There was a point during Andrew Denton's interview with Mark Latham where I thought: Latham could wind up committing suicide.

I too have been a "home dad" and I often wonder how I got through it without losing my marbles. Don't get me wrong, those years with baby makes three were among the most enchanting of my life; when a memories surface of our adventures out and about or of watching one of her favourite ABC shows or any of a thousand small incidents, I feel a terrible longing to have them all over again. There are times when I actually mourn the passing of those days.

But in all that time, I struggled to put two thoughts together to form a third.

Mark Latham has been cranking on at full bore for years and years. Not until he resigned from the leadership and his seat in Werriwa did he stop. And still, during the period between then and now, he was fulminating, still cranking on at full bore over getting the diaries ready for publication. Now that they are out there, he faces nothing less than a void.

This is a man who is hurt. He is hurt because during his time in politics he was never given the acclaim he thought he deserved. His books were generally thought to be a strange combination of sleep-inducing wackiness. He went to the backbench because his lofty ideas were met, not so much with scorn as with disinterest. When he somehow managed to be proclaimed leader, the party gasped with fear.

Much of what he says in the diaries is spot on. And surely no politician in the world can match him for having the courage in stating the obvious about George W. Bush and the Liberal Party. "The worst President in history," and "a conga line of suckholes" were immediately endearing because they were first order truths.

But his policies were a strange grab bag. He was left and right all over the place. Sometimes you would think he was in the wrong party, that he should have been one of John Howard's henchmen. At other times he seemed to represent the quintessence of the "fair go". He often fit the bill of a "liberal wet". In the end, he didn't really belong in either party.

Latham is an individual, not a team player. This is no bad thing, but in a system that requires conformity, it is lethal. To his credit, he is an individual who is opposed to the cult of individualism that has wrecked our sense of community. The distinction is often overlooked. But he was never able to settle peacefully into the world of machine politics. The bots in the party sensed this and it is they who hated him and into whom he is in return twisting the dagger.

Add to that a mixture of volatility, a heightened sensitivity concerning his self worth and an intolerance for injustice (especially when he feels the injustice is directed toward himself) and you have a man who should never have been a politician.

The Labor Party should never have promoted him to leader. Mainly because the Labor Party is everything he says it is … in a word, dead. It should have stuck with one of the sad sacks who were putting up their hands.

Because he has let it all hang out, Mark Latham can now be assured that, beyond his mother, his wife and children, he has no friends anywhere. His terminator-like assassination of Kevin Rudd on Lateline confirmed his assessment of himself as a hater. He is probably right about Rudd. He has said that the difference between him and the innuendo pushers is that he is signing his name to what he says. But, speaking about Rudd, the cold look in his eyes was damn near terrifying. That taxi driver was lucky to get off with a broken arm.

As a result, no politician, no businessman, no journalist will ever touch Latham again. By revealing confidentialities, he has dynamited his bridges. For the world of wheeling and dealing is based on secrets and the power the knowers of those secrets can wield.

But is he a whistleblower or a dobber? The whistleblower's action is honourable; the dobber's is not. In Latham's case the two seem to coalesce, in that there is as much about revenge as there is in spreading the truth about a moribund party.

Now that he is well and truly finished in politics, what can he do? Aside from his family, his reason-to-be is gone with the publication of the diaries.

No matter how much he goes on about the satisfaction of being a home dad, a man who has been a power player for so long cannot possibly be content with such a prosaic life.

I feel a great sympathy for Latham. He is a powerful person with a fragile ego who managed to get to the top of the heap. He didn't belong there, but I would rather see a Latham gnashing and snarling out bits of the truth than a blancmange like Kim Beazley. As for the other side, they are all guilty of crimes against humanity in one form or other. They are beneath contempt.

If Latham has helped to kill off the last gasps of the ineffectual Labor Party, all the better. Australia needs men and women with vision and compassion, not this lot.

I never much agreed with Latham's policies because I never could pinpoint exactly where he was coming from. I kept hoping that he would clearly and cleanly stand up for the well being of humanity, but then he would sound like just another economic rationalist.

Near the end of the "Enough Rope" interview, Andrew Denton says: "I find this profoundly sad ... that somebody of your intellect and your capacity who spent so much time and energy and invested so much of your heart into attempting to correct society's ills ..." Denton doesn't finish the line, as often happens in conversation, but I believe he meant to say something like … can just walk a way as if it never really mattered, as if it were just another interlude in your life, as if the millions of people who voted for you were of little account, as if, in effect, it never even happened.

If Denton's genuine concern registered, Latham didn't react. He really believes he can just drop all those years into the "been there, done that" basket and replace them with being a home dad.

I just hope he doesn't wake up one morning surrounded by a howling emptiness. The joys of parenting are not enough for someone like Mark Latham, indeed for most of us. The sudden banality of the corn flakes bowl will crumble the delusion he has been living. From that moment he will have to find a way back or face oblivion. His problem is that he is now a stranger in his own, increasingly strange, land.