Wayne Sanderson writes:

This is a tale best told in cliches, the dominant
dialect of the punditocracy. It’s the one about the bantam who punched above
his weight, causing a pundit to p-ss into the wind and cop it from a great
height after politics made for strange bedfellows ahead of a week that will be
a long time in politics.

A little while back Piers
Akerman thought Glenn Milne a “bantam-weight”, so he
has had to step up a division or three to set the national agenda with a certain
“leadership understanding” story that everyone is talking about.

Today
Piers thinks the story is all “giddy
hysteria” and
that the whole thing is “laughable”. Most men learn, at an early age, that when
taking your ease outdoors, it is best to point Percy downwind.

Now, there
will be a bit of hysteria about for sure, but the facts that Akerman relies on
for his argument had barely been typed into his column when down it came,
pouring all over him and his work from a great height, courtesy of Milne’s
column
today which
backgrounds his Sunday story.

Piers is unlikely to gain much comfort from
finding that his political bedfellow of the moment is Democrat Andrew Bartlett,
who yesterday described Milne’s story as “not much more than a
gossip column“.
It can’t be often Piers agrees with someone from what he dismisses as the
“kumbaya crowd”.

Now, as we know a week is a long time in politics, but
looking at this morning’s paper with their talk of “deep rifts” in the Liberals,
it does not seem that “the times may suit an
elegant departure“.

Then again, a lot of things can happen before the end of the day in the
hothouse of Canberra.