The DLP’s preferences had been key in supporting the Askin Government in key and marginal seats in previous elections.

Kane said the DLP would not direct preferences in those key seats as a consequences of Willis’ decision to not accept his help.

“We’re not going to run in Blue Mountains, Hurstville, Gosford and two or three other seats,” Mr Morris said Kane had warned.

In the election, many votes that might have gone to a DLP candidate went instead to the Australia Party and then most flowed to Labor.

The result: Blue Mountains, Hurstville, Gosford and other seats were lost by the Liberal-Country Party coalition – and government was lost by one seat.

“I never turned them down. I always accepted their support,” Mr Morris said of his own election strategy.

He had written to the electoral commission a few months ago for some statistics from his parliamentary career, especially the 1968 result, when he won the seat with an 8000-vote majority.

Liberals had held the seat of Maitland since the party first contested it in 1932. It was held by the United Australia Party before then.

Milton Morris, who had grown up in Mayfield, won the seat in 1956.

He was wooed to contest the federal seat of Paterson in 1969 when the then member and former defence minister Allen Fairhall was retiring.

Country Party State members Frank O’Keefe and State party leader Leon Punch were starters.

Allen Fairhall had surprised Mr Morris with his confidence between Anzac Day functions that year. They arranged to talk it through a few days later.

“We’d been out of government in NSW for 24 years, I told him,” Mr Morris said.

“I’m now minister for transport and the federal government looks like it might be finishing its run.

“What would you do in my position?” he asked the federal minister.

“‘Well,’ he said ‘when you put it that way, I’d stay minister for transport because you’re going to get a few more years there’,” Mr Morris said.

But it was a tilt at federal politics

that finally levered him out of the

parliament in 1980.

After a term in Opposition, Mr Morris saw a chance to switch to the federal parliament with the retirement of Phil Lucock in the neighbouring seat of Lyne.

He resigned his state post and went to the poll in October in a four-cornered contest with the National Party’s Bruce Cowan, the ultimate winner, the ALP’s Les Brown and the Democrat’s Edwin Poppleton.

His preferences elected Bruce Cowan, who trailed the ALP candidate by 5000 votes.

It was his tenth election, and his first defeat.

In his concession speech, reported in the Mercury at the time, Mr Morris said he was “less than ebullient” but he had no regrets.

“I stayed so long because it was fun,” he said, returning to the recurring theme.

“Otherwise you’d be like the poor old fire brigade bloke (Phil Koperberg) with a bleeding ulcer.”

Highlights are numerous in his parliamentary career, but he has a particular joy in the tale of the time he represented NSW at the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon on July 1, 1969.

An invitation hangs on his office wall at Telarah.

The tale starts with an offer he made to the sister of the then British prime minister, Harold Wilson, who was visiting people from Rutherford she had met on a cruise.

Mr Morris heard of this and put his ministerial car at her disposal, to collect her from her hotel in Sydney, transport her around the Hunter on the weekend and return her to her hotel on Monday.

It was to be a rewarding piece of diplomacy.

In July 1969, he and his secretary were travelling to Wales on an official train to attend Prince Charles’ investiture.

They shared a cabin with “a huge bloke I later found out was the US Ambassador to the Court of King James.

“He was huge, and had a cigar as big as your arm that kept polluting the carriage.

“We got to Crewe, where we had to change from an electric engine to diesel.”

The American’s wife called to her husband in the doorway of the carriage: “Where are we, honey.”

“Some place called Cree-wee,” he replied.

Mr Morris sat in the 11th row of the stadium erected to view the investiture.

He was captivated for every minute of the four-hour ceremony, he said.

“Back on the train, my secretary said: ‘Don’t turn around now, but Harold Wilson just got on the train and his aide is pointing in your direction.’

“Don’t be silly, I said to him. He’s just counting heads.

“He wasn’t. He came up to me and said ‘Mr Morris?’.

Mr Morris stood. “Please sit, he said to me.

“No, I must stand, Prime Minister.”

The British PM thanked him for the courtesy he had shown his sister while she was in his electorate, then asked who he was to see in London.

A meeting was suggested with the minister who introduced breath testing for drivers in the UK.

“You can’t say anything against Harold Wilson as far as I’m concerned,” Mr Morris said.