What looked like certain defeat a month ago has become less certain, but you still wouldn’t call him the favourite, not by any means.

His attack on Bill Shorten has been ferocious. The ALP leader is not within a bull’s roar of some of his predecessors. He is no Gough Whitlam, an erudite orator, and he is no Paul Keating, who was just as clever with words, but in a different way.

He is certainly no Bob Hawke, who was raffish, and immensely likeable. He wasn’t a bad prime minister, either, my authority for this being his successor, John Howard, who made this discovery for himself when he was doing the same job, and passed it on to me in a private confidence.

Sorry mate, but confidences don’t last 20 years without finding their way up to the surface.

Prime ministers need judgement, courage, the ability to think laterally on occasion, and especially luck. That fact that Shorten is ALP leader is Turnbull’s first bit of luck. Shorten doesn’t look or sound prime ministerial. Nor is he a bloke with whom you’d like to share a drink.

His greatest drawback is that he is prepared to sabotage the country (by opposing every endeavour to control expenditure) in order to sabotage the government.

Turnbull misses that target. As a union leader Shorten did deals to get rid of penalty rates. Wasn’t this terrible? No, not really. Penalty rates destroy jobs. What was wrong with it, then? The deal was for closed shops, generating a flow of funds to the unions.

These “low-paid” workers, with consequent jobs, weren’t being wronged. They were being harvested, so that their dues could be employed in campaigning for the ALP. So far, that totals $70 million.

Is it truly the case that shaving Sunday penalty rates plunges more than 700,000 people into poverty? The Australian newspaper puts the figure for those affected at about one third of that figure. Shouldn’t Turnbull say so? Doesn’t his office do research?