The front page on this day carried the full colour of prime minister Paul Keating's verbal barrage at a public servant over the planned purchase of, of all things, a Thai teak table for The Lodge.
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Controversy over the imported table, to be paid for by the Australiana Fund, which was responsible for sourcing furniture for The Lodge, Kirribilli and Government House, had been raging for days. The table failed to meet the fund's most basic requirement of being related to Australia.
Having taken a redundancy, Margaret Betteridge, the fine arts adviser to fund, went public with her version of events, which was that she had opposed Mr Keating's proposed $20,000 acquisition. Former PM Malcolm Fraser's wife Tammie, had jumped in to attack Mr Keating too.
But as he so often did, Mr Keating hit back the hardest at what he called the "revenge of the hyphenated names", the "blue rinse set" and the "old Tory antique club".
The "real story", Mr Keating told radio host John Laws, was that the Lodge lacked a decent dining table and that the Thai table had been identified by Mrs Betteridge. "Well, to find it and then to propose an offer to me and my wife, show photographs of it and invite us to...look at it, would lead you to assume, would it not, that it was one... she approved of, " he said.
"It is all the people with their hyphens showing...there is more double names in this stunt than you have ever seen in your life."
Sources close to the fund disputed Mr Keating's account. He told Laws he didn't even really care about the table and would be happy just to use the old one.
The newspaper's editorial opined that while Mr Keating had cast new light on the matter, his tendency to verbal abuse (including of an admiral, apparently) needed to be condemned.
"Even for Mr Keating, this latest effort at multiple insult is fairly startling. He has managed to be ageist, sexist, clasFix this textsist, even nameist, all in two or three sentences," the editorial said.
