Kevin Rudd in no state to rule: Julia Gillard

JULIA Gillard has revealed her belief that Kevin Rudd was not ‘in the zone’ to fight the 2010 election.

‘The government wasn’t functioning,’ Julia Gillard said when explaining why she challenged Kevin Rudd.

JULIA Gillard has revealed her belief that Kevin Rudd in office was so deeply damaged in a mental sense that the Labor Party could not risk backing him to the 2010 election as prime minister.

Ms Gillard had decided by early 2010 at a critical Rudd-­Gillard meeting on the veranda at Kirribilli House that Mr Rudd “was not in the zone to fight an election campaign”, concluding he was “miserable” and “depressed”. But in an exclusive ­interview, Ms Gillard said she felt unable at this Kirribilli meeting to tell Mr Rudd what she felt. “Call me perhaps lily-livered,” she said. “But do you sit there and say to the prime minister: ‘You’re not in the right state to run this election campaign’? Or do you just concentrate on seeing if we can start to plan this election year?”

“The government wasn’t functioning,” Ms Gillard said when explaining why she challenged Mr Rudd. “I had been surrounded by chaos for a long period of time. Kevin was not going to be able to come out of the spiral.”

The devastating, considered view of Mr Rudd’s condition and the nature of his mental deterioration is contained in an interview for my book, Triumph and Demise. Covering the six-year Rudd-Gillard government, including the internal Liberal leadership dramas, and released by Melbourne University Press, the book will be launched by Tony Abbott next Tuesday.

In an extraordinary description of Mr Rudd before her challenge, Ms Gillard said: “He was miserable. His demeanour in those last few weeks was that everything about the job annoyed him, from the women who put a cup of tea in front of him. He was depressed. The show wasn’t functional. If he had been capable of pulling out of that spiral he would have by then. This issue was about more than winning an election.”

Ms Gillard believed the failure of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in late 2009 was central to Mr Rudd’s malaise but only intensified an existing condition. “I think he had been in pretty bad shape for a long time. Copenhagen really knocked him around,” she said. “I actually think it was emotionally scarring for him.”

It was an astonishing situation, surely without precedent in our political history. The deputy prime minister had decided the prime minister was not mentally or psychologically equipped to fight Tony Abbott at an election.

Wayne Swan offered a scathing view of Mr Rudd’s condition: “I honestly think he felt it was going to be his moment on the world stage,” the former treasurer said of Copenhagen. “He came back as best can be described as completely devastated.”

Ms Gillard’s critique of Mr Rudd, however, goes much further. She claims Mr Rudd never made the transition from opposition to government. She decided to challenge, Ms Gillard said, because she was convinced Mr Rudd could not salvage his dysfunctional government.