As weary Britons watch the months-long saga surrounding the prime ministership of Keir Starmer nearing its end, it might help to know that another apparently stable democracy has been through all this before.
It was in June of 2010 when stunned Australians woke up to the news that their popular prime minister, Kevin Rudd, had been politically executed in a late night coup by his deputy Julia Gillard, making her Australia’s first female leader.
The dramatic events of that night kicked off more than a decade of destablisation in the country’s capital, Canberra, some of the impact of which is still being felt today.
Former Australian Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. (Picture: Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)Why did Rudd have to go?
It was later revealed that despite his jocular public image, largely cultivated through appearances on breakfast TV, Rudd was deeply unpopular behind the scenes with many of his parliamentary colleagues.
Rudd had a secret reputation for bursts of anger, including one occasion when he unloaded on a TV make-up artist while being prepared for an on-air interview.
Following a series of political mistakes, his enemies took the chance to take him out and installed Gillard, a Welsh-born former lawyer.
It was only the second time in Australian history that a prime minister had been removed by his party, and many Australians thought it unfair.
It was a perception that dogged Gillard through her time in office. But it wasn’t all that dogged her.
Tony Abbott became Australian prime minister in 2013. (Picture: Mark Graham/AFP)‘Ditch the witch’
Gillard called a general election within weeks of taking office, seeking to silence criticism that she wasn’t a legitimate prime minister.
Her Labor party (the Australian Labor Party leaves out the u) performed disastrously, with voters seemingly punishing the government for the events of the previous several months.
Labor only hung on to government thanks to dealmaking with a number of independent and other non-aligned MPs.
Their term in government was marked by a bitter public debate over the government’s carbon tax, requiring the country’s 500 highest-emitting companies to pay a fixed starting price of $A23 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted.
Australia has thousands of miles of sandy coastline – and climate change was an ongoing debate in the country. (Picture: Adam Pretty/Getty Images)But the tax was fiercely opposed, chiefly by opposition leader Tony Abbott, who travelled the country calling on the government to “axe the tax” and at one point speaking at a public rally while people behind him held signs saying “ditch the witch”, with crude drawings of Gillard in a witch’s hat.
This led to the most famous moment of Gillard’s time in office, the so-called “misogyny speech”, where she excoriated Abbott in parliament for accusing her of sexism.
“I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not,” she said, her voice shaking with anger.
“If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs.”
Returning Rudd
The other issue facing Gillard was what to do with her predecessor. She made him her foreign minister but his burning ambition for the top job never went away and in mid-2013 – almost three years to the day since she replaced him – Rudd challenged her and won the job back in a party room ballot.
But by now, the voters were thoroughly sick of the Labor soap opera, and with an election on the horizon, were only too happy to boot them out.
Rudd’s second coming as prime minister only lasted a few months until Abbott won the election, declaring that “Australia is open for business.”
However, it turned out that Australians didn’t like what Abbott was selling.
Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was an unwitting figure in a huge Australian political controversy. (Picture: Alastair Grant – WPA Pool/Getty Images)Prince Philip’s knighthood
Within a little more than two years, Abbott was gone, brought down by a series of missteps, most notably the decision in 2015 to make Prince Philip a knight of the Order of Australia.
The move – which Abbott made on his own, labelling it a “captain’s call” – shocked many of Abbott’s ministers, in a country which has some republican sentiment.
Later that year, he was replaced in yet another partyroom coup by Malcolm Turnbull, a millionaire ex-merchant banker, who justified his move by pointing out publicly that Abbott had lost 30 weekly published polls in a row.
Turnbull’s time in office contained a number of achievements. It was under his leadership that Australia legalised same-sex marriage, and work got underway on a long-promised second international airport in Sydney, the country’s most populous city.
But like Abbott, Turnbull only lasted around three years. Warring between factions of Turnbull’s Liberal party undermined his leadership the whole way and in August of 2019, Turnbull was toppled by his partyroom colleagues, replaced by his treasurer, Scott Morrison.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his family vote in the 2022 general election. (Picture: Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)‘All three were catastrophically wrong’
Patrick Leslie, a senior lecturer in policy and governance at the Australian National University, says the fall of Starmer most closely resembles those of Rudd and Turnbull.
“They (all) governed to the centre, and thought they could use their personal popularity in the country to bully their parties into compliance with their program,” Leslie told The i Paper.
“In the end, all three were catastrophically wrong about that.”
He also says that once the first prime minister has been removed from office, it then becomes a constant worry.
“Once you’ve ousted one leader, getting rid of another doesn’t seem so horrifying,” he said.
“We have definitely noticed the more or less flippant way that parties have gotten rid of their leaders … the public is (then) put off by how your party conducts itself. It becomes a vicious cycle.”
I consider @Keir_Starmer a friend and I'm thinking of him on what must be a very tough day.Serving in public life is a tremendous privilege but politics can also be a harsh business. When the time comes for Keir to leave Downing Street, he can be proud of the contribution he…
— Anthony Albanese (@AlboMP) June 22, 2026The cycle ends
When Labor returned to office in 2022, led by Anthony Albanese, a former senior minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, it seemed to be the end of the revolving door prime ministerial era.
This was bolstered when Albanese was re-elected for a second term with a much increased majority last year.
He was friendly with Starmer, and sent a message of praise on X after the news emerged of Starmer’s resignation.
Leslie is unconvinced that the parade of occupants of 10 Downing Street is over.
“That depends on whether (a new PM) can successfully persuade the party and then the people of the need for substantial reform. Real change is possible and needed for success,” he said.
“Andy Burnham has remarkably clear ideas about what to do … but he will have a Thatcher-scale fight on his hands.”
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