SYDNEY (AFP) - The 33-year parliamentary career of Australia's former prime minister John Howard has ended with neither a bang nor a whimper, just a strange case of a disappearing politician.
For nearly 12 years as prime minister, Howard's every public word and action was recorded and scrutinised, but when his government was ousted by Kevin Rudd's Labor Party in elections two weeks ago he vanished from the media.
That might have been understandable apart from the fact that he never publicly conceded defeat in his own Sydney parliamentary seat, which he had held for 33 years and where he was trailing the Labor candidate.
His opponent, former television journalist Maxine McKew, waited politely for a week for a concession before taking things into her own hands and declaring victory in the suburban seat of Bennelong.
That was last Saturday and could perhaps have been expected to flush the former prime minister out of seclusion, but there was still no word.
On Wednesday, the Australian Financial Review carried a small report on page eight quoting a spokesman for Howard as saying the country's second longest serving prime minister had conceded a week earlier in a phone call to the returning officer in Bennelong.
But the electoral commission said it never commented on conversations between candidates and its officials, so the alleged concession remained a secret.
"Quite often candidates claim victory or concede but from my perspective that's a public statement they make," said Tom Rogers, electoral officer for New South Wales.
"We go through the same process regardless of what happens. We think at the moment that Bennelong is likely to be declared by us probably by about Wednesday of next week, and that's when the result will be formally known.
"From time to time candidates might contact the electoral commission, but we would never comment on what the candidates have said," he told AFP.
Howard's biographer Wayne Errington said Howard would be embarrassed by the loss of his own seat, a humiliation no other sitting prime minister has suffered for 78 years.
"I think it's within John Howard's character just to disappear from the scene entirely," Errington told AFP.
"The business of claiming or conceding seats has no real significance, it's just a little bit odd that he hasn't come out and done it in a formal way."
Howard would be "grieving over the loss of what he has done over the last 30 or 40 years," and the prospect of having to find something new to do with his life, Errington said.
