Political relevance and ethical importance

In promotion for the latest edition of The Monthly we read, Robert Manne, in “Biff Goes Bang”, delivers the final word on the person everyone is hearing but no one is listening to. “Once Mark Latham has been discredited, and perhaps destroyed, some citizens will notice that the Diaries – for all their grandiosity, occasional cruelty and vituperative madness – are considerably more important in their implication than they have been led to believe.”
Manne has a point, putting Latham's bitternesses aside, the importance of his critique is that he is an insider. A Laborite (hideous term) who has been the Labor member's Labor member. He should (perhaps) not be dismissed out of hand as a disappointed could-have-been.
What is curious for me is the interplay between political idealism and political pragmatism (politics-the art of the possible).
Part of Latham's problem, it seems to me, is that he has gone from being idealist to pragmatist and, now, attempting to go back to idealist again.
An idealist when young and under Whitlam's influence, a pragmatist when power was in his sights, and now an idealist again when all that didn't work out.
The trouble is that to be perceived as an idealist you have to be relatively uncompromised, and the one thing a pragmatist is not is uncompromised.
Whitlam remained to many an idealist because the steamroller of the agenda of the early 70s looked like uncompromised idealism. As they got tangled up in pragmatism (which they were not very good at) this tarnished, and one might wistfully wonder whether Whitlam would still be seen as such an idealist if he had remained in power, say, another 5-10 years.
Hawke and Keating were ever the pragmatists, politicians par excellence, as indeed is Howard. There seems little room for idealism in the pragmatism of the "comfortable Australia" which is promoted by the present PM.
(bye the bye I was intrigued to hear former Liberal Premier Greiner discussing the Brogden affair recently observing that his main political filter was "winning ".

He told Geraldine Doogue:
"I used to have a sign on my wall which was a bit like Bill Clinton’s one about ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. I used to say, ‘It’s winning, stupid’. And I used to look at everything in opposition from the obvious prism of how does this impact on winning. I think there is a fair bit of evidence to say that some of these factional worriers don’t look at winning at all when they consider their actions, their internal actions, and their actions are almost all internally focused. They don’t look at that as relevant at all. And that’s my real complaint."

Now I don't have a political problem with that, but let's not think that "winning" is ideology.
What, I suggest, Manne will offer us about the potential importance of Latham's insights is the struggle that Labor is having to decide whether it is still an ideological party, or whether it has totally sold out to the idea of winning.
That Latham seems to be trying to paint himself as spotless in all this is curious, but we will view that better with the wisdom of hindsight.

[for another fine exampe of Manne's opinion see this article about the dilemma he states as "When Jewish loyalty meets the brutality of the state of Israel."]