The story may not be important enough for most of the Australian
“mainstream” media to touch, but Crikey’s revelations about the
awarding of a British government scholarship to Alexander Downer’s
daughter has been given a full run in The Times of London today.

Under the heading “Scholarship for minister’s daughter causes uproar,” the story (here) is covered at length by the paper’s Sydney correspondent Roger Maynard.

Maynard quotes a Downer spokesman as saying: “The minister has done
nothing here. His daughter has applied for and won a scholarship and
for her success to be undermined in this way, for her to be attacked,
is just reprehensible. She has achieved good things in her own right.
The selection process is all controlled by the British Government.”

And
it quotes Shampa Kaiser, of the British Council in Sydney, saying that
there “had been nothing irregular about Ms Downer’s application” and
that there had been no communication between her father’s office and
the scholarship organisers.