Labor bleeds from the heartland over Jenny Mikakos ‘sacrifice’

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews says his controversial stage four lockdown has done the job. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Daniel Pockett

A diminished and exhausted political leader haunted by a smashed economy is finally executing a successful health campaign.

This is the conundrum facing the Victorian ALP as it scrapes the blood off the cabinet floor and ponders the way Daniel Andrews contributed to the end of his health minister’s career.

The Victorian ALP has always been a strange beast, prone to running in odd directions when sufficiently provoked. So it was that on a day when the state had received the best pandemic news in many months, it should have been celebrating.

Instead, for many there was quite simply uproar over the way they claim Jenny Mikakos was slaughtered by Andrews at the altar of the hotel quarantine inquiry.

Like so much of what exists around Andrews, this story is nuanced.

While Mikakos was getting sympathy cards from across the party, it wasn’t because of her ability as a health minister.

For there is plenty of evidence to suggest that she and her department have performed rather badly during the first and second coronavirus waves.

It was more the way it was handled, multiple sources have told The Australian.

“He is a very lonely man,” one Labor figure said of Andrews.

Another: “No one trusts him.”

While Andrews conceded on Sunday he had had a busy time on the phone talking to colleagues, there still does not seem to be any appetite to force his departure.

But for each scandal and misstep, Andrews’s leadership authority is slowly being exhausted, perhaps as much as anything because of the clear understanding that the government engineered its own woes.

The Mikakos story is even more interesting for the fact of what the Premier said about her to the inquiry. It seems clear enough that she was in charge of running hotel quarantine once the the program was set up.

So while he wasn’t factually incorrect, his colleagues were just anticipating more loyalty.

He and Mikakos had known each other for decades, just as he had known another former colleague, one-time senior Left minister Gavin Jennings. The weight of opinion points to Andrews and Jennings also having fallen out.

“I suppose we are at a point where people are just incredibly uneasy about the way he behaves,’’ an MP told The Australian.

Mikakos and Andrews had not even spoken by Sunday afternoon and their communication seems to have been via text, a pretty unsatisfactory way for the lead minister in a pandemic to quit her post. The best that has been said of Mikakos is that she is a hard worker, and that is probably true.

But the broader issue is how the spat bleeds into the dynamic of a government both under siege and in a state of crisis.

Behind the scenes, MPs are preparing for Andrews’ departure but those closest to him — or at least who have the clearest insights into the man — paint a picture of a bloke who is going nowhere.

That’s certainly the message he gave at his Saturday press conference, where he became bogged down in the detail of Mikakos’s resignation.

Still, both the Left and Right, in the form of their various sub-factions and cross-factional arrangements, have quietly been considering what to do next, whenever that might be.

Deputy Premier James Merlino, linked to the old shop assistants’ union, is highly unlikely to get broad Right backing to run as leader after a split over an internal party vote.

Instead, senior Right minister Martin Pakula would probably get the nod, although the split might make it much easier for someone like the Left’s Jacinta Allan to storm through the middle and take the prize.

If that’s what you would call it.