Last Sunday when radioinfo spoke to (now) Fairfax Radio chief, Graham Mott, he assured us that negotiations with both Mike Carlton and Peter FitzSimons were continuing and that there was no truth to the claim in The Sunday Telegraph that Mike and Fitz would not be on air doing breakfast on 2UE next year. It now seems that the Murdoch paper was at least half right with FitzSimons opting out of the partnership.

Rumblings from deep inside 2UE persist that it was never a partnership made in heaven and was punctuated with shouting matches between the pair. FitzSimons, we are told, resented earning about half of Carlton’s salary. Mind you, given Mott’s stated zeal to rein in 2UE salaries, it is possible that Fitz may have achieved parity with Carlton without a pay rise if he’d bothered to hang around for just a little longer.

Still, walking away from a $650,000 pay-packet is no small decision given that most of us would be prepared to partner Vlad the Impaler for that kind of money. But according to a statement from FitzSimons the final decision came down to work / family balance. FitzSimons who is married Channel Nine Today Show host, Lisa Wilkinson said, “

While we coped fairly well as a family with the two of us getting out of bed in the wee hours, we came to the conclusion that it was going to be difficult to flourish as a family doing that over the long haul”.