Julia Gillard says she promised to make Kevin Rudd foreign minister in order to stop damaging leaks that were destabilising her campaign in the 2010 election.

“I had no choice,” Australia’s first female prime minister told Ray Martin in a Nine Network interview broadcast on Tuesday night.

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“I had to stop the leaks and it was made abundantly clear to me that the kinds of things we’d seen with the leaks to (journalist) Laurie Oakes were just going to keep happening,” Ms Gillard said.

Julia Gillard and Ray Martin.

After the promise, “there were no further leaks”, she added.

Ms Gillard, who is spruiking her book My Story, which will be released on Wednesday, spoke emotionally of her relations with Mr Rudd, whom she displaced as prime minister shortly before the 2010 election.

“I’d felt I’d done everything I possibly could to help and support and prop up Kevin,” she said.

“There had already in the days before (the coup) been some signs that I was being viewed with suspicion and I cried because I felt it was just so unfair.”

Ms Gillard admitted the image of her was “the woman who wielded the knife” and “political brutality”.

But during her conversation with Mr Rudd the night before the coup, she’d been hesitant.

Their conversation went for too long and she’d “fed hope”, which she shouldn’t have done.

After the 2010 election resulted in a hung parliament, Ms Gillard formed government after negotiating the support of the Greens and most independents.

‘My Story’, released on Wednesday.

Asked how she outplayed Tony Abbott, she said: “I stayed at it. I turned up. I was there every day doing it personally.

“Tony took a different approach. He went back to Sydney, particularly for the crucial last weekend before government was formed and tended to delegate it to others.”

After three years and three days Labor turned back to Mr Rudd to “save the furniture” in the 2013 election.

If she’d had a clear run, with no destabilisation and with the Rudd supporters genuinely behind her, she believed she could have out-campaigned Mr Abbott and “landed us in around about the same spot”.

Ms Gillard said people should only go into politics “if you really know why you’re doing it”.

“Will it end in tears? Yes, absolutely,” she said, adding: “The day I finished being prime minister I took a call from Paul Keating who said to me `We all get taken out in a box, love’ and never a truer word spoken.”

Yet she’d do it all again. “No question, do some things differently but do it all again. Absolutely.”

Meanwhile, in an interview with Fairfax Media, Ms Gillard says she thought Mr Rudd might be relieved after she toppled him in 2010. But, “I was wrong. His dominant emotion was a need for revenge.”

She reveals in the same Fairfax interview that Mr Rudd asked to be reinstated as foreign minister, just after his failed challenge to her leadership in 2012.

“It was an impossible request. I knew I could not trust him, that he would continue the campaign of destabilisation and that he would use the status and resources of being a minister to do so. I also knew he would keep leaking from cabinet,” she told Fairfax.

While Ms Gillard insists she made the right call in refusing Mr Rudd’s 2012 request, she says she made the wrong call in deciding to bring former New South Wales premier Bob Carr, who subsequently supported Mr Rudd’s successful challenge in 2013, to Canberra as foreign minister.

Mr Carr found the transition from political retirement hard and the workload “overwhelmed him”, she says, adding: “The other negative was Bob’s struggle with the focused discipline required for Foreign Ministry work.”

-AAP