TONY WINDSOR is more concerned with the theory he heard from Cori Bernardi: that it is not a vast chain of Yum-Cha restaurants that the Chinese secretly want to build in the Liverpool Plains but another one of their artificial military platforms, similar to the one they are building in the South China Sea. Once they get their power base embedded deeply into the fabric of the “black soil” country, Cori told him, they will then be ready to launch a lightning putsch on Canberra, get rid of Abbott, and thrust their man Rudd back onto his throne again. Of course it was long rumoured in Canberra that Rudd had always been on Beijing’s payroll, Windsor said, but no one was prepared to risk the mining boom to try to out him.

Working closely with Rudd while he was PM, this was not the first time I had heard this totally untrue rumour about Rudd being a secret mole, having started it myself: but I didn’t see any reason to confess to it now.  The origin of the rumour (my story about Gillard tipping off ASIO after she noticed Rudd making secret long-distance phone-calls in Mandarin to his ‘mother‘), I again thought best to keep quiet about. Also the one about the Russian sailor and the cucumber.