I think that if I were to submit to a generative AI machine a list of Kevin Rudd’s worst personality traits, and ask for it to produce a portrait of the man most pleasing to him, that it would render something pretty close to what was unveiled this week in Parliament House.
That is, for all of Rudd’s attempts at charm – I’ve seen it firsthand, and it works precisely like a light switch does – he’s still enslaved to his own colossal ego, to his own Napoleonic projections. He can’t help nor disguise it. He has always been the smartest person in the room, the most committed, the most soulful. Undiluted, Rudd’s arrogance would have been publicly repellent, and so to assume high political office he learned certain poses of amiability – gestures of self-awareness and humility.
It's hardly insightful to suggest that the private man might be different to the public face, but I’m unsure if this distinction has ever been as vast – or as consequential – in recent Australian politics as it was with our Kevin.
Rudd might’ve surfed a wave of collective fatigue with a four-term Howard, but it helped that he presented as a loveable dork, an intellectual centrist, a fastidious mandarin. But privately, he was savage. Privately, he barely slept. Rudd is neither relaxed nor genial – there’s always too much to get done, and if you’re talking to him you’re probably in the way of him achieving it. His extreme ambition and self-possession is not, in itself, a bad thing: but it is when you become prime minister, and are certain that no-one else shares your superpowers.
The gulf between what the public saw and endorsed in 2007, and how his own party saw him, was revealed in 2010 when his own caucus replaced him with Julia Gillard – a woman more temperamentally suited to the collaborative work of governance. But even as Gillard cleared the prime minister’s desk – the one made impractically busy by her predecessor’s indecision and egotistical hoarding – she had inherited the curse of the public’s fondness for Rudd and the inability to disabuse it.
Never could Gillard, or anyone else, say the truth: that Kevin was a nightmare that the party endured to get elected, but once in office proved to be even more insufferable and chaotic than they’d imagined.
The public, rightly, were confused and insulted by the rough eviction of their Prime Minister – and Gillard was stuck with the label of the scheming usurper.
And so it went.
I like Rudd more than this might make you think. He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever interviewed – though intelligence is expressed in various forms, and the emotional kind eludes him. But he’s a serious man in a world of grifters, and I’m not sure how many of them are left. But it remains that in government his seriousness assumed a toxic and paranoid intensity which was harmful to governance and the health of his own party.
Rudd’s now our man in Washington, representing our interests in the ailing Home of the Brave, while also trying to broker transparent guidelines to US/China antagonism. He flew back for the unveiling of the portrait, and it was cute to hear the old lines of affability, the feigned humility: “It’s a funny thing being asked to speak at an event like this,” Rudd said, “Speaking at the unveiling of your prime ministerial portrait is the closest you come in life to being the after-dinner speaker at your own wake.”
Rudd also said, about the proposition that his portrait be painted from an existing photograph: “If you’ve seen my official photograph, that’s not something of which you’d be proud. And so vanity ultimately prevailed and I decided to yield to having an official portrait done.”
For all of these cheesy self-effacements, this portrait is exactly as he wants it to be: a testament to his sophistication and studiousness; his knowledge of China and unrivalled insights into our grand geo-political games – a friendlier Kissinger. In his speech this week, he warned of war in our region.
No, I don’t resent the painting – I love it. Not least for the scripted humility that’s asked by the unveiling of something so immodest. “The secret to a great portrait is a sense of mystery,” the painter, Ralph Heimans, said at the portrait’s launch.
Are there subtle mysteries to the painting, and of the soul it professes to capture? I don’t think so: it’s exactly how Rudd wants to be seen. We might hope that his influence upon the US/China relationship is more constructive than his was with his own party.