The president of the United States did not have a high opinion of the prime minister of Australia. "A pestiferous varmint", he called him. But William Morris Hughes didn't give a damn what Woodrow Wilson thought of him. He'd been called a lot worse, after all, and it hadn't done him any harm. The Labor Party had declared him a "rat" and expelled him from its ranks - yet here he was, two years later, still the PM and now backed by a whopping parliamentary majority. The British foreign secretary, Lord Robert Cecil, described him as "...


