Today he is a pain in the national bum but one day, his actual 21st century career (robbed of his prime ministership and left fiendishly vengeful against the man, Turnbull, who had robbed him), improved and tinted by legend, will be a godsend. It will make him the perfect subject for tragic plays, tragic operas full of madness, ruthlessness, plotting and true horror.

It defames crocodiles (blameless aquatic reptiles, renowned for their sincerity) to accuse Tony Abbott of crying crocodile tears. But that famous expression did leap to mind when on Monday he lamented his leader’s lack of backbone, of bottle, on energy and climate change issues.

“What we want to know is, where are this prime minister's convictions?” Abbott wondered.

“We always thought that he was convicted on climate change issues. I think he probably still is. And it [the Turnbull pragmatic backflip on NEG] was a conversion of convenience this morning.”

Abbott’s stated disappointed in not having a towering man of principle as his leader was utterly crocodilian. Abbott is so vengeance-driven against Turnbull (tomorrow’s Aussie Shakespeares will make much of this madness) that it would make no difference to him, Abbott, if Turnbull’s convictions were as unshakeable as those that drove Our Redeemer.

It is hypocritical for that deceitful crocodile Tony Abbott to pretend to be disappointed in Turnbull’s lack of prime ministerial moral fibre. And yet for several million decent Australians, our disappointment in Turnbull is sincere.

The ABC’s discerning political analyst Laura Tingle has recently made a thoughtful analysis of this famous phenomenon. She divines that Turnbull disappoints us because he is just “not very good at politics” and because there was nothing in his political past that justified our irrational expectations of him.

Important, too, in our delusions must have been the way in which so many of us, disgusted by the thought of any Liberal being our prime minister, dared to dream that he was likely to be the most bearable Liberal for us to endure. In my own delusional lefty-pinko case there was some naïve pinning of faith in his past passion for the republican cause and in his characterisation of himself as a knight in shining armour prepared to tackle the dragon of climate change.

In recent days there has been some gleeful replaying of that ABC radio interview in which he vowed never to lead a Liberal Party that didn’t share his deep, deep personal convictions that climate change was real and had to be fought. Silly us that (like the naïve Three Little Pigs) we built our expectations of such flimsy materials, of the straw of a politician’s words.

But to put our disappointment in Malcolm Turnbull into a greater context, of course the experience of disappointment is part of the human condition. Perhaps disappointment in a politician must take its modest place in the whole gallery of one’s life of shattered dreams.

W.B. Yeats is surely on to something when he muses in his autobiography that our lives may be only “a long preparation for something that never happens”. Shakespeare is one of many deep thinkers to diagnose that our unreal expectations, inevitably dashed by life’s realities, are the cause of all of our heartaches. That’s what Shakespeare’s canny character Helena means when in All’s Well That Ends Well she trills “Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest, and despair most fits.”

I’m sure Ms Tingle is right, in her cool, detached, forensic way, when she diagnoses that our expectations of Malcolm Turnbull were naive.

But I think there is something more to our naivety. Perhaps our idealism, our dream of our dear nation being led by a fine, principled, intelligent person (in Turnbull’s case a republican and a man who appeared to be smart enough to have been persuaded by the scientific proofs of climate change), is praiseworthy. What is a nation, without dreamers, without those who hope that we shall overcome, one day, that the day is coming soon when man to man the world o’er shall brothers be?

Then, too, some of us thought we saw in Malcolm Turnbull (ostensibly warm, avuncular, civilised and witty) a prime minister we might actually admire and like. For those of us who have not been able to like (let alone respect) an Australian prime minister since 1996’s eclipse of Paul Keating, Turnbull seemed a PM of promising likeability.

It is a terrible thing for good-hearted people to only ever have as their prime ministers the sorts of grotesque, Howardesque, Abbottesque hobgoblins who make their (the people’s) flesh creep, whose every reptilian utterance makes them (the people) groan and turn off the evening news.

And there seems no prospect of ever liking Peter Dutton. Often viciously (but fairly) portrayed as a potato, as in Pat’s vicious (but fair) cartoon in Monday’s Canberra Times) it is not so much that he looks uncannily like a potato as that one knows, from so much he has ever said and done as Immigration Minister, that he has a potato for a heart.