Strewth: Down the hatch

Bill Shorten cooked up a strawberry pancake storm.

To quote The Simpsons: ’Tis no man, ’tis a remorseless eating machine; also the PM

Amid all the demonstrations of strawberry love in Parliament House yesterday, it was hard to go past Liberal MP Craig Kelly, who lugged a half-dozen punnets into the House of Representatives and hypothesised they can stop baldness. Dig in, Craig! And yet go past him we must, otherwise we’d never get to this photo of Bill Shorten doing his bit. Having cooked up a strawberry pancake storm with his colleagues Tanya Plibersek, Susan Templeman and Joel Fitzgibbon, it was time to tuck in. Just look at him go! The first thing that sprang to mind was feeding time in Strewth’s snake shed (not a metaphor), when Buttercup the python gets handed a rabbit. When his jaw was reassembled the Opposition Leader implored everyone to buy “a punnet for yourself and a punnet for the nation”. (Compare this with Peter Costello’s baby-making imperative to the nation: “Have one for mum, one for dad and one for the country.”) Shorten likes his tucker and has no truck with anything so dainty as nibbling. Exhibit B, that time he launched the rarely seen side-on attack on a snag sanger. For balance, here’s Scott Morrison showing a sausage who’s boss.

Youth abroad revisited

Yesterday we mentioned Dave Sharma — the Liberal candidate for Malcolm Turnbull’s former seat — and the oft-repeated claim he became our youngest ever ambassador when, aged just 37, he was appointed our man in Tel Aviv. Alas, as we pointed out yesterday, Stephen FitzGerald was 34 years and five months old when Gough Whitlam made him ambassador to China in 1973. Since then we’ve learned that Peter Tesch, now our ambassador to Russia, was even younger than that when he became ambassador to Kazakhstan in 1997 (the year the capital shifted from Almaty to Astana). Unless he arrived there in the last three weeks of the year, Tesch was 31. So on our Young Ambassador table so far, Tesch gets gold, FitzGerald silver and Sharma bronze. So, still a medallist. For now. (By the by, our learned colleague Jared Owens says if you let your cursor hover over Sharma’s Wikipedia photo, Wikicommons coughs up the caption: “Middle-aged man with combed-back short black hair and no other facial hair, wearing a suit, smiling into the camera.”)

Who’s cookin’ tonight?

Announcing his and wife Jenny’s strawberry-based plans on Today yesterday, Scott Morrison nearly invented a horror.

ScoMo: “Jen is making a pav, I’m making a curry this weekend … “

Karl Stefanovic: “You’re putting strawberries in a curry? I mean, that’s disgusting.”

Morrison (amid hearty chuckles): “No, no. But mate, I could make a strawberry chutney if you like …”

Fresh in our memories

Unlike many of his colleagues, shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus doesn’t clutter his parliamentary office window with decorations. But he does keep a photo clipped from a newspaper that most fateful August week: Scott Morrison with his hand on Malcolm Turnbull’s shoulder, just at the moment he declared, “This is my leader.” Mathias Cormann is in the snap, too, and it’s his smile that haunts the most.

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