Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Thursday November 26th
Marius - politics …
Many substantial political careers have involved a near-death experience.
John Howard, Winston Churchill, Robert Menzies, Richard Nixon - any number of public figures have seen the guttering flame of their careers almost snuffed out, only to burst back into renewed life.
Of course, renewal and reaffirmation are not the only things that follow such experience. Sometimes what follows near-death is, well, death.
At the moment, Malcolm Turnbull is being assessed as being somewhere between political life and death - with a preponderance of opinion putting him more towards the latter end of that scale.
It is easy to make a case for the Liberal leader being doomed, if not immediately then in the fairly short term. He survived what was effectively a leadership vote this week by 48 to 35 and that was against a candidate in Kevin Andrews who was demoted in the Howard Ministry and associated with a string of policy failures.
That, so the argument goes, shows the anti-Turnbull forces, at a minimum, number 35.
Wilson Tuckey, who moved the motion against his leader, says it’s not the first vote that gets the incumbent, just wait for the next one.
If Turnbull does survive, he will face an election next year which nobody, certainly no analyst, thinks he can win.
Maybe the most reliable a guides to the election outlook are the bookies. They now give the Coalition about a 20% chance of winning the next vote.
Put a dollar on Labor to win now and you’ll get $1.18 back - put a dollar on the opposition and, if they bolt home, you’ll pocket $4.50.
They don’t have a market on Malcolm Turnbull, but you’d want good odds to back him to survive his continuing political near-death experience.
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Debbie - sport
After trying to keep up with eight European Champions League matches, two English Premier League games and a clash between Rafael Nadal and Nikolay Davydenko across most of the brekkie show this morning, I’ve not much energy left and saving what little is in the tank for the start of the first test between Australia and the West Indies.
So only time and brain space left for something light!
During banter in the NewsRadio office the other morning, Marius Benson was regaling us with reports of his weekend tennis prowess. As he was talking, I looked up at my TV screen to see the Russian Nikolay Davydenko in action and it struck me Marius on court must bear a reasonable resemblance to Davydenko.
Don’t know he’d handle Rafa Nadael with quite the same ease that Daydenko did this morning, when he dispatched the world number two 6-1 7-6 - but I couldn’t get the similarity out of my head as I watched that victory this morning.
So, in the time-honoured sports section tradition of “Separated at Birth” I offer you:
Nikolay Davydenko
Marius Benson
