Brits, take it from an Aussie: If Tony Abbott is your solution, you've got big problems

It’s true that Tony Abbott was a highly effective opposition leader.

Between 2013 and 2015, he was involved in enough domestic scandals, international embarrassments and local protests to damage the reputation of a sitting Australian prime minister.

Alas for Abbott, he was prime minister himself at the time.

We Australians have been obliged to reflect on the qualities of our former conservative “Liberal” leader at the prompting of the British. For reasons that are inexplicable to us, Abbott has been tapped for the role of trade envoy by Boris Johnson’s government.

Related: No 10 urged to revoke trade role for 'misogynist' Tony Abbott

The task ahead is to skilfully create for Britain a post-Brexit trade environment. The nation must replace a forsaken European common market membership with international exchanges that are profitable, advantageous and – fingers crossed! – don’t result in too much visible pus in the food.

I can only imagine someone in the appointment process believes the whole endeavour is destined to fail and only a fool would take the job. In that case, Britain, fair enough: Abbott romps it home on both fronts.

Prior to becoming prime minister, Abbott really was an exceptional opposition leader. Against Julia Gillard’s minority Labor government, he led “the party of no” – fighting her legislation and trying to block her agenda. If there was a protest placard calling Gillard a “bitch”, Abbott wouldn’t shy away from being photographed under it.

For all his opposition, Gillard passed hundreds of bills, yet Abbott’s loudness convinced Australians the country was in chaos and Labor had caused it. Labor rolled Gillard, Abbott won the 2013 election and revealed – surprise! – the chaos was him the whole time.

Much has been made of Abbott’s reputation for sexism and misogyny – his public insistence that virginity is the greatest gift a woman can give someone, for example. His conviction that women were not suited to leadership. There were sleazy winks and references to a candidate’s “sex appeal”.

Should this behaviour disqualify him as a trade envoy? Yes. But it’s not the only reason. Neither are his statements about Indigenous Australians or his ugly opposition to marriage equality.

Love, that stuff ain’t the half of it.

Abbott is a man whose nuanced contribution to international relations as prime minister was not limited to threatening to “shirtfront” Vladimir Putin with an Aussie Rules football tackle over the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17. He also dropped a casual comparison to the Holocaust in a speech on the national jobs report. He reintroduced knights and dames to the Australian honours system, and the Australian he honoured first was … Prince Philip? He even got the name of Canada wrong (“Canadia”); he was in Canada at the time. Trade envoy?!

Maybe his British backers missed the time Abbott ate a raw onion like an apple in front of the national news media, and for no particular reason. The Australian town of Ballarat commemorates it regularly, crowning a local statue of the former PM with a garland of onions.

Perhaps what his British friends have also either missed or wilfully ignored was that Abbott wasn’t just a gaffe-prone, sexist, political eccentric. He is not merely an out-of-his-depth clown tripping over bits of international politics in a hapless, endless dance with his too-big shoes.

Australians have elected and re-elected prime ministers who’ve overstepped the boundaries of acceptable political behaviour, adult circumspection or simple good taste. Robert Menzies fangirled the Queen. Bob Hawke encouraged the whole country to take the day off for a yacht race. Paul Keating leaned towards his opposition nemesis in parliament and taunted him by purring “I wanna do you slowly”.

But Abbott is not only out of the prime ministership but out of parliament itself because he’s not a leader: he’s a neocon ideologue whose political judgment is not only aggressive but woefully inept.

In his first 100 days in office, Abbott pursued a rightwing thinktank’s wishlist of radical policy initiatives with gusto so cack-handed that middle Australia mobilised mass protest marches within months. The brutality of his poor-punishing first budget so enraged the population that what should have been a friendly centre-right cross bench was provoked into becoming a populist firewall of legislative opposition to his agenda.

Related: Boris Johnson is not hiring Tony Abbott for his trade expertise | Larry Elliott

He burned sympathisers and alienated natural allies so forcefully that there were 60 consecutive weeks of him trailing Labor at the polls before his own side necked him from the job. Once deposed, Abbott promised not to snipe from the backbenches … and then sniped from the backbenches. His loud, conspicuous failure to read the national mood on the issue of marriage equality is not simply one of the reasons his once solidly conservative seat is now in the possession of a liberal independent; his presence actively hurt the “no” campaign.

The Australian reaction to Abbott’s envoy appointment cannot be repeated, but it begins with a “W” and ends with “TF”. “Whichever Australian traded Tony Abbott to Britain,” remarked local cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “is the person Britain actually needs to help them with trade.” To pursue Abbott instead does not speak to qualification, or good governance – let alone anything like a desirable outcome. It speaks to “jobs for the boys” ideological loyalty that overrides history, fact and reason.

Dear cousins: my God. I fear chlorinated chicken is the least of your imported trading problems now.

• Van Badham is a theatre-maker and novelist, occasional broadcaster, critic and feminist