It could have been much worse. On Saturday John Howard and his Government were ejected with an enormous swing, but for the past two weeks the Australian Liberal Party had been facing electoral Armageddon. Though in the end it was badly beaten, despite a campaign in which everything seemed to go wrong it was no 1997.

The closest thing to a Portillo moment was Howard’s defeat in his own seat of Bennelong, but given his majority that was hardly a surprise. Over the course of the campaign, the Government had endured an interest-rate rise (the sixth in a row), the release of an official report that showed it had spent millions pork-barrelling its own seats, and the revelation that a senior member of the party had been caught delivering forged campaign literature designed to stir up hatred against Muslims. The wonder is not that it lost, but that it held so many of its seats.

Why did Howard lose? Part of the explanation is that the voters were sick of him. He had been a fixture in national life since 1977 when Malcolm Fraser made him Treasurer. Over that time, as all politicians will, he shaded the truth on occasion. His particular skill was to make statements that appeared cast-iron but which on closer examination allowed considerable wriggle room should circumstances change.

For this reason Howard was very rarely caught telling lies, but as the years went by the impression increased that he was economical with the truth. The focus groups must have picked this up, because this year all Labor politicians have been repeating a line to deadly effect: “John Howard is a very clever politician.”

Looking back, the signs that Australians were beginning to weary of Howard were there before his last election victory in 2004. He won then with an increased majority by successfully painting the Labor leader, Mark Latham, as a flake, not fit to be trusted with the economy. The emphatic nature of that win led people to overlook that for much of the previous three years Labor had been ahead in the polls, suggesting that Howard’s appeal was fading, and that only at the last minute had voters decided that Latham was too risky. As it turned out, Latham was a flake: within three months of the election he had cracked up and resigned from Parliament, forcing Labor to resurrect Kim Beazley.

Howard seemed invincible. He had a big majority courtesy of Latham. He had an Opposition leader he had beaten twice before and who he was sure he could beat again. He even had control of the Senate, the first Prime Minister to do so for 25 years. In these circumstances, why would he retire to hand over to his unpopular deputy, Peter Costello? The back bench was not telling him to go, indeed most of its members were begging him to stay.

Alas, Howard's position was built on sand: his big majority was not a reflection of his popularity, but Latham's unpopularity. Labor soon realised that Beazley was a dud and replaced him with the fresh-faced former diplomat Kevin Rudd, who it was clear was no Latham. But it was Howard's control of the Senate more than anything else that was to prove his undoing. For years he had longed to change Australia’s industrial relations system, watering down unfair dismissal laws and making it easier for bosses to move workers from collective agreements (negotiated by unions) on to individual contracts; but the Senate had made this impossible. Now armed with a Senate majority Howard pushed through Work Choices – probably the most unpopular law in Australian history. At a stroke the Liberal Party lost the working-class voters who had been the bedrock of its electoral success and on Saturday they sent it packing.

If Labor is absent from the picture, it is because, by and large, Labor went out of its way to make the election about the Government. Rudd’s message was simple: “If you want to get rid of that tricky old politician John Howard, then vote for me. If you want to get rid of Work Choices, vote for me.”

What Rudd really wants to do now he is in government is anyone‘s guess. Australia is the country whose political landscape most closely resembles Britain’s and since the early 1970s the two countries’ governments have tended to change at the same time. The connections between Labor and Labour, and Tory and Liberal, are deep. Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign owed much to John Howard’s 1996 “small-target strategy”.

So what lessons should British politicians draw from Howard’s demise? At the national level, it reinforced the old saw that Oppositions don’t win elections, Governments lose them. Labor had not gone away and thought hard about the policies it needed to get into government. There were no review groups headed by grey eminences. It simply concentrated on what people didn‘t like about John Howard. Where there was no obvious electoral advantage in disagreeing with him, Rudd was happy to lead a “me too” party. Labor was also very good at turning Howard’s gifts as a politician against him. At every opportunity it praised his intelligence and cunning, so that voters began to see calculation whenever he opened his mouth. In mock humility, every sentence from David Cameron should begin: “Of course, the Prime Minister is a very clever politician . . .”

At a local level the lesson was the value of incumbency, particularly the ability of MPs to spend taxpayers’ money “communicating” with the electorate. Given the number of seats where the MPs hung on by their fingernails this money was probably the decisive factor in preventing a defeat turning into a rout. The opposition parties in the UK will be at huge disadvantage at the next election because Labour has just increased all MPs’ communication allowances by £10,000. The Liberal Party in Australia will regret increasing these allowances in the run-up to the election as much as Labor will use them to entrench its majorities. Labour at Westminster here should consider this before it increases them again.

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