Whether Mister Fat is now the Little Boy from Manly’s hero can be debated but there is no doubt that here, as at many other points in this sparkling study, Little has brought larger theoretical considerations to bear on social phenomena which we all recognise. For myself, I was brought up in that old fashioned social-democratic snobbery which regarded the very notion of millionaires as inherently vulgar. Of course, the concept of a millionaire, like much else, has been subject to steady indexation over those years.

Along with his mentor and colleague, the late Alan Davies, Graham Little has played a large part in making the Politics Department at Melbourne University a notable centre for psycho-political speculation. There are those who resent psycho-politics because it ‘makes nothing happen’, but it can be said of all texts that they both do and do not make things happen. Strong Leadership certainly sets the understanding leaping, political assumptions jumping around and the risible zones quivering, the latter especially in the course of Little’s discussion of Ronald Reagan, ‘the most notorious hands-off chief executive since Nero’.

The book consists of a general and theoretical prologue, which takes over the baton from Little’s earlier studies, Political Ensembles and Politics and Personal Style, in offering a psychological etiology of political postures and affiliations; Oedipal and Kleinian presuppositions of early self-division and later, inadequate reconciliation are drawn upon in order to cast illumination over the bland, rugged faces of our leaders. Strongly present, if re-ironised, is the Audenesque notion of the Truly Strong Man. One thinks of Auden’s Airman in The Orators, or of such moments in his early lyrics as

Watch any day nonchalant pauses, see
His dextrous handling of a wrap as he
Steps after into cars, the beggar’s envy.
‘There is a free one,’ many say, but err.

Little, too, is interested in the ‘balancing subterfuge’ by which strong leaders of a non-consensual type learn to come to terms with their own internal divisions, replacing those divisions with their simpler, workable, armour-plated dichotomy, ‘I/not-I’, so that they can get on briskly with the job of leading their fellow citizens.

The three central movements of the book are devoted to discussions of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Malcolm Fraser. The central one of these is, inevitably, comic, Reagan emerging from this, as from all other accounts, as a risibly plastic imitation of a strong leader. But the accounts of Thatcher and Reagan have a different kind of fascination.

I take it that Thatcher is – along with Gorbachev, the man with whom she can do business – the most successful political leader at present on the world scene. She is also much disliked. Earlier this year, I asked a professor at Harvard, a woman of some distinction in her field of criticism, why it was that Thatcher was not a feminist hero. On the spot, she proved unable to answer the question, merely stammering, ‘But ... but ... but ... I hate her.’ The reason why Thatcher is not a feminist hero lies, above all, in the fact that she does not aim to give more opportunity to the disadvantaged except by way of giving more clout to the already powerful through the encouragement of muscular inequality. As Little puts it, ‘the aim is to make government leaner and stronger, better able to help the strong for being free of the energy­sapping entanglements in social welfare, education, etc.’ Competition, isolation from the weak gentry, energy, self-control and Pleasing Daddy, these emerge as the hall­marks of this remarkable leader.

Reagan’s inclusion is partly a genuine enquiry, partly a large ironic question as to how this naive jellybean man, sentimental, boyish and perhaps stupid, could have survived in so big a chair. The psycho-political reading from his childhood works convincingly, even cutely. And the president provides Little with a whole panorama of writerly occasions for Chekhovian comedy and for intertextual interpretations (Reagan as the creation of his own films, of The Picture of Dorian Gray, of Back to the Future and, best of all, as the cel­luloid hero from The Purple Rose of Cairo). But I feel that the political scientist in Little remains affronted that a creature invented by media and minders could merge as President, while the moralist in him disapproves of Reagan’s fairy-floss life story turning out to be a pack of lies.

Malcolm Fraser, the man with ‘an astonishing capacity to throw oil on burning oil’, proves to be the most interesting challenge; perhaps he is the most interesting human being of the three. With a beautifully timed coup de théatre, Little traces the origins of the big man’s ‘life is not meant to be easy’ back to Freud’s New Introductory Lectures, while disclosing that their literal source is to be found in Shaw. By Shaw out of Freud, there’s a pedigree for Fraser’s awkward, successful politics of ‘contest-and­control’. If Fraser, he of the gangling stature and Easter Island head, seems partly like Alec Hope’s Pharaonic builder, grimly answering, ‘Let the work proceed’, he can also be seen as an interesting product of our age of dividualism, another modernist in what many of us recognise as an almost comforting Presbyterian tradition: the tradition in which we ironise, or even larrikinise, those conflicts which we cannot tum into serious work. Take Fraser’s preference for ‘Waltzing Matilda’ over ‘Advance Australia Fair’ or the marvellous subversiveness of his favourite dream, in which

his mother is riding in an Irish gig; the gig hits a stone and topples aver, his mother is up-ended and thrown out; a young Malcolm is looking on, doubled up with laughter.

Now, there is a dream with everything going for it. Even the implications of the gig being Irish will be familiar to fellow-sprigs of the great Presbyterian tree.

This book is absorbing, indeed diverting, in a host of ways. One can take pleasure from the arguments back to childhood, rejoice in the deft sketches of character or luxuriate in the epigrammatical panache which defines politics as ‘a sort of drain or sump to which the tensions and defeats of family life finally flow.’ And Little is not simply your detached clinician. For all his concentration on defining the condition of Strong Leadership, his dislike of authoritarianism keeps welling through. Sometimes it proves a real gusher, as when he writes of American Classlessness in these terms: ‘The myth of the ever-expanding frontier cloaks the invidiousness in the American message of enterprise and success.’

Whatever your political menu, this is a book which you should find hard to resist. Who could be disappointed by a book which contains so much sparkling prose and which examines three leaders of whom it could be variously said that perfection, of a kind, was what they were after?