It's hard to earn a crust as a maggot when you've got to resort to stunts to talk to the PM

The boot is on the other foot for the former opposition leader trying to interview his old pal.

Mark Latham with Julia Gillard at the Ekka in Brisbane on Saturday:

LATHAM: Can I just ask you why the Labor Party's made a complaint about me working for Channel 9?

Gillard: Ah, I don't know anything about that, Mark.

Latham: If you want a make a complaint, you really should make it about [Kevin] Rudd, who's the one who's sabotaging your campaign.

From The Latham Diaries:

SUNDAY, August 22, 2004: Yesterday, when we left the hospital, a crazy woman was yelling at our car, trying to sell us raffle tickets in the driveway, just as Janine was about to turn on to a busy street. Incredibly, she made it on to the evening news, claiming that I snubbed her. I rang her this morning to square off the bad publicity and buy her raffle tickets. She said that one of the TV journalists put her up to it. Another set-up, another stunt by the maggots.

Laurie Oakes on the Nine Network on Sunday:

[LATHAM is] not a journalist, he's still full of bile and settling old scores; I don't really think it does 60 Minutes or the network much of a favour to have him posing as a journalist.

From The Latham Diaries:

FRIDAY, March 19, 2004: Janine says that Oakes is the only one who ran hard. That would be right, I never get a break from Jabba the Hutt, that's a given in this job.

Andrew Peacock on ABC2's Breakfast yesterday:

YOU'D need to be pretty handicapped not to appreciate this government is dissolving before your eyes daily.

And the PC police pounce. Kieran Gilbert on Sky News:

ANDREW Peacock a little earlier said it had been 16 years since he'd been on the hustings. He's obviously a little bit rusty given the language that he used in Melbourne during an interview. It was a bit inappropriate.

Jacinta Tynan: You have to be careful of everything you say. He just didn't seem to be thinking, did he?

Josh Gordon in The Sunday Age, August 1:

ARE parts of Australia uncomfortable with the idea of a woman as prime minister? Conservative columnists are thundering about the flood of support from "the sisterhood".

Bob Ellis on ABC's The Drum Unleashed website on August 5:

IT is worthwhile reflecting how much better at "doing sincerity" Rudd is than Gillard. He seems thoughtful, self-amused, calm in his own skin, and principled. She seems evasive, wayward and under-informed, pulling out a merry laugh that has no equivalent in human behaviour, like a dead rabbit out of a threadbare hat, and moves not a few of us to nausea. A lot of successful politicians (Churchill, Attlee, Menzies, De Gaulle, Whitlam, Keating, Carr, Tanner, Shorten) got by without laughing. Some laughed and were less successful (Costello, Beazley, Reith). I can think of no laughing female politician (Palin, Kernot, Chikarovski) that ever got there in the end. Those female politicians that do not laugh (Helen Clark, Tanya Plibersek, Nicola Roxon, Verity Firth, Maxine McKew) look, currently, like better prime ministers than Gillard.

First Tuesday Book Club panellist Marieke Hardy on ABC online's The Drum yesterday admits her judgment can be flawed:

IN 2004 I voted for the ALP and believed Mark Latham was going to run this country . . . I also wanted it to happen. I was wrong, of course, since it has now been proven that Latham is an unhinged liability prone to turning up at press conferences and scaring children with his bulging eyes and firm, irrepressible handshakes.

More errors of judgment? Tim Blair quotes Marieke Hardy in The Daily Telegraph, May 6, 2008:

MY favourite Australian is Bob Ellis, because he is a rogue and a scoundrel and a rabble-rouser and his poison pen is beyond reproach.