Call up any comparisons you like - two rutting stags locking antlers, two WWF wrestlers steaming up their spandex, two old ladies fighting over the last Eccles cake at the supermarket - but the live-to-air scrap between journalist Adam Boulton and Labour's former spinmeister Alastair Campbell was the most entertaining smackdown of this election.
The antipathy between Boulton, the political editor of Sky News, and Campbell, once Tony Blair's top aide, has simmered for years. It has to do with the fact that Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Campbell thinks that Murdoch's newspapers and broadcaster are ''utterly slavish'' in their devotion to the Conservative Party, and that Boulton's coverage has been biased. You can read Campbell's (clearly partisan) analysis of the ''Murdoch agenda'' here.
The two of them are turning into the Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell of this campaign. Listen to what Campbell says during their tussle, which took place immediately after the British prime minister announced he was stepping down: '"Adam, I know you've spent the past few years saying Gordon Brown's dead meat and he should be going." And even worse, "You're clearly upset that David Cameron isn't Prime Minister."
This causes Boulton to go all Rumpelstiltskin and shout, ''I'm fed up with you telling me what I think!'' It's hard to imagine an encounter between a Canadian reporter and a political operator degenerating into a finger-jabbing, eye-popping fight (since we're in Britain I supposed it qualifies as an "argy-bargy."')
But the British press is much more partisan than its North America counterpart. The Sun, owned by Murdoch, ran an utterly brilliant anti-Brown headline the day after an election in which no party won a majority and the country was left on tenterhooks:
Part of Campbell's fury is certainly down to the fact that the Sun, whose support he helped win for Blair, has switched its allegiance to the Conservatives.
As I say, this is not the first time Boulton and Campbell have clashed. In his memoir, Campbell writes that Boulton, reporting on the resignation of Labour MP Stephen Byers, ''is still blathering away …What total scum bags these people are.''
And in the middle of the night after last Thursday's elections, the two began screaming at each other as the tension and exhaustion mounted. ''You're great at giving it,'' Campbell barked at Boulton, ''but you can't take it!'' Ladies, take it outside.
If you want to see something even more amusing than the Boulton-Campbell brouhaha, you should rent In the Loop, a great political satire from last year in which the main character, the splenetic spin doctor Malcolm Tucker, is said to be based on Campbell. I'd post a link here but I'm afraid it's really not appropriate -- Tucker uses profanity the way Baryshnikov uses his feet.