Lindsay stays loyal

Rudd was beheaded, and it was all for nothing, Tanner laments

It's interesting that Lindsay Tanner says that Labor dropped Kevin Rudd because they couldn't see that he could recover in the polls.

I'm sure that was part of it, but surely the fundamental reason it happened was because few could bear the way he organised himself and his office. Let's not forget passages such as this from just one of the post mortems after he was deposed:

The prime minister was a loner, far from consultative and keen to centralise power in his office. He appeared to have no mates in politics.

One veteran who has known Rudd since his days in Foreign Affairs says: "There are only two sources he goes to for advice: God and the cat." Cabinet was often out of the loop, on big issues and small. When Rudd announced the appointment of former National Party leader and deputy prime minister Tim Fischer as the ambassador to the Vatican, cabinet greeted the decision with stony silence. Only Foreign Minister Stephen Smith knew in advance about the appointment.

A well-placed Canberra insider said ministerial calls to the PM's mobile phone were always diverted to staffers, generally a gofer. From the time he became opposition leader in 2006, virtually none of his senior colleagues had a direct line.

They got in touch by sending a text. The story has often been told how Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was forced to get on the same plane as Rudd to give him a detailed briefing on the national broadband network.

Now we learn that booking a flight with the PM to get face-time was almost standard operating procedure. One Rudd staffer joined the boss on a flight to the Middle East, en route to Afghanistan, to brief the PM. The staffer then flew straight back to Sydney.

The outcomes of giving Kevin a chance to recover in the polls looked like this:

a. Kevin fails and we lose government;
b. Kevin succeeds and we have to put up with working with him and his appalling staffers, likely made even worse by a second success, for another 3 years.

They was no upside to keeping him.