Paul Keating review: Troy Bramston's spellbinding tale of a unique leader

Neville Wran said once "if you were in a tough race, there's no one you'd rather have than Keating. They don't breed them like that any more in Sussex Street. He was a part of the right … but he was a class above them."

Bramston finds absolutely no evidence for David Day's charge that Keating was dyslexic, though he does seem to have had an absolute oral mastery of any brief handed to him. When he was made Treasurer he turned up to see John Stone, the conservative head of Treasury, without bringing any of his staff with him. It was to make clear that he was "the intellectual equal" of Treasury and that "I didn't need reinforcements".

Keating was furious that Hawke claimed Keating had opposed floating the dollar. Keating says "it was probably the most important thing I did as Treasurer".

Bernie Fraser, who succeeded Stone as Secretary of Treasury, says the Hawke-Keating government "did what no government has done before or since … let the markets do what the markets do … but [with] a focus on social objectives and fairness." Even Keating, the father of Australian economic liberalism, declared in a 1985 lecture that his aim was to "civilise capitalism".

He shook the very foundations of the economy trying to get a 10 per cent consumption tax but suffered the most serious defeat of his political career when he failed to do so. He reserved a lot of his fury for Hawke, whom he saw as "a lucky mug who doesn't know what he wants to do with the country, what he wants to do with his life, or where he wants to lead the government".

When John Howard did not stop Wilson Tuckey slandering him, the Catholic Keating came out with one of his most famous and least merciful denunciations: "From this day onwards, Mr Howard will wear his leadership like a crown of thorns, and I will do my best to crucify him."

He came to see Labor's loyalty to Hawke as a "f---ing tragic error" and when Hawke insinuated that Keating could be replaced as Treasurer, Keating said to him: "You and I are finished ... When I decide to come at you, mate, I'll take your head right off."

No wonder Keating was forced into the Kirribilli agreement. At the end of 1990, Keating declared "this is a recession Australia had to have" and Hawke, looking back, says the remark represented "an albatross around his neck for the rest of his career". This is also when Keating declares that among Australian prime ministers, there is "not one" to match Lincoln or Roosevelt. He also describes the country as "the arse end of the world".

He says to Hawke, "How can you have your ear to the ground and not hear it?" "Hear what?" Hawke asks. "Hear that you're finished."

In December 1991, Gareth Evans would say to Hawke: "the dingoes are pissing on your swag, digger" and Keating gained dominion.

It's difficult to adjudicate the complexities of Keating's personality and his achievements. He reacted with fury to his speechwriter Don Watson's portrait of him as a melancholy Hamlet of a prime minister, and Watson's Confessions of a Bleeding Heart, that somewhat hagiographical valentine to Keating, may be the mirror of Watson's qualities that Keating held up to Watson.

This is when they worked closely together and when Keating gave some of the greater speeches in Australian history: the Redfern speech on behalf of Aborigines ("We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers").

And the Unknown Soldier speech ("We do not know who loved him or whom he loved … his family is lost to us as he was lost to them") and the rationale for a republic which that dry old liberal Andrew Robb describes as "a magnificent speech". Keating singlehandedly increased the support for a republic by 10 per cent in just a year.

And yet the same man introduced mandatory detention even if he says, "It never started with us, never". He also signed the treaty with Indonesia which Timor's Ramos Horta described as "a treaty between God and the Devil". Even Gareth Evans baulked: "But I am a bit of a libertarian and that's not part of Paul's repertoire."

And when Hewson came at him with a GST, only John Howard understood the cleverness of his response when he said he would not fight it in the Senate. Eventually, however, it was Howard who would gun him down.

Keating had a more stupefying fierceness than anyone in our history. At one point when the CFMEU was preventing access to Parliament House, Keating declared that he was going to get the army to pulverise the union's expensive truck.

The Defence Minister Robert Ray was rung by a concerned senior public servant who said, "the Prime Minister has gone f---ing insane". Meanwhile Keating was attempting to track down the Attorney-General Michael Lavarch to get his approval and said to Kim Beazley: "you tell that little c--t that if he doesn't have that ordinance on my desk within one hour, he is sacked". Beazley rushed to Lavarch's office and urged him under no circumstances to answer his phone. It rang, and it was the demon king. Beazley told the Attorney it was a missed call.

This consistently compelling biography demonstrates Paul Keating was a leader like no one else. Paul Kelly says to Bramston that Keating had a colossal romantic sense of the prime ministership but that his vision stopped him from realising its limits.

Still, he was a man who believed that Labor needed to dynamise the market to put the riches of the earth back into the hands of working people. That was a story he liked to tell himself anyway, with his strange introspective inwardness and his sense of the darkness as well as the power and the glory.

He dressed like a prince, had great charm and could listen to anyone. Of course he thought the latte-sippers were just "basket-weavers from Balmain".

But Paul Keating was a streetfighter. He is the only prime minister to refuse a Companion of the Order of Australia. He says he hopes Australia was different before and after him. Anyone want to argue that?