Sheridan’s trip down memory lane, Pyne back on telly, and Trump’s ‘but actually’ on Hitler

Talkin’ ’bout boys

What are they doing to poor Greg Sheridan over at The Australian? He’s supposed to be the paper’s foreign editor. Presumably he just wants to write about Indonesia’s domestic politics, or be worryingly indulgent towards far-right governments in Europe. So why do they keep asking him to weigh in on other matters? Last week he had to resort to four goddamn paragraphs of reminiscences about Billy Joel to hit the sprawling word count in his piece about how Taylor Swift “confounds the progressive left”.

Now he has to talk about the “woke madness” of the “campaign” to abolish boys schools (by which he means there was a column about it in the Australian Financial Review). It’s another scenic stroll of a piece recalling his time at an all boys Christian brothers school, where he learnt the kind of timeless instruction that the left doesn’t want boys to hear, and that couldn’t possibly have been imparted had there been any girls around:

The brothers taught that when walking down the street with a girl the bloke should try to walk between the girl and the road. That’s so any danger coming from the road, such as a car crashing off the street, hits the bloke first.

Always Pyne time

Here’s our impression of former senior government figure Christopher Pyne answering a phone: “Hello, I’ll do it.” The great fixer has never encountered a camera he wouldn’t address with a few witty anecdotes. Now he’s swung by pulse-of-the-nation comedy panel show The Hundred with Andy Lee to discuss his one-time record-setting number of evictions from Parliament, something that panellist Mike Goldstein points out makes him officially more annoying than Pauline Hanson.

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Politics: it’s basically all a bit of a lark, isn’t it? In case it comes up, Pyne has since lost his crown to Nick Champion — the only MP, as Bernard Keane once pointed out, who Bronwyn Bishop could expel without any accusation of bias — who managed a remarkable 105 ejections in his time in federal Parliament.

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Picture the scene: you’re minding your own business, checking your emails one morning, only to find the former prime minister has sent you a message about the current foreign minister, asking you to “Give me some topics, some background on this motherfucker”. That’s what Czech environmentalist Jan Rovenský woke up to this week. Former Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš emailed him (thinking he was emailing an aide of the same name) asking, in a less than entirely coherent fashion, for dirt on Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský:

Write me the Israel story, how he turned his back on our people, how he went to Doha, how he goes everywhere, campaigning, mail-in voting.

He also asked for info on Lipavský’s children. Anyone who has followed Babiš’ time in public life will know him as a “colourful figure”. An agribusiness billionaire turned politician, he was the richest and oldest person to become prime minister in Czech history, in 2017, as well as the first to be charged with a crime while in office when he was charged with fraud that same year — though he’s always insisted the charges were politically motivated; he has been acquitted twice since. Still, it feels on brand that this apparently isn’t even the first time it’s happened.

“It’s not the first time that Andrej Babiš has accidentally sent me an email, apparently addressed to my namesake, who is his spin doctor,” Rovenský wrote (in Czech, obviously…) on Facebook. “I never published any of them. I usually either politely ignored them or pointed out the sender’s mistake … But to drag your opponents’ children and wives into this is totally over the line.”

Trump Watch

Among the many things that will happen as the world’s least anticipated rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden pulls closer, our favourite to keep an eye on is the resumption of books by or about people who used to work with Trump — kicked off by Jim Sciutto’s The Return of the Great Powers — telling us things that veer from shocking to entirely believable in about half a second.

It will surprise no-one who watched Trump on the world stage to hear that he lavished as much praise on dictators off camera as he did in public. Apparently several of Trump’s former advisers told Sciutto that Trump called Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán “fantastic”, Chinese President Xi Jinping “brilliant”, and even North Korean leader Kim Jong-un an “okay guy”.

To top it all off, the former and possible future president of the world’s most powerful country liked to pull the go-to move for a contrarian 16-year-old halfway through his second beer: “Well, but Hitler did some good things,” Trump reportedly said to John Kelly, his chief of staff from 2017 to 2019. Now brace yourself, but according to Kelly this admiration was not backed up by a rock-solid understanding of Third Reich internal politics:

[Trump] would ask about the loyalty issues … when I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to [Hitler], and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, he didn’t know that.