There are two ways to deal with dumped political leaders. They can either be accommodated or destroyed. The fatal mistake the Labor Party made when it knifed Kevin Rudd last year was that it tried to do both.
Since Rudd’s removal the party’s public position is that there is a valuable role for Kevin to play at senior levels of government, that he is a team player, an asset in foreign affairs, someone who adds depth to the Cabinet and continues to enjoy deserved popularity with the voters.
The party’s private position is that Rudd is a high-maintenance sook, was a bully and a control freak as leader, that he is now using foreign affairs to gallivant about big-noting himself, that he is running Julia Gillard down to whoever will listen, and that it would have been best for everyone if he’d bowed out gracefully ahead of last year’s federal election.
This was the tactical stupidity at the heart of last year’s leadership transition. Not only did Julia Gillard promise to keep Kevin Rudd on the frontbench, she gave him the portfolio of his choice. Unsurprisingly the former DFAT wonk went for foreign affairs, forcing the very capable Stephen Smith into defence. At the same time the factional leaders who had orchestrated Rudd’s demise were openly expressing their disbelief and irritation that Rudd wouldn’t “go quietly”, as they put it, hoping the humiliation he had endured which had left him weeping with his family in the prime ministerial courtyard would be so devastating that it would drive him from political life.
A few short weeks later and Julia Gillard was wishing that the hopes of the factional leaders had been realised as a string of mid-campaign leaks, which pretty much everyone in Caucus rightly or wrongly blamed on Rudd, threw Labor’s re-election bid into spectacular disarray.
What is clear is that, 12 months on, the vibe inside the ALP remains unchanged. Every other day – or at the moment at least once a day – the Prime Minister finds herself being asked about her relationship with Rudd and must laughably argue that they get on terrifically well and that he’s a valued member of the Government.
Yet open the pages of the newspapers over the past three days and you will find quote after quote from unnamed MPs about what a malignant entity Rudd is, how appalling he was as leader, how there is no way the party would ever go back to him. Further, open the pages of The Australian and you find a bizarre public request from the former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie for Rudd to bow out of politics mid-term.
It is deeply unusual that as a fellow Queenslander - who would have known Rudd for years through his former role as chief of staff to another former Labor Premier in Wayne Goss – Peter Beattie would misread Rudd’s psyche so poorly as to pen a public request for him to make himself scarce.
Rudd’s mental state over the leadership question can be summed up with one pithy phrase: I’ll show those bastards.
Beattie is seriously deluded if he thought that Rudd would spring out of bed yesterday morning, turn to the opinion pages of The Australian and say: You know, Beattie’s right, I’ll ring head office and hand in my notice. Such calls have the reverse effect of galvanising Rudd’s determination not only to stay, but to stay loudly rather than quietly.
Rudd takes an understandable degree of delight in polls showing he’s preferred leader over Gillard. He has used the medium of Twitter to declare that party elder statesman John Faulkner is “dead right” in his analysis of the rotten culture within the ALP, or to tweet that his assassination party has now been cancelled for fear it has become a media circus (now there’s a surprise).
Rudd is clearly very happy to keep things ticking along. He knows he does not have the support inside Caucus, not even close, but he is delighted to be talked up as the people’s choice candidate for the leadership and to reinforce that status with soft interviews appealing to younger voters or re-establishing himself in his Kevin07 incarnation as a Labor great who saw off John Howard. His thinking is that if the polls continue to head south, beyond their already unprecedented level of badness, Labor might have a moment of crazy panic and return to him in desperation. Or more likely, Gillard will lose the next election and Rudd will offer himself up as the only person with any public support and any capacity to make the party relevant and electable again.
The saying goes that revenge is a dish best served cold. Kevin Rudd has decided that it’s a dish best served gradually. Because of Labor’s failure to resolve the Rudd question last year, Julia Gillard is being served a degustation menu of bite-sized shit sandwiches, and they will be dished up to her on a regular basis over the coming two years.
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