By Craig Regan
Are you sick of the Prime Ministerial soap opera? Take a holiday overseas or become a hermit. The Press Gallery loves a good leadership stoush - so prepare to hear much, much more.
The most likely scenario is that one of the warring parties will bring on a spill in a week and the loser - most likely Rudd, but a lot can happen in a few days - will zip off to the backbenches to plot some more.
If Gillard goes down, you can bet the media will look for turning points in her leadership. They’ve already being edited into neat TV packages that can be rolled out at a moment’s notice. So what will become these so-called watershed moments?
Putting aside the PM’s pre-election promise about “no carbon tax under a government that I lead” and the stumble over sending asylum seekers to East Timor, these are the contemporary events that stand out:
- That speech to the ALP National Convention, wiping Rudd’s term as PM from the history books: It looked churlish, not Prime Ministerial, and fed into the image of disunity.
- The Australia Day melee at The Lobby Restaurant in Canberra: That image of the PM being dragged into a waiting Comcar made her look helpless. That her office had a hand in stirring up an incident that led to pictures going worldwide posed serious questions about who was in charge.
- The Four Corners interview: If you’re going to do an interview, have a game plan. Why not forcefully make it clear that leadership rumblings were underway before the Rudd coup but the decision to stand was taken at the last minute?
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