On 15 October 2007, when John Howard told ABC radio listeners that 70% of the ministry in a Labor government would be former trade union officials, he was relying on the fact that the spoken word contains a degree of deniability.
Unfortunately for the Prime Minister his claim has now made it into very specific campaign literature and Wayne Swan quite rightly points out that not only is this statistic wrong but that he has never been a union official as alleged.
Nor it seems have many Labor MPs who are likely to makeup the front bench if Labor forms government.
Mr. Howard should have made certain that his suspect claim remained oral - after all, we can all do the sums but might have decided that we were mistaken about what he had actually said.
Now we wait for the Leaders Debate to start tonight, with Howard's gaffe ringing in our ears courtesy of SBS World News.
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