Interesting piece in The Daily Telegraph (Australian version) about the foul mouth of Kevin Rudd, the Labo(u)r Prime Minister. He's a 'swear bear' (and his swearing pre-dated the recent slide in his opinion poll ratings).
"Those Chinese f****** are trying to rat-f*** us," said Rudd at last year's Copenhagen summit. He was giving an off-the-record briefing to journalists.
The Telegraph's Claire Harvey tells us that the f and c words are staples of every Rudd paragraph;
"A few months ago, I spent a day trailing Rudd around Brisbane. We had a long interview on the Royal Australian Air Force jet during a flight back to Sydney. Repeatedly, although I had two tape recorders running and was taking shorthand in my notebook, Rudd interrupted his own long, circuitous sentences to say something amusingly direct and clear. Each time, it was expressed in profane terms. Sometimes, he strung several swear words together. And each time he used a rude word, he prefaced it with "off the record".... He was simply swearing for the sake of it, as if to let me know that he was a hard man who knows how to swear."
Mr Rudd's foul mouth is one of the big observations in an extended profile by journalist David Marr.
Does it matter? Is anyone surprised? Don't most Australian (and British and American) politicians swear? Yes and most journalists certainly do. A Ruddy lot.
Now, I'm not getting all Mary Whitehouse on readers but despite the massive growth in swearing I can't get used to it. My mum never tolerated it in the home and most people I've worked with haven't sworn. I don't complain when others swear but I don't like it when young kids turn the air blue on a bus and all passengers have to listen in. I don't like to be sat over dinner with friends in a nice restaurant and the f word is used frequently, casually - rather than occasionally to really ram home a point. Does anyone feel the same or am I a fuddy duddy?
PS And before jokers get carried away in the thread below, bad language isn't acceptable in the ConHome comments policy.
