Miners 'okayed move on Kevin Rudd'

JULIA Gillard was "given the nod" by the big three mining companies to challenge Kevin Rudd's prime ministership.

JULIA Gillard was "given the nod" by the big three mining companies -- Xstrata, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton -- to challenge Kevin Rudd's prime ministership, knowing the advertising campaign against the mining tax "would be pulled".

It was just one of many signs that led Mr Rudd to suspect Ms Gillard's leadership bid was "a very long betrayal".

The revelations come from an article written by Mr Rudd's friend and actor Rhys Muldoon, published in the latest issue of The Monthly magazine. He questions whether "the party backroom boys" could "have sought tacit approval from the miners for a change at the top to seek an end to the damaging impasse" on the tax.

On the night of the coup, Muldoon writes that he "bumped into Tony Burke, a Labor minister and a friend", and asked what had happened. "It's done," he quotes Mr Burke as saying.

Mr Burke told him Mr Rudd's chief of staff, Alister Jordan, had been asking MPs whether they were loyal to Mr Rudd. "You can ask for my loyalty once, you can't ask twice," he told Muldoon.

Contacted by The Australian, Mr Burke said: "It is untrue. Alister Jordan never had those conversations with me."

The article contains what Muldoon says is Mr Rudd's version of how the critical meeting with Ms Gillard and senator John Faulkner unfolded when she told him she was challenging for his job. "Apparently Gillard had kept him talking for two hours or so while her forces, or at least the forces behind her, were counting numbers," writes Muldoon.

"Rudd had asked Gillard to wait at least until October before requesting a ballot for the leadership . . . the last thing she had said to Rudd, as she left his office, was: 'I just want you to know, I'm not going to challenge you.' "

According to the article, Ms Gillard then "made a call" from outside the prime minister's office. "It was brief. She turned on her heel, walked back into Rudd's office and said, 'Kevin, I'm challenging for the leadership'."

Rich with detail and raw emotion, Muldoon says that night at The Lodge, a "party erupted like an Irish wake" with "drinking and dancing and even semi-nudity". Mr Rudd was thrown into the pool "fully clothed". His wife, Therese Rein, had wept, saying: "Why would they do this? Why?"