At the Sydney Writers' Festival last weekend, Alan Ramsey, once of these pages, was asked why he referred to Howard as the Toad.

''Because I didn't think I could get away with Turd,'' he replied.

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For longer than anyone can remember, Daphne Lucas has been making jams and pickles in the kitchen of her home at Bomaderry, down on the south coast near Nowra.

They are her contribution to democracy. At election time she sells them to raise campaign funds for the Australian Labor Party, of which she is a long-standing member.

Not this election, though. Mrs Lucas lives in the federal electorate of Gilmore, and the Labor rank and file there are seething with anger. The Romper Stomper bully boys who run Labor's NSW head office at Sussex Street in Sydney have refused to let them preselect their candidate for federal Parliament. Head office has lumbered Gilmore with its own man, an unknown. There is a revolt brewing from Shellharbour in the north of the seat to Ulladulla in the south.

"These people have been told they are not intelligent enough to choose who will represent them in Canberra,'' says Neil Reilly, a popular Kiama councillor who is also president of Labor's Gilmore federal electoral council. As the ALP candidate in 2007, Reilly attracted a 6.5 per cent swing from the sitting Liberal, Joanna Gash, and a pre-selection ballot would have chosen him to run again. A redistribution has since turned Gilmore into a notional Labor seat, and the locals were convinced he could win it.

But a couple of months ago Reilly was summoned to Sussex Street to meet the party's state secretary, Matt Thistlethwaite. "Sorry mate, but we're putting someone in over your head," he was told, and that was that. On Wednesday, May 5, Labor's federal executive rubber-stamped the new candidate, David Boyle, a gym manager who lives outside the electorate and who had never been an ALP member.

Nobody in Gilmore knows why. Reilly is not a member of the Left faction loathed in Sussex Street. Boyle's only claim to fame is that he played rugby league for the South Sydney Rabbitohs back in the 1980s, which allows the spin doctors to promote him as "a footy great". When he eventually turned up to meet the party faithful at the Bomaderry Bowling Club he stunned them by announcing that his mentor in life was none other than Alan Jones, the famous broadcaster.

"You can imagine the groan that went around the room when we heard that,'' says Veronica Husted, president of the Jervis Bay and St George's Basin ALP branch.

Next Friday a group of true believers will take a bus to Sussex Street to confront Thistlethwaite who, they say, has refused to answer their phone calls, letters and emails. If they cannot get him to see sense - and this is unlikely, given that he is the most incompetent state secretary in memory - they will go on strike. There will be no one in Gilmore to hand out Labor leaflets, to do the door-knocking, run the meetings and sausage sizzles and staff the booths on polling day.

Some will resign from the party. Most will vote informal, and on the Senate paper, where Thistlethwaite has been kicked upstairs on to the Labor ticket, they will make sure to put him last.

"I'm beginning to think that being in the Labor Party is like being in an abusive relationship,'' says Robyn Drysdale, president of the Milton-Ulladulla branch. "You just keep getting bashed."

The Tories did their best to hose down the unsurprising news that a disillusioned Malcolm Fraser has quit his life membership of the Liberal Party. ''He was a fine Liberal prime minister," said Phoney Tony, pedalling furiously. "He was a distinguished leader of our party through some difficult times as well as some successful times." Can we have that in writing, Tony, just to make sure you mean it?

Barnaby Joyce was not so generous. "It really means very little," he was assuring anyone who would listen on Wednesday. Eventually they will have to tow Barnaby out to sea and sink him by gunfire.

Fraser is entirely correct that the party has lunged to the hard right, leaving him and like-minded moderates out in the cold. Those scary red arrows in the latest Abbott television commercial, warning of the evil Muslim menace, are an obscene piece of racism.

For all his pious blather about a ''broad church'', John Howard enjoyed boasting that he was the most conservative prime minister ever. He made certain that true liberals, people in the Menzies tradition such as Bruce Baird from NSW and Judith Troeth and Petro Georgiou from Victoria, never got a ministry and were ruthlessly snubbed in the party room.

At the Sydney Writers' Festival last weekend, Alan Ramsey, once of these pages, was asked why he referred to Howard as the Toad.

''Because I didn't think I could get away with Turd,'' he replied.

Labor's in a real pickle trying to keep up with the Joneses