It's not a pretence and I'm sure he is, absolutely, driven by these emotions. It's amazing, however, how very often these mesh, exactly, with his political requirements. Take last week.

The intimate strip-searches of innocent women travelling through Qatar was outrageous and Morrison mined it for all he was worth. He recognised, instantly, that this was a big thing and used it (first move) to transform the political equation. He harnessed the scandal, urging us to focus on it, and so naturally we forgot the problems his government was mired in at the time.

Then (second move) play the personal card. "As a father of a daughter," he said, "I could only shudder at the thought that anyone would ... be subjected to that". What had occurred was outrageous enough without mentioning his daughters. The only reason they appeared was to allow him to personalise what had occurred and to demonstrate how intensely he'd been moved by the whole event.

In doing so (third move) Morrison also allowed his bumbling, incompetent Foreign Minister off the hook. The department had known about what had gone on for weeks; its failure to smooth a path to de-escalate the situation is inexplicable, particularly as someone from the department appears to have actually been on that very flight itself. Instead of waiting for Channel Seven to reveal what had occurred, it should have begun defusing the situation.

Qantas services overseas have virtually stopped, and Qatar Airways has become, today, our vital link to the outside world. It's put on extra flights to bring back thousands of Australians, and that route through Doha is allowing us to stay in contact with others across the globe. DFAT understands we simply cannot afford to sever this key relationship. A forward-thinking department would have immediately begun planning and working out how to resolve the issue instead of needlessly and pointlessly waiting to be caught, helplessly, blinking in the headlights and wondering what to do next.

Wargame the issue yourself. Australia's benefiting, greatly, from the Qatari link and yet what occurred is unacceptable - where's the off-ramp? What DFAT needed to do, immediately, was identify the culprit - because it wasn't either Qatar Airways or, more broadly, Arab culture. Someone in the airport had been shocked and horrified when a newborn baby had been found abandoned in a bin; the situation rapidly spiralled out of control. Airport workers couldn't turn to the manual to find out what to do because this sort of situation hadn't been envisaged when the manual was drawn up. Trying to work out what to do resulted in a couple of (relatively) junior airport officials embarking on an escalating succession of actions more redolent of a third-world country than the sophisticated international city Doha is today.

Digging down to the truth and discovering what really happened would have provided an obvious means of defusing the issue. What was needed - and occurred over the weekend - was exactly this: pointing out that Qatar Airways was not to blame, an insistence that this will never be repeated, and admission of culpability. Instead our diplomats stammered, blustered, and bumbled as they were grilled in front of a Senate committee. Thank goodness the PM's emotional display suddenly rescued them, because they were obviously unable to find the words to do so themselves.

This explains Morrison's remarkable success.

MORE NICHOLAS STUART:

His hallmark touch is an ability to play politics as if it's ideology-free, with every day representing a new beginning. This doesn't mean, however, that he's ignorant of the way it works. He watched on as Kevin Rudd - a master of the short soundbite - lost when he failed to focus on building the material superstructure that delivers long-term success. At the same time as he's out harvesting advantage in the daily media, he's using your money to carefully build electoral success. And there's nothing Labor can do about this, because it's absolutely the right thing to do.

Long before the PM suddenly decided he needed to intervene in the Qatar issue - which will soon blow over and dissolve into nothingness - this column was investigating the remarkable transformation taking place in defence industry. The recent budget boost has now pushed military spending well beyond 2 per cent of GDP, but what's really significant (and exciting) about this is where it's going.

The big US and European multinationals have done very nicely from all that earlier money Christopher Pyne was shovelling out on big, multibillion-dollar projects. What's interesting about this new money is that Morrison's made it very clear to Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price that he wanted to stop sending money overseas. She heard. Its seemingly impossible, now, for three days to go past without yet another announcement of money being spent on Aussie equipment, local jobs, Indigenous industry. It's a brilliant, strategic, move.

It creates winners. It pushes money into the economy. Labor can't afford to criticise it. Perhaps most importantly, though, it adds strategic depth to all that short-term tactical manoeuvring and emotion that the PM uses to dominate (and win) the daily news cycle. But he can't do that forever.

EOS, one of our two big defence manufacturers, recently signed a $450 million-dollar contract to supply remotely operated weapons systems to another country in the region, and Qatar itself hosts critical command and supply facilities. Expect this story, with all its tactical noise, to blow over very quickly. As far as the government's concerned, we can't afford not to be friends.