It can’t be too much fun having to share your new(ish) boyfriend with the voting public, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s fiancee, Jodie Haydon, seems remarkably good-natured about it.
News of the couple’s engagement was published on Thursday morning, on the social media site X (formerly Twitter), which seemed apt, as that’s where they first connected. Theirs is both an unusual romance and a thoroughly common contemporary tale.
Jodie Haydon and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese after telling the media of their engagement at The Lodge on Thursday. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Albanese is a second-time-rounder, having been married before (a friend of mine who married a divorced father-of-three called him a “quality retread”).
They had met the old-fashioned way – in person, at a superannuation event. But it was only when Haydon slid into Albanese’s direct messages on Twitter that they got together for a date.
Her Labor background is stronger, even, than Albanese’s – she comes from a long line of Labor-voting public school teachers, she attended a public high school on the Central Coast, and she had a teenage job working at a fish and chip shop. She is widely regarded as warm and down to earth, as was her predecessor, Jenny Morrison.
Haydon is patron of the National Portrait Gallery but otherwise keeps a low profile in Canberra. It’s believed she works for the NSW Public Service Association as a women’s officer, although the prime minister’s office would not confirm this following the engagement announcement on Thursday.
But what will she do now?
Unlike in the United States, where the president has a first lady – an official position with its own office, staff and budget attached – the role of a prime ministerial spouse is undefined and sometimes troublesome. We saw this with the arrival in the Lodge of the “first bloke”, Tim Mathieson, the partner of our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. His presence made Gillard even more of a target than she already was.
The PM has recruited a wife, but nobody knows the job description
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17.02.2024
It can’t be too much fun having to share your new(ish) boyfriend with the voting public, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s fiancee, Jodie Haydon, seems remarkably good-natured about it.
News of the couple’s engagement was published on Thursday morning, on the social media site X (formerly Twitter), which seemed apt, as that’s where they first connected. Theirs is both an unusual romance and a thoroughly common contemporary tale.
Jodie Haydon and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese........
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