Stand by for the Kevin Caravan, that cavalcade of bad jokes and cheesy lines we saw used so effectively in the 2007 election, and never really since.
From touchdown today Kevin Rudd will be putting on a show, not just for his Caucus buddies but for the general electorate, those people his wife yesterday asked to lobby their local Labor MP on her husband’s behalf.
Mr Rudd will be calling for support from people not in Parliament, not even in the Labor Party. He wants to be able to claim a popular groundswell.
It will be a weekend of Kevin - Kevin pleased to be returning to the bosom of the family; Kevin nodding appreciatively as a voter gives friendly advice; Kevin staring into the middle distance as he contemplates the future. Anna Bligh will fit in there somewhere.
And of course there will be facial expressions of the “shock and disappointment’’ he felt after personal attacks on him by Wayne Swan and others. The inhumanity.
We will see everything except the scores of telephone calls he will be making to Caucus members to get their votes, or to take advice on strategy.
And remember the cheesiness? We had a hint yesterday in his final Washington press conference when he said, “I must now return to Australia, aircraft await…’’
Finally, two and a half pages of transcript later we came across familiar wordage: “...and as they say in the classics, I’ve got to zip.’‘
The Kevin Caravan will be different to the Julia Juggernaut.
The Prime Minister will continue to be a prime minister with related duties and won’t have the luxury of Mr Rudd, who until Monday at least has no day job and can concentrate on corralling Caucus votes.
A Julia Gillard appeal to the broad electorate would have limited success because as every opinion poll shows she is heavily marked down by voters. She insists policy achievements will change that. But Kevin Rudd has the advantage of not having introduced a “carbon tax’‘.*
His appeal to supporters outside the party room carries risks for Labor. It could be decided that the only way to counter that appeal would be to destroy him, at least in the eyes of the public.
That would be a messy spectacle and would convince many voters Labor was dominated by the politics of viciousness.
And as cabinet minister and Rudd backer Martin Ferguson yesterday said, it could simply provide campaign advertising fodder for the Liberals.
But the alternative prospect is that the general public would see a false Kevin Rudd, and not the one who has been undermining Julia Gillard while she has been Prime Minister; who was a difficult leader unresponsive or hostile towards many of the concerns of colleagues.
There are many Caucus members who know what a struggle it was to work under Rudd PM, it might now be time for the voters to hear the full details.
Forget what Wayne Swan and Stephen Conroy have had to say so far. That’s just the start and the dossiers are large. For 20 months people have been biting their tongue but now see no need to stay silent.
But that leaves past comments lingering in the public’s memory. “I reckon we’ve got a terrific Prime Minister,’’ Mr Swan said in May, 2010.
It’s the suggestion of sabotage of the 2010 election - repeatedly denied by Mr Rudd - which angers many senior figures. He has said he had no roll in damaging leaks but fingers are also pointed to the frigid reconciliation he had with Julia Gillard just days before the election and his tendency to run his own campaign outside the official one.
The idea Kevin Rudd is presenting himself as an election winner after his roll in denying Ms Gillard her victory is too much for some to take.
The Prime Minister wants Mr Rudd to match her promise that, if she loses the Monday ballot she will renounce all leadership ambitions.
He probably won’t, and why should he? Why should he be the only one of 103 not allowed to be ambitious?
He is entitled to keep pursuing the leadership, that is if there is anything left of him after his colleagues have finished.
[* Ministers are now prepared to put their names to the stories they could not tell in public after his removal, about what life was like in the heart of the Rudd machine. However, it was Mr Rudd who first gave voters a peek into that period of federal politics. In April last year he appeared on the ABC’s Q&A with a very one-sided account of what happened to his Emissions Trading Scheme. He said some cabinet colleagues wanted to junk it and he had to be quick smart to save it.
“You had some folk who wanted to get rid of it altogether, that is kill the ETS as a future proposition for the country. I couldn’t abide that,’’ he told the TV audience. The point of the breach of cabinet confidentiality was that the quest for a carbon price would have disappeared if he had not been able to send the carbon plan off to the safety of the future before it was completely ravaged.
In this new period of openness, prepare for that account to be one of several which will be questioned.]
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