The Ruddslide is beginning. No, not the polls. We’re about to be covered in biographies.

Kevin Rudd: The Biography by Robert Macklin appears today, as does Nicholas Stuart’s Kevin Rudd: An Unauthorised Political Biography.

And for anyone who has been reading David Marr or Robert Manne and is dreaming of a new dawn of decency, here’s a warning.

Stuart has observations from prominent Queensland political observer and Senior Lecturer in Management in the Faculty of Business at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Scott Prasser, on Rudd’s style of management as displayed in the Goss years:

Prasser insist that “Rudd was the de facto power behind the throne. He was Wayne Goss’s closest adviser and the premier’s Mr Fixit. He was the key man.” But he does not admire what was achieved. “Executive government control, secrecy, and manipulation of appointment processes remained embedded during this time,” he says.

Many, many people are waiting for the Howard years to end. 

Just as in the UK, a little over a decade ago, Labour supporters waited for the defeat of the Conservatives and an end to “sleaze”.

There, Tony Blair is about to depart. Instead of ending sleaze, he gave his supporters Alastair Campbell, s-xed up Iraq dossiers, the suicide of Dr David Kelly and a cash-for-peerages scandal that could see senior political figures facing criminal charges.

We’ve already seen the Rudd machine at work in Canberra – the intimidation of Sun-Herald journalist Kerry-Anne Walsh and her editor when they dared depart from the official life story of the Labor leader and questioned his recollection of the sad events that followed his father’s death.

New Labour campaigned to Things Can Only Get Better.

Labor supporters here should get ready for Rudd realpolitik should their boy make it to The Lodge, or things can only get bitter.