Bob Hawke and Paul Keating

In a television interview this week, Blanche d'Alpuget described Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, as being two bulls in one paddock. It was thought that Paul and Bob had called a truce and while not exactly friends, over the past few years, they at least seemed to tolerate each other.

But this week Paul Keating was on a plane and read an excerpt from Blanche's new book "Hawke: the Prime Minister" and got a shock. She wrote: "With little formal education, his intellect led him to hobbies, one after another, all his life: car engines; budgerigars; the life of Winston Churchill; rock music and as his taste matured, classical music and its visible sister architecture." He was outraged and couldn't believe his eyes. "The book is even stooping so low as to say that because I had no university education, I was incapable of absorbing complex documents and that I did not even read them" he said.

Paul Keating retaliated with an accusation that he "carried Bob for years" and said "Hawke went missing from 1984 to 1987 of his prime ministership due to long years of depression and executive incapacity."

But Bob Hawke's finance minister Peter Walsh remembers things differently and says that Keating's claim is an exaggeration. The book details Hawke's depression on learning in 1984 that his daughter Rosslyn was a heroin addict. He was debilitated as a leader for six months or a year but was back in control by the 1985 tax summit, where he pulled the rug on Keating's broad-based consumption tax proposal.

Blanche insists she said a lot of nice things about Keating in her book. "I've said he's brilliant rhetorically, marvellously intuitive, affectionate and kind to staff, a wonderful father and beautiful in appearance. I have always liked him and his portrait in the book is very recognisable".

In a letter Keating wrote to Hawke this week which was leaked to The Australian, he said "Yours and Blanche's rewriting of history is not only unreasonable and unfair, more than that, it is grasping."

Both former Prime Ministers will be invited to Julia Gillard's launch of the imminent election campaign.