KEVIN Rudd is one of the most insecure people I've ever met, yet fought like someone who thought he could never be beaten.
This made him one of our strangest prime ministers - a man whose greatest weakness fed his greatest strength.
Rudd was eternally eager to assert his status, like a man who feared he was given less than he deserved.
As prime minister, he travelled with a bigger entourage than did John Howard.
He would put his boots on a desk or – in my case – our our office coffee table, showing the soles of his feet like a dog cocking a leg on a lamppost.
If he no longer needed you, he cut you.
If staff challenged him, they were frozen out.
In his first spin as prime minister he hired absurdly young staff - people he could better dominated, but also staff less cluey in the ways of power.
And when he was dragged down as leader by colleagues shocked at his rudeness and dysfunction, he was utterly determined to drag down in turn the woman who’d so humbled him and who he considered deeply unworthy of his job.
Character counts in politics, and Rudd’s character counted plenty.
He was so thrilled to be powerful, attracting the powerful, that he staged a farcical ideas summit of 1000 of our ''best and brightest'', who produced almost zero practical ideas but served as marvellous celebrity props to Rudd’s ego.
He adored his frantic foreign travel, meeting world leaders in summits that delivered nothing for Australia anyone could recall.
In citing his achievements - again - in Parliament on Wednesday night, he singled out ones where he spent like the nation's Santa Claus (the bloated stimulus package) or made great, symbolic gestures like the nation’s great conscience (the apology to the ''stolen generations'' and signing the Kyoto protocol on global warming).
He took no pride in simply expanding the freedom of other Australians to make their own decisions on how to invest, work and play.
If Kevin hadn’t helped, it didn’t seem worth doing.
When a parishioner fainted in his church, Rudd was photographed holding his ankle while two men did the actual work of carrying him outside.
This trait also explains why Rudd struck so many voters as a man without inner convictions. He’d do whatever he thought would be popular.
Global warming would go from the ''great moral challenge'' one year to something barely worth mentioning the next, depending on the polls.
He was against same sex marriage one month and then for it when he needed the support of the Left for a leadership challenge.
Yet this, again, was also a strength.
Many voters appreciated having a leader who would do what they wanted, and wouldn’t force on them what they didn't - like a carbon tax, for instance, which Rudd on his return promised to ''terminate''.
So Rudd was right.
When he came back as prime minister this year he did indeed save the furniture at the election and then some, saving perhaps half the seats the utterly incompetent Julia Gillard seemed bound to lose.
But then he was finished.
Bill Shorten was opposition leader and, under Rudd’s own new leadership rules, could not in reality be challenged this side of the next election.
Now even Rudd finally had to realise he could never again be top dog.
The leader. The centre of the room. And with tears, he left.
