Some journalists took to Twitter today to tell us Mungo MacCallum was dead, but he wasn’t and isn’t.
Still, any excuse to remember one of my favourite Mungo pieces. It appeared in Nation Review on December 27, 1974.
It was a month after Malcolm Fraser had failed to dislodge Bill Snedden from the Liberal leadership. It’s easy to see leadership changes as inevitable in retrospect, but foretelling the future is fraught at the best of times.
Fraser eventually toppled Snedden in March 1975. Three months earlier, MacCallum prophesied: “They hate him and distrust him; but, sooner or later, they’ll elect him.” It was as good as it gets in the predictions business.
