Given that it is journalism, some of the omissions are noteworthy and perplexing: there is, for example, nothing by Alan Ramsey (whose clear-sighted and sharply written articles bring an iconoclastic freshness and immense political experience to the Sydney Morning Herald each Saturday); nor is there anything from Laura Tingle (whose work adds such distinction to the Australian Financial Review); Ross Gittins, the lucid and humane doyen of commentators on our political economy is also missing entirely; nor does the dazzlingly witty Annabel Crab appear in a collection which is manifestly lacking in humour.

Allington, in telling us that Jones was ‘a latish replacement’ for the otherwise-occupied Maxine McKew, has really given an explanation for Jones’s astonishing confession to me that the MUP editors assembled most of the selections, to which he then added a few of his own. An odd editorial process, I think.

Furthermore, the fact that most of his choices are journalistic offers an explanation, too, for the curious metaphor in the editor’s introduction: ‘But who really got it? Who best read the tea leaves? Who understood what was actually going on in the electorate’s collective mind?’ Well, those of us who read, not the soothsayers’ ‘tea leaves’ but rather the empirical quantitative data which the opinion polls unremittingly presented to us during 2007: we certainly knew what was going on and what was going to happen when the election arrived (interpretation being another matter, entirely). So, if Jones and his team were willing and able to deal with numerical data, if he had included something written by John Stirton, the statistician for AC-Nielsen, Jones might not have needed to ask those rhetorical question. But that would have required him to cast his editorial net rather wider.

John Carmody, Roseville, NSW