Muddling fact and fiction in Kev's fanciful family forgettery

POLITICS is an odd profession, so it naturally tends to attract odd people. Among the most unusual is our prime minister, Kevin Rudd, whose various personal and family stories are capable of filling the entire parliament's quota for weirdness.

POLITICS is an odd profession, so it naturally tends to attract odd people. Among the most unusual is our prime minister, Kevin Rudd, whose various personal and family stories are capable of filling the entire parliament's quota for weirdness.

Australia had an early warning of Rudd's biographical creativity in 2007, when the then newly elected PM dropped in on ABC cricket commentators during a Brisbane Test match. The Gabba was familiar turf for Rudd, who told his hosts that he had seen Australian fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson destroy England's batsmen at the ground in 1974.

As Fairfax reported, "mostly he remembered 42-year-old Colin Cowdrey - called to duty from England to halt the carnage - walking on to the field and going up to Thomson to shake the hand of the man who was going to hurt him".

There's one small problem with Rudd's story. Cowdrey never played in that match. The veteran was only recalled to England's team after the match where Rudd claims to have seen him.

Perhaps the PM simply has a trick memory. Speaking of which, Rudd's wife Therese Rein told an interviewer in 2009 how she coped with negative media attention.

"All that stuff goes straight to the forgettery," Rein said, explaining that the "forgettery" is a tradition in the Rein family.

"My mother has one. I think her mother had one. Stuff that actually doesn't matter goes in there.

"Stuff that's not important, stuff that if you carried it with you would be a burden."

Bizarrely, later in 2009 Rudd claimed to share exactly the same family tradition, saying that he inherited from his own mother her "enormous ability not to take things too personally. If people slighted her she'd feel it but she wouldn't take it in. There's a family term we used - she had a very good 'forgettery'."

That would be your wife's family, Mr Rudd.

Rudd mentioned his mother again last week in the context of the government's latest tobacco tax increase, which is driving the cost of cigarettes towards $1 per smoke.

"I'm the son of a woman who never smoked in her life and she died of lung cancer, we assume through passive smoking," Rudd said, which is an astonishingly precise diagnosis for a woman who lived to 84.

Medical science can't pinpoint most causes of lung cancer in the elderly. Rudd not only has that ability, but uses it to inform his taxation policies.

As other commentators have noted, Rudd is very dependent on family history when it comes to government decisions. He's previously cited his wife's difficulties in obtaining a locally built hybrid car for the government's funding of so-called green technology. Who needs a cabinet? Indeed, who needs a whole party when the Rudds are an instant and on-call focus group? Well, it could be that Rudd's eccentricities are exaggerated by media attention. We'd all come across as a little abnormal if we were under constant watch. But Rudd happens to be just as weird in person.

My only meeting to date with the PM took place in early 2009, when he was riding high in the polls during his first term. He was attending the first day of the Test match in that summer's series against South Africa.

At one point Rudd joined our small group - me, a TV exec and a newspaper editor - for a chat.

It was friendly enough. I asked, for no particular reason, if he'd seen any recent polling figures for Julia Gillard.

Rudd laughed: "He never stops, does he?"

My attention drifted a little as the conversation went on but returned when I became aware of Rudd's hand around my neck. It wasn't quite touching. He just sort of held it there, presumably to illustrate a point he was making about maintaining political advantage. And held it there. And held it there.

I didn't feel threatened - Rudd isn't a threatening presence at all - but it was definitely more than a little awkward. Then, as he took his hand away, Rudd's index finger quickly traced a line across my throat.

Most likely it was accidental. Hey, it's easy for friendly gestures to be misinterpreted when your hand is around the neck of someone you've just met.

Eventually Rudd was called away. The exec turned to me and said: "What the hell was that about?"

Beats me. He's one strange bunny, that's for sure. Spare a thought for Labor MPs and staffers who are locked into supporting Rudd during the election campaign and possibly beyond. While the rest of the nation watched Sky TV's tracking of Rudd's flight from Brisbane to Canberra yesterday, imagine the mounting dread in Canberra.

"Getting reports of a toxic mood inside Labor's campaign HQ," Fairfax's national political correspondent Jonathan Swan reported on Twitter last week. "From one source: 'I'd say about 90 per cent of people in there would hate (Rudd)'." Swan's source continued: "I shit you not at the amount of times I've had conversations with long-term Labor staffers and people who say 'I can't believe I'm saying this but I don't want us to win under Rudd' -- mainly for the good of the party, he's not one of us."

Curiously, Swan's tweets never evolved into a major Fairfax news story, despite him writing: "Have now heard from multiple sources in PMO and campaign HQ similar stories about toxic mood re Rudd." Swan further quoted one Labor contact: "The majority of people in HQ actually hate Rudd."

Little wonder, then, that Rudd is stacking his campaign team with blood relatives. Strange he may be, but the Prime Minister isn't altogether stupid. As usual, the biggest cheers following his election call yesterday came from within the Rudd family camp. First Lady Therese vaulted on to Twitter to deliver this unprecedented verdict: "Giving Kevin a hug after a kick-arse press conference announcing the election."

I stand to be corrected on this, but we might have just had the very first arse-themed prime ministerial decree from a resident of The Lodge.

Oh, wait; earlier in the year we had Tim Mathieson's tiny Asian fingers instruction on prostate exams.

Almost left that one in the old forgettery.