All Australians not living in secluded caves will know why Berejiklian is so newsworthy (more of her plight in a moment).

Meanwhile, since poets never make the front page, some readers may not have noticed the news that US poet Louise Glck has just been awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. Your columnist, poetry-mad and politics-mad, has simultaneously been following the plight of Ms Berejiklian while at the same time, to catch up with culture, reading and re-reading the often deep and mournful poetry of the new Nobel laureate.

Juggling these two very different subjects, one is struck by how the very things that we think must help make a fine female poet an even finer, tenderer, more life-experienced one (divorce, relationship angst, love's bruises and melancholies are recurring themes of Glck's terrific poetry) are made a handicap for a woman in public life/politics.

We think Louise Glck's eventful personal life a contribution to her life's work whereas Gladys Berejiklian's straying from the straight and narrow has her opponents and the worst of the commentariat all moralising and haughty. They hiss that her poor judgment in love proves she has poor judgment in everything.

But what if, like a poet being educated, tenderised, humanly improved by love's follies, a woman in public life/politics is in the same way educatively enriched by her follies? What if this makes her an even better political servant of the people?

Somehow for me the already admirable-seeming Berejiklian emerges, from the revelations about her love life, as even more admirable than she had been thus far. It must be the discovery that she, like all of us who have a true pulse, has had humanisingly humiliating experiences of being Love's plaything.

It is one of Shakespeare's recurring themes that love's passions make idiots of all of us.

"To be wise and love, exceeds man's might," Cressida diagnoses in Troilus and Cressida, musing that only the gods manage such a feat.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare has Theseus observe on his (the Bard's) behalf:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains.

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact [all deliriously deranged in the same way].

And A Midsummer Night's Dream is just the play that leaps to mind when one think of how very Shakespearean the Gladys Berejiklian humiliation is. It is the play in which Titania, the hitherto mighty and rational Queen of the Fairies, deranged by love's alchemy, falls crazily in love with a man, Bottom, who has a donkey's head.

Everyone else can see that the donkey is not a proper match for her and has a spectacularly ugly head. But for Titania, love being blind, it is the most handsome head and face in the history of manhood and belongs to an irresistibly wonderful being. How eerily suggestive this is of Gladys Berejiklian's now much-regretted passion for the unattractive-in-every-way Daryl Maguire. He is surely one of the Bottoms of NSW public life.

And in this Shakespearean context, with Gladys Berejiklian emerging so tragically human and flawed, how cold, opportunistic, inhuman and petty NSW Opposition leader Jodi McKay's criticisms of Berejiklian seem.

McKay's criticisms, the Dalek-like tone of their utterance, the stiff, prim, moralising haughtiness of her manner, require McKay's pretence that she herself has never been sent temporarily bonkers by love's madness.

But perhaps she never has been.

In his posthumously just-published selection of his very favourite poems, our dear Clive James marvels at how a cold, detached character in Dom Moraes' poem At Seven O'Clock has "Antarctic eyes".

Ever since reading that a few days ago, one has been alerted to the phenomenon in unfeeling people. Ministers for immigration often sport Antarctic eyes while speaking inhumanely of our asylum seekers in offshore detention.

Now sure enough in recent days up on our screens pop chilly critics of Gladys Berejiklian, critics like Jodi McKay, whose Antarctic eyes betray the permafrost in their hearts.