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Getting the Treasurer Peter Costello in a Flap
03/10/2007

Yesterday I blogged about the fact that once a news journalist, always a news journalist.

That blog was about how news gathering can get into your blood, and about how getting a scoop becomes better than sex (.. err except sex with your wife. Sorry doll..).

Yesterday the Breakfast Club had another scoop of a kind. It was actually more of a trashy magazine splash.

What happened was that some of our guests managed to get the unflappable treasurer Peter Costello in a flap.

The guests, comedians Aamer Rahman and Nazeem Hussein were in the Radio Australia foyer downstairs, waiting to come on the Club, when Australia's treasurer (and hopeful future prime minister) Peter Costello came past them. They spoke for a few moments, after which the treasurer laid a complaint to our reception desk, saying that security ought to tell those two young whippersnaappers not to be so rude to people.

The question remained therefore was: what did they say to him?

So later, when they came up to the Club for their interview we did ask them. On air.

Oh yes, they laughed, a little embarrassed, a little mortified, a little cheeky, we simply asked for his photograph.

Is that all, we asked?

Well, they replied, we did say to him: "What does it feel like knowing that you'll never be prime minister."

Yep that'd be the thing that caused the complaint. You see, Peter Costello has been the PM's deputy for 11 years, and has been annointed as his successor for all that time. The reason that Peter Costello never got the top job was simply that the PM stayed firmly glued to his boss chair for every day of that 11 years, and now that the government looks likely to be headed for defeat at the upcoming election, Peter Costello is smartingly watching his hopes of being PM slip away. Making it even more painful is the fact that yesterday the treasurer would have seen the latest opinion poll which shows the government a gazillion miles behind the Opposition.

In comedy, as they say, timing is all. The same applies to politics. Obviously the effect is magnified when comedy and politics collide, as it did in our foyer yesterday.