Just plain potty

THE welfare of former prime minister Kevin Rudd has been uppermost in Strewth's tiny mind since he got the Machiavellian chop.

THE welfare of former prime minister Kevin Rudd has been uppermost in Strewth's tiny mind since he got the Machiavellian chop.

As Foreign Minister, Rudd seems to be in his element, dashing from one important meeting to another. His next destination is Brussels, where Pakistan is top of the agenda because of that nation's problems with terrorists and insurgents. A quirky key into Rudd's wellbeing can be discerned in an advertisement published in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, an ad that defies all our attempts at deconstruction. Below a photo of a bored-looking Rudd is the following: "For years, the former prime minister tucked into shedloads of yoghurt, every day of the week. But when he got the top job and started spending a lot of time out of the country, his minders found the home-grown substance harder and harder to get hold of. Worse, Mr Rudd allowed his love of Australian-made yoghurt to be supplemented by foreign foods. Especially imported Chinese figs. And we all know the sad end to this story." At the bottom of the ad there is a pot of yoghurt, but the image is so small, the brand cannot be identified without the use of a magnifying glass.

Coded out

VIEWERS of the ABC's Q & A show on Monday night can be forgiven for wondering what qualifications federal Sports Minister Mark Arbib has to comment on important sporting issues. Caught in the glare of the studio lights, a drop of perspiration struggling to emerge from his forehead, Arbib was unable to say how many players there are in an Australian football team. For goodness sake, Mark, it's the national winter game. There are 18 on the oval and four on the bench. To cover his woeful ignorance, Arbib tried to excuse himself by saying he's a rugby league kind of guy. Supports NRL grand final losers, the Sydney City Roosters. Now, Strewth can forgive a man for freezing in the spotlight. But isn't Arbib a Labor Party numbers man? The sort of chap who organises political coups?

Vastly exaggerated

IT was interesting to see The Sydney Morning Herald's TV critic Doug Anderson chatting to sidekick Michael Idato on the paper's website yesterday. They pontificate persuasively on an SBS documentary about what president John F. Kennedy would have done about the escalating war in Vietnam had he not been assassinated in 1963. At one point Anderson says it's a shame president Richard Nixon's secretary of state Henry Kissinger is not alive to see the show. As of yesterday, Kissinger was alive and living in New York.

No prima donna

THERE are many stories about Australia's greatest artist, the soprano Joan Sutherland. One that Strewth recalls involved her husband Richard Bonynge, who was known for his aloof manner, particularly with the media. On one occasion in Sydney, in 1965, he announced that he and his wife were above being photographed and questioned by "orang-utangs". The Sydney press returned the insult in buckets with prominent journalist Ron Saw writing that Bonynge had made a "howling ass" of himself and his famous wife. Sutherland, in contrast, was naturally unpretentious, open and friendly. There was never any hint of the prima donna about Sutherland.

FORMER editor of The Age, the Herald Sun and The Weekend Australian Magazine Bruce Guthrie will lunch in Melbourne again judging by the enthusiastic turnout for his book launch yesterday. His memoir, Man Bites Murdoch, assesses his time as an editor at Fairfax and News and his parting with the Herald Sun. "It ended abruptly and I still sort of don't know why," he told Strewth. A menagerie of former pollies, including John Caine, flacks, lawyers and Age hacks, including Caroline Wilson, Paul Austin, Sunday Age editor Gay Alcorn, and former editor Andrew Jaspan were there. Launching the book, Ray Martin, whose memoirs have sold more than 150,000 copies, said: "I want it on the record that this book is an outrageous pack of lies". Publisher Louise Adler said the book "will be read by the paranoid as a critique of News Limited". Guthrie was more circumspect. "The difficulty is when people like Crikey cherry-pick, they pick out sentences and paragraphs when the book has quite an arc to it. I'm quite comfortable that when you read it from start to finish, I don't take too many whacks."