Former prime minister John Howard says a senior Labor Minister’s description of his Liberal party hero Robert Menzies as a “nazi appeaser” is “beneath contempt”.

A war of words has escalated after Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy used a National Press club appearance on Thursday to attack the conservative war-time prime minister’s failure to stand up to Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s.

Opposition MPs immediately condemned the Albanese government frontbencher for the “smear” and then tried unsuccessfully to censure him in Parliament.

Late on Friday Mr Howard, who has long admired Robert Menzies and has written a biography of him, lashed out at the comments from the Labor frontbencher in a brief statement to The Nightly.

“Pat Conroy’s comments are beneath contempt,” he said in a brief but terse response.

During a Friday morning television appearance, the Defence Industry Minister doubled down on the comments, telling Channel 9 his statement was a “historical fact”.

“In the end, you can’t argue with history ...There’s a letter from Menzies ten days after Hitler invaded Poland, saying it does not want a first-class war, saying nobody gives a damn about Poland, arguing that we have no right to dictate what sort of government Germany has and arguing for a peace deal”.

“It’s the Liberals who are desperate for a distraction from the fact that Angus Taylor is hopeless,” the ALP left faction heavyweight said.

“They’ve spent more time defending Menzies than they have their own leader. That is how ridiculous they are and irrelevant they are at the moment,” the Minister added.

For several years, Minister Conroy has argued in Parliament that Labor’s wartime Prime Minister John Curtin had pushed for massive increases in military funding, while claiming Menzies had advocated appeasement and cuts to defence.

Meanwhile former Home Affairs Secretary and senior defence official Mike Pezzullo said the “nazi appeaser” label was overly simplistic.

In an interview on Sky News he argued that if Mr Menzies were to be described that way then figures such as British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and US president Franklin Roosevelt would also fall into the same category.

“I don’t think any of them were nazi appeasers,” he said.

“They had a policy of appeasement to try to buy time because they thought, only 20 years after the First World War, their countries were still devastated and needed time to rearm.”

Mr Pezzullo, who once worked as a national security advisor to former Labor leader Kim Beazley said that he understood Minister Conroy’s broader historical point but questioned the usefulness of the label.

“There was a big push to try to appease Hitler … to try to buy time. But I just don’t know that the label helps,” he said.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Robert Menzies Institute and former Liberal candidate Georgina Downer also hit out at Minister Conroy’s comments.

“Pat Conroy’s ahistorical attack on Robert Menzies is proof that our current crop of politicians need to be reading more history books,” she wrote online.

“If he had picked up a copy of The Young Menzies, he would know that while all who had lived through the calamity of World War I naturally wanted to avoid another global conflict, John Curtin was the bigger proponent of appeasement, voting against attempts to increase the defence budget throughout the 1930s & then opposing the sending of Australian troops to fight the Nazis in Europe.” “It was, after all, Robert Menzies who declared war on Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939,” Ms Downer added. “Amidst a worsening geopolitical climate it is crucial that we understand the complexities of history, and what led people to believe in appeasement. Lest by indulging in simplifications, we increase our risk of repeating the same mistakes.”