My favourite Anglosphere politician

The Daily Telegraph (UK) ^ | 26th February 2012 | Daniel Hannan MEP

[naturalman1975]

In a press conference on Saturday, Kevin Rudd, who has resigned as foreign minister to challenge his boss, Julia Gillard, said something revealing. 'The job of the Australian government', he pronounced, 'is to keep Tony Abbott out'.

Really? That's the primary purpose of the state machine of the Commonwealth of Australia? Not to run the country? Thanks for clearing that one up, Kevin.

.....

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.

That such a man should be leading in the opinion polls, despite the prevalent MSM culture, says a great deal about his countrymen's level-headedness..... Yet Abbott has stuck, patiently and courteously, to his beliefs, winning the respect even of voters who don't share them.

One of those beliefs is an identification with the community of free English-speaking peoples, the Anglosphere. Even by conservative standards, Abbott is outstandingly pro-British and pro-American.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I envy you this man.