But just how much ‘real’ friendship is there between these talking heads? Rather ungenerously, I couldn’t help but wonder about Jessica Rowe’s decision to wed Peter Overton at precisely the time her colleagues were reading the news on Channel Ten. In recent months, we’ve heard a lot about the political ‘flip-flops’ of John Howard, Mark Latham and John Kerry. There have been many flip-flops in Australian broadcasting, too, with perhaps the most spectacular backflips of all being executed by the witty, left-leaning Mike Carlton, who now chats (un)easily with John Laws on Sydney’s 2UE.

The pair worked together at 2GB in the 1980s, with Carlton presenting the breakfast programme before Laws’s morning show. Sydney talkback is arguably the most fiercely competitive market in Australian radio, and the size of offices has been enough to provoke bitter feuds between hosts. According to Carlton, Laws took credit for taking him to number one in breakfast, while Carlton believed that ‘a great combination’ was the reason for 2GB’s success. When Laws left for 2UE in 1988 – thus breaking a promise, according to Carlton, that he would not leave 2GB – Carlton wrote and performed a biting satirical country and western ballad dedicated to Laws.

On his departure for London in 1990, Carlton asserted that he didn’t want there to be a ‘feud’ with Laws any more. Some months later, Carlton’s comments to Laws’s biographer John Lyons suggested that he pitied, rather than despised, his fellow broadcaster: ‘I suspect the real John Laws is a worried and lonely person. Get close to him and he’ll seek to destroy you if there’s any sense of rivalry. In a way he’s a recluse – he’s got acquaintances, allies and networks but few sustained friendships.’ Laws was furious, telling Lyons that Carlton could have been describing himself: ‘To be in an industry where you’re so insecure or so ineffectual the only way you can draw attention to yourself is by attacking somebody who has achieved something, then I think that’s very sad.’

Carlton was also sharply critical of Alan Jones, who was now 2UE’s breakfast host. First he declared the rival programme ‘a direct photocopy of mine’, then he dismissed Jones as ‘a fast-talking merchant of hype’. Carlton returned to Australia in 1994, where he briefly presented a music-driven breakfast program on MIX 106.5 FM, promising ‘no dumb talkback’ and advising listeners to tune in to Jones if they ‘want to be told what to think’.

Why recycle these old comments? Well, pretty soon Carlton was back doing talk radio on ABC 702 and then 2UE; after a time hosting the 2UE afternoon programme he began including more talkback, assuring listeners that he wanted to hear what they had to say; and his stablemates were Jones (breakfast) and Laws (morning). While he was in no way implicated in the cash for comment scandal that swirled around Jones and Laws, Carlton remained pretty quiet about their activities, even though he’d described Laws, as early as 1991, as ‘a willing collaborator to the freebie syndrome’.

In 2002 Jones famously transferred to 2GB, taking much of his audience with him. Carlton was now free to say what he liked about ‘The Parrot’, but he didn’t have the same luxury with Laws. Newspapers ran photos of the hosts from the increasingly beleaguered 2UE enjoying a drink together as they watched the footy. In September 2003, 2UE moved Carlton into the breakfast slot, hoping to repeat the success of the Carlton–Laws combination in the 1980s. On the first morning of the new programme, Laws joined his old nemesis for a friendly on-air chat. Then, at the start of his own show, Laws declared that Carlton was back on breakfast radio in fine form. They presented a united front against management’s clumsy attempt to merge the advertising and news functions of 2UE with those of the Macquarie Network, with Laws, the man exposed as having accepted money for reversing his editorial line on banks, telling a listener: ‘I mightn’t have a job tomorrow but you have to stand up for what you believe in’ (27 November 2003).

As the battle for ratings supremacy continues, Carlton and Laws sometimes still chat on-air at around 8.45 a.m. It must be like Carlton once said: ‘adrenalin and money keep you going.’

A postscript. When John Lyons’s Laws: A Life of Power was published in 1991, Laws claimed he hadn’t read the book and, I seem to recall, while interviewing Colleen McCullough, mused about what on earth he could learn from the experience. Years later, on joining Sunday as a reporter, Lyons occasionally came on to the Laws programme to promote his big stories. According to Laws, his biographer was now a fine journalist.