(Image: AAP)

It’s sure been a cold, cold winter The Midwinter Ball, coming up on September 7, is an odd tradition in many ways: a place where politicians, sponsors and journalists get soused together in an off-the-record context, at least until Laurie Oakes got hold of a reasonably amusing speech from Malcolm Turnbull.

Beyond that it’s always interesting to remember the corporate sponsors this event attracts:

Plenty of questionable places for a press gallery event to take money from … say, basket case/layoff specialists Qantas. But what really stands out is the money being taken from fossil fuel giants Woodside and Shell. We suppose it helps get back the “troubling cosiness between the powerful and those supposed to hold them to account” vibe that was lost when the whole thing went on the record.

Brokers who break things The Peter FitzSimons/Jacinta Price saga has dragged on into yet another day. After the Nine papers ran FitzSimons’ interview with Price, she complained to The Australian regarding his “rude and condescending tone”, triggering a back-and-forth that’s played out across the pages of the national broadsheet all week. FitzSimons’ editor at The Sydney Morning Herald Shevan Bevan Shields weighed in yesterday, tweeting that he had listened to the full audio of the interview, that it was perfectly civil and that “The Australian really needs to move on”, which The Australian promptly turned into another piece.

We know that Media Watch has offered to be an adjudicator on the matter, but let’s face it, guys — you don’t want any of that milquetoast both-sides ABC nonsense. And so we at Crikey would like to offer our services. After all, you know we’ll be impartial. Between all the concerned parties — a culture-warring alt-right darling, a journalist who can’t bear to cut a single word from his profoundly garbled paragraph-length questions, and a newspaper that talks about the woke victimhood mentality empowering Putin in one breath and complains when one of their favoured politicians is subject to a “forceful and confrontational” interview in another — we have absolutely no favourites.

Uncommon wealth It’s not often you have to don a miner’s helmet and breathing apparatus to plumb the depths of a major company’s annual reports and accounts, but that was what was needed on Wednesday in investigating how the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) is now valuing investment in Swedish buy-now-pay-later company Klarna.

A year ago, when the buy-now-pay-later sector was still in full boom, it was valued at $2.7 billion. Now the sector is dying and Klarna’s value has spent the past year collapsing.

So it’s noteworthy just how hard it is to find Klarna among all the talk about massive profits and higher dividends in CBA’s 2021-22 results announcements and annual report. Indeed, we didn’t find the writedown details until the “Notes To The Accounts” way down on page 247 of the annual report. It reveals that CBA now values its stake at $408 million.

CBA CEO Matt Comyn seems to have lost his enthusiasm for buy-now-pay-later, just as his previous enthusiasm for the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies dimmed from November last year, when massive losses and failures started ripping the crypto world apart.

Everything else is PR Credit where it’s due: we didn’t expect to receive an email promoting Sydney’s 104.1 2Day FM’s breakfast show Hughesy, Ed & Erin this morning, much less that it would be anything we’d click on. But the chummy confines of a breakfast radio show was probably the best place to “confront” Opposition Leader Peter Dutton over his addition to the series of photographs that make politicians look like they are being introduced to the concept of food for the first time.

“With the cameras there, I mean you can’t eat it from the side because the sauce drips off like Bill Shorten, so it leaves one angle and it’s not a great one.”