Richard Butler has demonstrated a valuable lesson

So all premiers, before tempted by high opinion polls or personal folly, hoist that banner and repeat three times before going to bed: there are no votes in vice-regal appointments.

For governor newbies there are two key lessons to learn.

First, have some notion of the job description before starting work. One problem for Richard Butler was that he was encouraged by Jim Bacon to behave unconventionally, but the parameters for that behaviour were never spelt out for him.

Butler, naively, thought he had some sort of carte blanche to be a reformist governor, but reform to what?

No wonder governors tend to be retired judges or generals as these already have a notion of what the job entails. But other states have managed to "modernise" the role by appointing sports personalities, for example, so it clearly can be done.

Whoever you settle on, the key is to make sure your governor knows what is expected from the start.

Second, understand your audience. Have the wit to take into account the sensibilities of the community into which you are thrust. It is hard to imagine that Butler, one would expect so familiar with public relations and the media, could make such a basic mistake. But he did, and in a big way.

He failed to understand how an outsider might be perceived in this smallest and most parochial Australian state. It was more than not being popular, he was seen by many as taking the locals for a ride, and there is no way in small-town Tasmania that a public figure could get away with that.

Tasmanians, although probably finding the post rather archaic - almost quaint - are prepared to form a personal attachment to the individual in vice-regal office. This familiarity means that authority figures like politicians and governors have always been accessible here.

Richard Butler should have taken the time, and had the manners, to read the prevailing public sentiment more astutely. How could he come to a small conservative community - as a republican, a Labor appointment, a high-profile, outspoken commentator - and not expect the locals to put him under the microscope?

This is not to defend the petty minds and gossips in Tasmania - which frustrate all of us who live here at times - but rather to make the point that this is reality in a small and insular community.

Of course Butler blames a media "campaign" but this is stretching things too far; Murdoch's Hobart Mercury may have fanned the flames but it is Butler who lit the fire, again and again.

This story is a long way from being over. Commentators will debate for months to come whether Butler was fairly treated, whether he deserves his payout, whether he was pushed to resign, whether he was a victim of a media campaign, how small-minded we Tasmanians are, what the political fallout might be - not to mention the consequences for the monarchist versus republican debate.

Readers will have no shortage of column centimeters to help them form opinions on the above. But none of these issues, as important as they are, can detract from the basic political lesson for premiers and viceroys, which probably can be distilled down to this: once the blood is in the water it doesn't matter whether you are right or wrong, you're dead either way.