From the sleepy city of Townsville

Kudos to Malcolm Weatherup of the Townsville Bulletin, a man who not only knows how to use a phrase, but is also good enough to provide an educational digression for his Australian readers -

On the national scene, PM KRudd is increasingly proving himself to be the ideal candidate for the old north of England putdown ' all mouth and trousers'.

(A small digression: for those who aren't familiar with the saying, Michael Quinion in his excellent World Wide Words explains that it is incorrect to say 'no trousers'. Mr Quinion opines 'all mouth and trousers' is an effective put-down of a certain kind of over-confident man. In the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green explains it as being a pairing of mouth, cheek or insolence, with trousers, a pushy sexual bravado, a fine double example of metonymy, a container for the thing contained.)