For more than forty years, Laurie Oakes has reported on politicians and politics, the ruthless drive for power, the emotion and cold calculation, the wheeling and dealing, the backstabbing and the brawling, the triumphs and the failures and the betrayals. His weekly columns since 1987 (mostly in The Bulletin and now in the Daily Telegraph and the Herald Sun) have been requried reading for anyone fascinated by national politics - and who wanted to know what was really going on. This updated collection ranges from the (broken) Kirribilli House agreement between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to the Howard Government being described as 'mean and tricky' (by the Liberal Party national president), and from Kevin Rudd's victory in 2007 to an unusual take on Peter Costello's departure from national politics.