This week I was commissioned by The Spectator Australia to illustrate Neil Brown's piece featuring a paragraph on the "perpetually earnest" Bill Shorten and his leadership ambitions around the Qantas fiasco.

The editor wanted me to depict Shorten with a mobile phone glued to his ear, as he is often seen in this position. This was a pretty tight deadline, but I submitted six thumbnails before finally resting on the chosen one.

I thought that depicting Shorten as Gollum from Lord of the Rings reaching for his "precious" prize (thumb #3) would have been fun, but we needed to have Qantas as a backdrop, and that element would have distracted and confused the audience.

Thanks for looking!