The reported appointment of the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott to join Britain’s board of trade has left Whitehall dumbfounded and Australian opposition politicians even suggesting the idea might be a hoax. Abbott was forced to renounce his British citizenship as a condition of entering the Australian parliament in 1994, but he has excellent connections with the Conservative party through figures such as Rupert Murdoch, the pollster Lynton Crosby and the trade secretary, Liz Truss. British right-of-centre thinktanks such as the Policy Exchange and the Centre for Policy Studies have also feted Abbott, despite his controversial two-year premiership. He has been given a regular platform to praise Thatcherism and Brexit, speaking alongside the former Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer. Not all former Australian high commissioners, however, view Abbott’s apparent appointment as a sign that British headhunters cast their dragnet in the right waters. Mike Rann said appointing Abbott to run Britain’s trade negotiations was the equivalent of Australia asking the UK’s education secretary, Gavin Williamson, to run the Australian school system. There is a strand of Conservative Brexit thinking that sees departure from the EU as a chance to revive the old anglosphere, including the countries which make up the Five Eyes intelligence alliance - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. It is not entirely a coincidence that the Department for International Trade, led by its politically aware permanent secretary, Antonia Romeo, chose Crawford Falconer, a seasoned New Zealand trade negotiator as its second permanent secretary and chief trade negotiation adviser. Falconer’s appointment in 2017 on a salary of more than £260,000 was a sign that the government was unable to find true Brexit believers or experienced non-Europeans in its own ranks to be trade negotiators. Abbott, like Falconer, is also more patriotic about Britain than most Britons. Extolling the virtues of Brexit last year, Abbott told the Policy Exchange: “This is the country that has seen off the Spanish armada, the French emperor and the German kaiser. Against Louis XIV, against Napoleon, against Wilhelm II and then against Hitler, this country didn’t need Europe. It saved Europe, helped – as it always should be – by its friends and family, the Commonwealth across the sea. “This is the home of the mother of parliaments, of the Industrial Revolution and of the world’s common language. That’s right, the modern world has been made in English, so no country on Earth should be more capable than Britain of standing on its own two feet. That, surely, is what’s crying out now for remembrance, amidst all the decline-ism and defeatism, because if Brexit fails, Britain fails.” For a country such as Britain, however, that tries to trade on its liberal values, Abbott cuts a strange champion. He has been accused of misogyny and is known for his oppositon to same-sex marriage, deep scepticism about climate change and antagonism toward labour rights. He also has a reputation for political gunslinging, and an inability to command loyalty. His directionless leadership collapsed in 2015 in a welter of leaks, recriminations and dire opinion polls. Australia’s former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd recently wrote: “Abbott has never cared about policy. He has only cared about politics and winning at any cost. I cannot remember a single positive policy initiative that Abbott has championed and then implemented. “As a result, unconstrained by policy, the entire energies of this giant wrecking ball of Australian politics has been focussed on destroying his opponents.” He also pictured Abbott as dependent on Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News International, and a man he both reviles and attributes enormous powers. He wrote: “In Britain, Murdoch made Brexit possible because of the position taken by his papers. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far-right which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican party. In Australia, as in America, Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating to multiculturalism.” Abbott may not be Murdoch’s greatest or final bequest to Britain, but he is one of the most unnecessary.