In praise of … Malcolm Fraser

Some people take a turn to the right as they get older. The former Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser has been sliding left for decades, and this week confirmed it by announcing his resignation from the Liberal party in protest at its growing extremism. Mr Fraser has been a force for moderate good sense and progress ever since he lost power in 1983, a sort of antipodean Jimmy Carter, living proof that dull leaders can sometimes make fine retired statesmen. British ex-prime ministers, looking for a role more fulfilling than the corporate lecture circuit, could do worse than copy Mr Fraser, who spent the 1980s campaigning for change in South Africa and helped persuade the US to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime. Since then he has stood apart from his old party's apparent indulgence of intolerance, speaking up for refugees and civil liberties and against Australia's role in the Iraq war. Now he has resigned from his old party in protest at its rightwing new leader Tony Abbott. His independent-mindedness is all the more surprising since Mr Fraser, who turned 80 the other day, was a hardline cold war warrior whose name went down in infamy when he replaced the country's glamorous Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in a dubious 1970s constitutional coup. His arrival in power seemed to represent stultifying reaction. His retirement has proved the opposite; one political career, at least, that got failure over with first, and then ended in a flourishing golden old age.