It’s hard to know which is stranger, Carl Scully’s claim that he was offered a safe federal seat, or the effort Labor took to bury him yesterday. The certainty is the obvious contradiction between the two.

The Terror quotes an anonymous “Labor source” as saying the sacked minister was highly recognised in focus groups for all the wrong reasons.

“Even anecdotally, everywhere you go. People don’t know about politics, they just know Carl Scully’s a f-cking idiot.”

Guess that means there won’t be much of a testimonial dinner.

Scully was sacked as NSW police minister after misleading parliament but that was only the timing, not the reason – no-one gets sacked for failing to tell the truth any more.

Premier Dilemma ditched Scully because he was more than accident-prone, he was accident-promoting. More importantly, he was too close and obvious a reminder of the Carr Crash government Dilemma and the machine is trying to scrub from history. Bob Carr? Never heard of him.

Scully’s putative comeback only lasted a couple of days before the message of not being wanted was rammed home, but he has given himself a more glowing send-off than he received when he was dumped from the ministry.

The one-time leadership contender reckons history will thank him for the Cross City Tunnel and just about everything else. Well, maybe not the odd train crash or riot.

“Anyone’s life should be judged by the whole book rather than the last chapter,” the SMH quotes him.

“Mine is a great book of achievement. I leave with an enormous sense of satisfaction because I made a difference. I was never motivated by polls or shock jocks or tabloid journalists.”

See, he was asking to be sacked. It may be a measure of the credibility accorded his claim of rejecting the offer of a safe federal seat that it is left to the final paragraph of the SMH story.

If the offer was considered genuine, it would be a much bigger story: Labor determined to lose next election.