Peter Costello, Arthur Sinodinos, Phillip Adams and a gaggle of right wingers trying to be Phillip Adams

(Above: Peter Costello.

Below: a cheshire cat. Note the befuddled rulers clustered beneath the cat).

As surely as night follows day, so Arthur Sinodinos's column in The Australian Doors haven't yet closed on Costello was inevitably followed by this story in The Age with the header 'He had a good laugh': Costello not entering state politics, says Baillieu.

So in the morning Costello is standing by to become the premier of Victoria, and after he's rescued that state from Ted Baillieu and John Brumby, he'll be back lickety-split in federal politics to save Australia from Chairman Rudd.

And without pausing for breath, Costello has had a chance to dash off a column for Fairfax abusing the ABC's lefty tendencies, astonishing and upsetting poor old aging and harmless presenter Phillip Adams (Left to its devices, it's their ABC).

The indignant, deeply shocked Adams pertly reminds Mr. Costello that the demand for a right wing Phillip Adams came from Costello's boss John Howard, and resulted not just in Michael Duffy and Paul Comrie-Thomson's program, but in a show called The Continuing Crisis, a calamity of a show hosted by Imre Salusinsky and Tim Blair, wherein they showed radio skills that makes Adams seem like a golden tonsils of the microphone (yet such is the traditionalist hidebound conservatism of the ABC, it still has its own web page here).

If you want to listen to Adams, you can stream or download the show here, but beware, he's too old to be as innocent as he sounds.

Which perhaps might explain a little recent bitterness by Tim Blair when he refers to Michael Duffy as a friend often described as conservative ... who just happens to vote Green (Blair here, Duffy's green tendencies here).

Which in turn prompted me to look up the last rites of the show, and a tetchy report on Blair's co-host, as delivered in Gerard Henderson's Media Watch way back when (here):

Imre Salusinszky
And then there is the case of Blaming Ourselves co-editor Imre Salusinszky. From June to September 2001, he was given a gig (along with journalist Tim Blair) as host of a Friday evening program on ABC Radio National. You've heard about the old leftist motto: "Give peace a chance". Well the idea of the Salusinszky-Blair program was to give a so-called "right-wing Phillip Adams" a chance on the ABC. The program, The Continuing Crisis, was no worse than much – and better than some – of what passes for a comment on Radio National. In any event, the Salusinszky/Blair gig was soon terminated (the full story is told by Salusinszky in the July-August 2002 issue of Quadrant magazine).

So it cannot be said whether or not Imre S. would have succeeded as a "right wing Phillip Adams". But we do know that Mr Salusinszky was once, along with Phillip Adams himself, a financial member of the "Kerr's A Bastard" Club. Remember Sir John Kerr? The Governor-General who dismissed Gough Whitlam's Labor government in November 1975, no less.

Well, once upon a time, Imre Salunsinszky wrote to The Age (14 June 1976) defending himself against the Age editorial which claimed that he and others who had demonstrated against Sir John were "young hoodlums". Wrote Young Imre:

Now, there was some damage done to Sir John's Rolls-Royce. Though I did not do it, I do not dissociate myself from that, either. I do not feel overwhelming remorse at seeing some dents in a luxury Rolls-Royce containing the man who destroyed what history, despite the harpings of your newspaper, will see as the best Government in this nation's history. I do not think that Sir John should be riding around in that Rolls-Royce. After what he did last November, I don't think there should be any Governor-General riding around in a Rolls-Royce. In the light of this, I don't regard it as absolutely tragic that the car was dented.

And so on – until Imre Salusinszky's (somewhat pompous) designation of himself as "National Affairs Correspondent, Farrago newspaper, Melbourne University" Whereupon well known anti communist academic Frank Knopfelmacher wrote to The Age (18 June 1976) in a somewhat light-hearted view:

May I say that Mr Salusinszky's belief that the Whitlam Government was the best in Australia's history is shared by many people and organisations (e.g. the Iraqi and Soviet Governments and the PLO, and certainly Mr Whitlam himself though apparently not by the Chinese Government) and it is, therefore, by no means eccentrically unique.

What a metamorphosis. From a leftist Whitlamite, to a right-wing Phillip Adams, in a mere quarter of a century. It's the kind of transformation which could have been discussed, say, on a program like The Continuing Crisis.

But back to the Victorian crisis this morning:

Mr Baillieu rang Mr Costello this morning after John Howard’s former chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, urged the former federal treasurer to consider entering Victorian politics with the hope of becoming premier.

‘‘I can assure you that he made it very clear to me that that’s not going to happen.’’

Asked whether he believed Mr Costello would make a good premier, Mr Baillieu replied: ‘‘I think Peter Costello would have made a fantastic prime minister, but that opportunity has gone.

Sob, all our hopes so cruelly raised now so cruelly and cavalierly dashed. Who's the head of the Liberal opposition at the moment? Malcolm someone? Isn't he rich or something?

What about Peter Costello? Great, always around, can't get enough of him, always shoving it up the ABC and ruffling feathers in Victoria, and still getting everyone excited and speculating, as they keep reading his columns, and casting the runes and fishing through the entrails and consulting the Delphic oracle and wondering if just at the last moment, as he reaches the edge of the cliff, he might pull out a whip and Indiana Jones style use it to swing to a tree over the other side, and go on to be the first ruler in the coming World Government, snatching it away from Chairman Rudd.

Me, I just don't get the obsession with Cheshire cats. Is this the longest, slowest payback in Australian political history, as the grin keeps hovering in the trees, above the current players?

Here's how it should work:

And then? No! No 'and then'!