By Andrew Bolt – The Herald Sun

THE private Kevin Rudd is smashing into the public image of Kevin Rudd, and his blood is now all over the polls.

I’ve said it for a year, but only now do more Left-leaning commentators agree there’s a potentially fatal flaw in the Prime Minister.

It’s that personality thing. Once again we find – as we did with the unstable Mark Latham – that character in politics is king. Or knave.

The public Kevin Rudd is in fact more charming than the original, as well as calmer and more self-assured.

He talks of long-term plans, is usually cool in a crisis, smiles often and exudes an intelligence no one doubts.

His pitch is spot-on: “I’m Kevin, and I’m here to help.” And this is the Kevin that until this week had approval ratings higher than any seen before.

Yet the private Kevin Rudd is rather different – actually deeply uncertain and short of big ideas.

You may think this impossible to believe of a man who, despite his sometimes nervous giggle and trembling leg, seems crisply efficient and a whirlwind of fresh thinking.

But just check which “new” idea he singled out for most praise from his Ideas Summit — to invent a bionic eye that in fact had already been invented.

Or note the one that’s so bogged him down this past shambolic week – to set up a dodgy FuelWatch scheme that even its few supporters admit might at best save motorists a cent a litre, but at worst will cost more.

Or observe how his biggest decisions almost always involve ordering yet another review – into carbon trading, say, or grocery prices, or Aboriginal welfare, or taxes, or infrastructure.

In private conversation, Rudd seems just as limited, at least in my small experience, but also in the experience of some who know him better.

To (over) compensate, this private Rudd is arrogant, obsessed with power and desperate to bury himself in the frantic paper-shuffling that is the substitute for action.

It’s not for nothing that in Question Time in Parliament, where he is most on trial, he surrounds himself with as many as 17 piles of paper.

Watch him move sheets from one pile to another, sometimes unread, or scribble notes as if at random, while listening out for his next question. Without those papers for comfort, he’d feel like Samson shaved.

Being so manic, and so unsure of himself, he’s of course also famously impatient and short-tempered – which is why it’s no surprise he’s had six diary secretaries in just six months.

And it’s also no surprise that some senior public servants or Labor staffers, badly bruised, have leaked damaging Cabinet submissions exposing him as a FuelWatch fraud.

I used to meet Rudd over dinner or coffee back when I was touting him as the leader Labor should have.

Even then I realised he couldn’t listen to an opposing argument, or not without bristling, as if it were personal. There wasn’t that deep listening you got from John Howard even when you told him to his face he should quit.

Just why this uncertainty, I can’t say. Losing his father early? Being the poor relation while young? Being bookish – a “nerd” – at school?

There are some clues, of course. There is Rudd’s wildly exaggerated – yet genuinely felt – telling of how his mother and he were booted out of their home by a wicked farmer after the death of his sharefarmer father.

There’s the call he made to Sunday Age reporter Jason Koutsoukis, who’d written that Rudd was the kind of person who’d been a “prat” at school – a call that had Rudd shouting that Koutsoukis was a fat, smelly genital.

There’s also his decision to hire as his global warming guru Professor Ross Garnaut, who actually knew nothing about the science but had been, as ambassador to Beijing, Rudd’s boss when the young man was a junior diplomat. A delicious reversal of roles.

And there was Rudd’s astonishingly long trip overseas this year – a trip with no real agenda, producing no real results, but one that let him fluff his feathers to world leaders who’d only known him, if at all, as a dowdy Opposition spokesman.

All this might not matter much – after all, it’s often unhappy or uncertain people that are driven to do the greatest deeds. But some of Rudd’s ways of compensating for his insecurities are now getting in his way.

One is his refuge in urgent busy-busy.

It’s no problem if Rudd keeps up the dawn-to-midnight regime that’s given him the “Kevin 24/7” tag he revels in. Let him bust his gut, if it’s in the service of good government. But it’s another thing to insist everyone around him works so frantically, too, and to so little real purpose.

