“There are no circumstances under which I will be Secretary General of the United Nations,” former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told reporters today, while busily sending text messages to UN delegates to shore up support.
“People come up to me all the time, and when the conversation turns to me running for the United Nations role, as it invariably does for some reason, I tell them that it’s not something I’ve even considered.”
He said he was just here to help. “I’m simply here to offer what support I can. I’m 100% behind the current Secretary General. And I’ll be 100% the next Secretary General, correction, I’ll be 100% behind the next Secretary General, which won’t be me,” he said, before explaining he had ‘several important phone calls to make’.
Mr Rudd later told journalists he had a lot of respect for the potential candidates for the upcoming role. “I feel like I know them well. Which is to say, I’ve done a lot of research on them, very detailed research. I know everything about them. Absolutely everything. Perhaps we should catch up and I can share some of the details”.
Meanwhile, members of the United Nations said they were bracing themselves for Mr Rudd not running. “He’s definitively ruled himself out, so I expect to be hearing from him pretty much every day from now on,” one delegate said.
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