2. AN OFFER HE COULD REFUSE.(Lenny Sump refuses Con Pyorrhoea's request for donation)(Brief Article)

THE MELBOURNE GRAND PRIX has come and gone in a asma of petrol fumes and stale champagne. fortunately, connoisseurs of sleaze were denied this year the unappealing presence of world Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, Britain's pipsqueak-sized richest man. Ecclestone, it will be remembered, is the one whose not wholly disinterested offer of a vast donation to the British Labour Party Tony Blair got caught out trying to accept.

Amid all the excitement of the elegant gathering of motorspeed lovers (which this year received a Golden Seal of Quality Control award from the Australian Institute of Dangerous Drivers) media attention was apparently too concentrated on the "shock" of the event's first fatality--though why "shock" is not clear when this is the kind of thing races of this sort must inexorably lead to--to notice that an Australian MP had decided to do a Blair. According to insiders, no one was more disappointed than Con Pyorrhoea, left-centre-right-wing (anything to stay in office, say his admirers) ALP member for the federal seat of Sharkey, to discover that Ecclestone had not turned up this year. Undaunted, the MP reportedly decided to approach Ecclestone's deputy, former East End bovver boy Lenny Sump, with his request for a donation for "an eight-figure sum", ostensibly to fund Labor's "Knowledge Nation" campaign. Over a plate of Tasmanian caviar in the Corporate Achievers' Tent, Pyorrhoea allegedly promised that Labor, when elected, would not only fund an "upgrade" of the Albert Park Grand Prix circuit by removing all remaining trees and "other obstacles" (houses etc.) within a five-kilometre radius, but make attendance at the Grand Prix compulsory for ...