Daniel Hannan on Tony Abbott

Daniel Hannan, one of our favourite politicians, has been visiting Australia.

My favourite Anglosphere politician

by Daniel Hannan

Tony Abbott is, at present, my favourite English-speaking politician (though Canada’s Stephen Harper also has a pretty good claim). 

He is one of those fortunate men who is at once clever and likeable, a Rhodes Scholar who, when campaigning, speaks in monosyllables (at the 2010 election, which he lost by a single seat, he summarised his programme as ‘stop the [refugee] boats, end big new taxes, stop waste, pay off debt’).

For some Lefties, a brilliant man with demotic appeal is a class traitor; their sense of betrayal is compounded by the fact that Abbott is a Roman Catholic who inexcusably refuses to be either Labor or republican.

To top it off, the Liberal leader is guilty of what are, in the eyes of Australia’s bien pensant elites, the three unpardonable heresies of our age: he believes in God, opposes eco-taxes and wants to scrap restrictions on free speech.

Read on at The Telegraph