So the Labor caucus finally took Malcolm Turnbull's advice. The Liberal frontbencher's much-quoted remark about the strange phenomenon of a party whose hatred of a deposed leader was stronger than its instinct for survival pithily summed up the last three years in Australian politics.
But last night that long-repressed survival instinct welled up and surfaced as Kevin Rudd reclaimed the Labor leadership with the support of 57 out of 102 members of caucus. The question is whether the instinct has taken hold too late to make any difference to the result of the federal election.
There will be many, not least the 45 ALP MPs and senators who voted for Julia Gillard, who will see this as a contemptibly cynical analysis of the ousting of Australia's first woman prime minister. Already a narrative is emerging, especially in social media, of the martyrdom of St Julia. Some say Rudd's return is entirely to be attributed to sexism and misogyny. Others blame media obsession with opinion polls, apparently believing that voters have no view until a pollster's questions prompt — or even guide — them in forming one.
Of the latter claim, suffice it to say that it oozes the elitist disdain for ordinary voters of those who utter it. Lest we forget, one consequence of compulsory voting is that a long-term trend in the polls almost always indicates the election result. And what they have been indicating is that Labor is headed towards the greatest defeat in its federal history, with its numbers in the 150-seat House of Representatives likely to shrink from 71 to as few as 35, and with nine ministers likely to lose their seats.
Yesterday that dismal prospect even focused the mind of Bill Shorten, one of the factional chieftains who manoeuvred Gillard into the Lodge in 2010. Announcing he'd abandoned his oft-declared support for her, Shorten said people close to him would resent his decision. He did not only mean longtime associates such as the Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes, another powerbroker of the ALP right who helped propel Gillard into power. Doubtless he also had in mind his wife, Chloe Bryce, leader of the Women for Gillard campaign.
As for the role of sexism in Gillard's downfall, her own comment during her press conference last night got it right. She said that sexism partly, but not wholly, explained the political obstacles she has faced.
Of course she has suffered insults and humiliations that male politicians in 2013 typically do not encounter: most recently and notably, the offensive remarks about her body included in the menu for a Liberal candidate's fundraiser and the asinine questioning of her partner's sexuality by a radio shock jock. But to see the attitudes expressed in such behaviour as the sole explanation of her massive unpopularity among voters — women as well as men — is to have a very selective memory indeed.
The reality, evident to anyone willing to acknowledge it, is that there has always been a simmering distrust of her because of the circumstances in which she replaced Rudd in 2010. When voters heard her respond to the undermining of her own leadership by pleading for loyalty and party unity, she simply lacked credibility. Add in a succession of misjudgments in office and you have the mix that led to yesterday's events. Voters had simply stopped listening to her, giving Tony Abbott and the Coalition a free run.
The misjudgments were truly staggering, and started early. Remember her promise in June 2010 that she would resolve the three problems — increasing boat arrivals, attacks on the mining tax and the botched emissions-trading legislation — that seemed to be dragging Labor to defeat in that year?
The first of many boat-arrival 'fixes' was the East Timor solution; except she forgot to ask the East Timorese government before announcing it. The mining tax was saved by making concessions to the biggest three miners that gutted it as a revenue measure. And carbon emissions? The breaking of her pledge in the 2010 campaign that there would never be a carbon tax has dogged her ever since.
Can Rudd now fare any better? He is a formidable campaigner and consistently rates well above either Abbott or Gillard when poll respondents are asked who is their preferred prime minister. What is more, Labor has a success story to tell about the economy, which in considerable part derives from his support for stimulatory spending during the global financial crisis.
Thus far, however, the Government has failed to sell that story, because Gillard and her deputy and Treasurer Wayne Swan, who last night chose to follow her to the back bench, have allowed the Coalition to pretend the state of the economy and the state of the budget are the same thing. Yet nearly all other OECD countries wish they had Australia's low net public debt, and most of them wish they had its growth and unemployment rates.
Rudd tells this story without illusions. At his press conference last night he acknowledged that whoever governs after the election must deal with the fact that the resources boom is over. And he repeated his longstanding view that he does not want to be prime minister of a country that no longer makes things. (The lame, muted responses of Gillard and Swan to the collapses in Australian manufacturing have steadily fuelled the sense of abandonment in Labor's heartland.)
So Rudd can campaign on Labor's economic stewardship, as well as the fundamental social-democratic reforms that will be Gillard's legacy: disability insurance and the Gonski restructure of education funding. Against all this the coalition will remind voters at every turn of the hatred that many of Rudd's caucus colleagues have for him. The result could still be that voters, weary and disgusted with Labor's divisions, will sweep the Government away regardless of their preference for him as prime minister.
And if they may get a chance to do it sooner than the declared election date of 14 September, if the second Rudd Government cannot win the support of at least five of the seven crossbench MPs in a no-confidence motion. That would not result in a constitutional crisis, as some ill-advised Canberra journalists have claimed. On the contrary, it would be a matter of constitutional conventions working as they are supposed to do.
Whatever happens, the common misquotation of Bette Davis in All About Eve will apply: 'Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.'
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.