Just because Julie Bishop, our briskly efficacious Foreign Minister, has been busy leading the Australian response to the MH17 disaster, eyeballing President Vladimir Putin and basking in the praise of Bill Clinton, doesn't mean she hasn't kept up with her old hobbies.

One of Ms Bishop's favourite pastimes is spectatorship of Labor's internal leadership struggles, which, to be fair, are far more grimly fascinating than the popular reality TV shows. During the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era, Ms Bishop loved to deliver a rousing speech to her party room, replete with references to Shakespeare's bloodiest tragedies, on the latest knife-twists in the dystopian psycho-drama that was the Labor party's leadership.

Despite the recent escalation in her duties, J Bish has kept her hand in, as evidenced on Tuesday when she informed her party room of the latest Labor leadership plot, even before the plotters themselves knew about it.

Tanya Plibersek, Ms Bishop said, had "taken a leaf out of Julia Gillard's playbook" and was engaged in a campaign to undermine her leader, Bill Shorten.

"It is increasingly obvious that Mr Shorten is having to fight off an attack on his leadership by Tanya Plibersek," she told the assembled Libs and Nats.

"The next step will be to get the unions onside, which is what she is doing."

Ms Plibersek, Ms Bishop elaborated, would use the findings of the royal commission into union corruption, which was "likely to do great damage to Mr Shorten's reputation", to strengthen her play for the leadership.

It was a strategy so well thought-out it made one wonder if Ms Bishop is familiar with the psychological concept of projection, which is where you impute to others the impulses that actually nestle in your own psyche.

For it is not the female deputy leader of the Labor party who has recently been the subject of leadership speculation, but Ms Bishop herself.

Cursed by her own competence, Ms Bishop has caught the eye of commentators and colleagues. Former Howard government minister Peter Reith has opined that Ms Bishop should be the next Coalition prime minister. LNP backbencher Teresa Gambaro reportedly told a private gathering that Ms Bishop could be the next female prime minister.

And when asked on television who should be our next PM, senior Coalition front-bencher Christopher Pyne committed an embarrassing pronoun spoonerism which did nothing to quell the chatter.

"I want her to be Prime Minister for 10 years and after that people can worry about the next thing in 10 years," Mr Pyne told Channel Nine.

He meant "him", of course, him being the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.

Luckily the transcript later sent out to journalists corrected the slip, which was in no way Freudian, quite as though it had never happened.

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