KEVIN RUDD'S rise to power was a peculiar triumph over the party's opposition. Caucus didn't like him but the public did. He led no faction and won few friends in Parliament but appealed directly to the Australian people. Rudd rose on the polls and the polls destroyed him.
At the shabby end of the Howard years he seemed exactly what Australia needed: a conviction politician of rare courage. As he rose through the ranks he presented himself as a truth-teller, soft-hearted, hard-headed, a fighter, a man of vision out to reshape the future. The public loved him.
Rudd looked different close up. So many who worked around him came to loathe the man. His energy and resilience were phenomenal. So were his temper and relentless self-belief. Caucus colleagues felt belittled. Ministers were frustrated. Staff fled. Camaraderie was never the man's style.
Mark Latham aimed one of his cruellest barbs at Rudd, saying after the 2004 elections: "He only holds his frontbench position because of his media profile and public standing among people who have never actually met him." Two years later he had Latham's job as leader of the opposition.
He proved the party's greatest electoral asset since Bob Hawke and did what only half a dozen Labor leaders have done since Federation: he brought the party in from opposition to government. And the party rewarded him with unprecedented powers. This was emphatically - until yesterday - the Rudd Labor government.
It was always personal. His politics were driven by a decent ambition to make Australia a better place for families like his. He was only a kid when his father died after a car crash. The Rudds were thrown off their farm and he was parked in a grim boarding school. His efforts to escape these terrible years marked him for life.
Safe back at Nambour High he began to work. Doing his homework better than anyone else in the school was the template of every success that came his way. This was more than swatting: his aim was to make himself unassailable. "I just got determined to make sure that I could look after myself in life and do something about what I saw to be wrong things happening in the world."
The idea of going into politics hit him when he was still a schoolboy. For Rudd, politics was always about leadership. Ultimate power. Though a couple of uncles were Country Party mayors in the deep north, he opted for Labor. But he was a long time joining the party and didn't lift a finger to help Labor in the turbulent late 1970s.
At that time, Rudd was leading a troupe of evangelical Christians at the Australian National University. He was a campaigning wowser in the company of Therese Rein, the woman who would become his wife. She too supported his long-term goal of pursuing politics. She waited for this, Rein says, from their "very first meeting".
Rudd believes he can master anything. The tougher the task, the better. He mastered Mandarin and was a promising young diplomat before taking time out to become chief bureaucrat to the reforming Labor premier of Queensland, Wayne Goss.
But here the problems began to show. Though super bright and determined, young Rudd made enemies everywhere. Something was missing. The subject he never mastered was people. Politics is all about people.
Everything else he mastered on his long climb to the top. He learnt to sidestep the factions and won pre-selection for his Brisbane seat . But when he arrived in Canberra, Rudd was written off by his colleagues as a strangely ambitious nerd. They underestimated him. Eventually he "nagged" the party into giving him the leadership, says Bob Carr.
Australians saw him every week for seven years on Seven's Sunrise. They saw him endlessly busy as Labor's spokesman on foreign affairs through the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. They saw him batter the government over the AWB "wheat for weapons" scandal. But they didn't see the chaos behind the scenes.
He had to do everything himself. He couldn't trust and didn't delegate. He worked his staff ruthlessly. His temper was formidable. The office operated in a strange atmosphere of rush and delay. Everything happened at the last minute, more often than not to suit the next media hit. This didn't change when he became PM. While he rode high in the polls it hardly mattered. His party accepted Rudd's demands for near absolute control. Cabinet was reduced to a shadow of itself.
Part of the problem was Rudd's old ambition to find decent solutions to the nation's problems. Decency is personal, intuitive, hard to delegate. Marry that to a sense of indispensability that is right off the Richter scale, and you had a recipe for ruin. Once again, Rudd had enemies everywhere.
When the polls turned after Copenhagen - and plunged once Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan persuaded Rudd to dump the emissions trading scheme - the prime minister found he had few friends where it mattered: in caucus. Factions are there for the hard times, supporting leaders when they mess up. They weren't there for Rudd.
Another man might have changed his ways. Had the party any confidence that was possible, Rudd might have survived. But the verdict of his colleagues, and the polls, was that changing Kevin Rudd was not a possibility. The problems were deep and personal. The brutal conclusion was he had to go.
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