Public servants are being rung at dawn, summoned on a Sunday, or kept back until bedtime, which is fine, you might say, but not if reports wanted by yesterday and produced overnight are then left unread.

Fine, but not if four departments must investigate a scheme like FuelWatch, only to have their advice against it wilfully ignored.

Fine, but not if the heads of government departments, and all Rudd’s ministers, are told to sit in on his “community Cabinet” meetings, just to watch Rudd hog the microphone for hours, chatting with voters come to complain about funding for a local school or – and I’m not making this up – to reveal some “new paradigm” inspired by the Zulus.

What an aggravating waste of time this seeming busy then becomes. Last month top bureaucrats, including the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, were even ordered in for a meeting of the national security committee of Cabinet, only to be left sitting in the corridor for two hours waiting for the Prime Minister.

Part of this may be no more than Rudd being undisciplined and beyond anyone’s power to control.

After all, he was famously late for his campaign launch speech last year, and late again to Victorian Labor’s state conference last month.

But a part of this, I’m sure, is Rudd asserting his power, as much to himself as to others. And that cannot make for efficient government.

The same is true of Rudd’s other habit of compensation – exulting in his authority.

He’s never been popular with colleagues for radiating the vibe that he feels he’s the smartest man in the room. But now it seems he’d like it known he’s the most powerful, too.

So one of his first actions in office was to order all his ministers to visit a couple of schools and homeless shelters and report back — as if they didn’t already know their own electorates. And as if Rudd cared for their reports, either.

This asserting of status is an old tic. Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson recalled seeing Rudd at work two decades ago as the right-hand man of Queensland premier Wayne Goss, serving as head of the office of Cabinet.

Pearson said his intelligence was equalled by his arrogance: “In meetings with mining industry leaders, Rudd would hold court with his feet on the desk in front of his supplicants.”

The late Tom Burns, then deputy premier, added: “I’d go past his phone and there’d be all these Post-It notes stuck on it . . . I’d just say to Rudd’s secretary, ‘You might as well throw all them notes in the bin’. Kevin just didn’t ever bother phoning anyone back.”

Such was his reputation for control and arrogance that he was known as “Dr Death”, and was blamed in part for giving the Goss government a reputation for high-handedness that caused its 1995 defeat.

Still, Rudd was terribly young for such responsibility, and many of us learn from our mistakes. But how well is Rudd learning from his own?

He is still paranoid about control, micro-managing details best left to a deputy flunky. Even senior ministers must check their press releases with his office, and many do not dare move a muscle without his approval. The result is logjams and second-guessing.

That fierce urge to control also makes Rudd so poll-driven that he’s been unable to make one tough political decision in his first six months, despite huge voter goodwill.

And so a Budget he swore would be brutal – had to brutal – actually increased spending. Now this fuss over petrol prices has panicked him into suggesting he may leave petrol out of his planned carbon trading scheme, making a nonsense of his vow to slash emissions and “stop” global warming.

There’s time and chance to change all this, of course. Rudd is still very popular, even if this week’s Newspoll

has voter satisfaction with his performance dropping seven points to 56 per cent, thanks to his erratic performance over petrol prices.

What’s more, he faces an Opposition that’s still far from selling itself as a credible alternative government.

And give Rudd credit. He is very clever, endlessly hardworking, and more ambitious than Caesar. I’m sure he is eager to do good, and if he sees he must change, he will doubtless try.

But changing policies is one thing. Changing yourself by addressing weaknesses in your very character is a monstrously difficult other.

Still, John Howard in office grew as a man as well as leader, becoming so much warmer that he became a serial hugger. So why not Rudd?

For him, the challenge will be to grow into the man voters imagine he already is. In fact, I’m sure that’s the carefully constructed man Rudd knows he should be, too, and all that holds him back now is his character.

Watching him take a deep breath and address that will be to see unfold the story of the rest of his career.