Look at moi! Kevin now Kath and Kim

IT WAS Kevvie's Kath and Kim moment at Kirribilli.

He was entertaining guests at the prime ministerial dwelling overlooking Sydney's magnificent Harbour - that's right, the place he was so critical of when his predecessor lived there, when at 10.40pm on Friday, October 10, the telephone rang. It was US President George W. Bush - and the comedy and cover-up was about to begin. Almost a month later, some details have been dragged from Rudd in response to a story published in The Australian a fortnight ago, on October 25. That account, written by the paper's chief political correspondent Matthew Franklin, confirmed that it was claimed by "informed sources" that during a conversation on a speaker phone in a study and monitored by a member of Rudd's staff, Rudd had lectured Bush on the need to include the G20 economic grouping of nations in any plans to reform the battered international credit sector. According to the report, "Rudd was then stunned to hear Bush say: "What's the G20'?" It also said Rudd lobbied (as the Mandarin-speaking former public servant always appears to be doing) for a role for China, having just four days earlier been on the phone to Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa. Two days later, The Washington Post carried a White House denial, but the story has created a diplomatic storm for a number of reasons, not the least being the insinuation that Bush did not know what the G20 was but more importantly because its appearance has confirmed the long-held view in international diplomatic circles that there is no such thing as a private conversation with the Australian prime minister, who, it must be noted, has made much of the fact that he was once a low-level junior diplomat. The notion that Bush was ignorant of the G20 is difficult to sustain as White House records clearly show that he had mentioned the body numerous times over a considerable period of time. It is also a difficult claim to swallow given that the G20 was to meet that weekend in Washington at the behest of US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, as Rudd surely would have been aware as Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan was already in the US for the conference. The US Ambassador Robert McCallum telephoned Rudd about the article, and a US official has said that ``we agree with Kevin Rudd's office that the report mischaracterised the conversation and it was inaccurate''. Yet the editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell, who was at the dinner, published the initial account and it would be absurd in the extreme to suggest that this highly professional newspaperman published material which he knew to be false. Mitchell is not discussing the evening at Kirribilli, which is in keeping with protocol, but it is apparent that others who were present did not feel bound by the same rules of common decency. Presumably, the dinner was a private function, paid for by Rudd and not the taxpayers but that's a question that may have to be asked in Parliament next week or teased out in the estimates process. And while it is claimed that Rudd and his staffer were alone with the speaker phone in the Kirribilli House study, it is something of a stretch to insinuate that the conversation was loud enough to be overheard by the dinner guests. What is known though is that Rudd loves to make himself the centre of attention, even more so, if there is an international twist to the story. It is his ``look at moi, look at moi'' compulsion and he is like a small child anxious for the approval of an adult audience when it strikes him. Remember his breathless revelation in August that he was sitting just two rows behind Bush and Russian leader Vladimir Putin at the Beijing Olympics when he witnessed what he said was an ``animated'' discussion between the two world leaders over what he presumed was Russia's assault on Georgia? Here is what he told The Daily Telegraph's Luke McIlveen at the time: ``The president and Mr Putin were in animated conversation two seats in front of us and I imagine they had a few things on their agenda''. McIlveen reported that Rudd said Bush appeared to be making a strong point to Putin, even as the athletes filed into Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium. In the world of international diplomacy, national leaders don't give blow-by-blow accounts of their assumptions about others' conversations. In the world of politics, natural leaders don't feel the need to attempt to burnish their images by relaying their private conversations (real or imagined) to amuse their dinner guests. Insulting the intelligence of the US president for a few cheap laughs as the brandies and ports are poured is an act that might be expected of gauche student leader, or the ungracious Greens leader Bob Brown, but not of an Australian prime minister. This account, if true, and The Australian has not found it necessary to publish anything to counter the initial report, would indicate that the oafs, if not the barbarians, are well and truly ensconced in Kirribilli House.