The Mitchelliad continues — Chris “Eraserhead” Mitchell’s memoir, Factotum (or something), currently having a 90-part serialisation eveywhere, in prose so flat-footed it could have avoided military service in Vietnam. Yesterday was a corker, with circulation of chapters in which Eraserhead denounces the left-wing press for being insensitive and intrusive at the time when King Rupert’s marriage to Wendi Deng was falling apart:

“It seemed to me at the time that, in the post-phone-hacking media world, Rupert’s marriage breakdown was treated vindictively and that a man well in to his 80s losing a wife with whom he had fathered two children was given no room to grieve for his loss.”

Well, we wouldn’t want to crowd him, would we? Quite aside from having to deal with Wendi Deng’s … heh … friendship with Tony Blair, Rupe was flat out running a media empire whose journos hacked the phones of relatives of dead service people and parents of abducted and murdered teenagers. And what better way to honour an old man’s legacy and patronage than to put the full story of his humiliation in your memoir? Even Tony Abbott appears to be pissed off with Eraserhead, telling Sky News:

“When you have the former editor-in-chief of The Australian gleefully relating conversations which everyone must have understood were off the record, including conversations as I believe were from his own CEO and ultimately Rupert Murdoch himself, something is going wrong …”

“There is a trust deficit not just in politics, but in society. Generally, there is an honour deficit, not just in politics but in society generally.”

“Ex-Australian editor lacks honour and decency.” There’s an exclusive, Australian-style. Haven’t read the book yet, myself. I’m looking forward to the chapters where Mitchell describes how to turn a monopoly national broadsheet into a money furnace, and how to get elected the most failed and unpopular prime minister in recent history. Where are those excerpts? — Guy Rundle