As an editor of a quarterly magazine, where most articles are commissioned months in advance, articles on current events make me nervous. What happens if the basic facts behind an article change before it goes to print?

The editors at Melbourne University Press must have thought that they were safe in commissioning Patrick Weller’s Kevin Rudd: The Making of a Prime Minister, due out in August.

But now at best they need a new closing chapter, and a move in the bookshops from ‘current affairs’ to ‘history’.