Oakes is, of course, the doyen of the parliamentary press gallery, and like Linda Evangelista, doesn't get out of bed for the journalistic equivalent of less than $10k a day.

If Oakes pops in on the NPC he wants an answer to a question, and it is a brave politician that fails to provide an answer.

Still Our Lady of Altona is no shrinking violet either.

Gillard pointedly declined to answer Oakes' question.

(If you have a life beyond the political circus and weren't tuned into the speech a moment ago the question was essentially did she enter some sort of Kirribilli pact with Kevin Rudd on the night she bumped him off and then renege at the last minute. The question was followed by a rather significant period of eye contact between hunter and hunted.)

One of those pulse rate monitors worn by marathon runners would have almost certainly detected a spike in the Prime Minister's blood pressure, still television viewers and most voters weren't in the room to detect any subtle signs of anxiety.

Gillard didn't blink but she flattened out afterwards, as if she was already internally war gaming what the out-take of the brief Oakes hijacking would be. Possibly she was deflating very slowly, like an abandoned premium foil balloon.

We (you readers, Laurie Oakes and all vultures of my kind) are being requested to move forward, not backward.

This request isn't "would you like peas or broccoli" or "are you a league or an AFL man" or "would you like to look forward".

Adopting the present future tense isn't presented as optional. (Would you like to look forward, it's really cool?) Nope, not that, this is just Look Forward. The please in the sentence is implied not stated, and mostly not even implied.

If you look backwards you see all sorts of things best not seen.