Rudd's papers

Annabel Crabb conducts a bit of psychoanalysis on the Rudd papers:

Comrade Ferguson's capitulation suggests that discipline is as crisp as ever in the Ruddocracy.

But the increasing disarray in the Dear Leader's papers suggests intriguingly otherwise.

Mr Rudd has always spread out his papers in question time, constructing neat piles which he rearranges and tends with all the assiduity of a pensioner at bingo.

But in recent days, his piles have become noticeably dishevelled. There were 18 yesterday, as best we could count - although counting them was difficult because they spilled into each other.

At one point, he dragged up another chair and had three new piles going on that, plus another stack propped up behind the brass clock that adorns his desk.

The whole effect was unsettling in its disorder; kind of like the scene in A Beautiful Mind where you finally get to see inside John Nash's shed and it's a flapping mass of newspaper clippings, and you finally understand the true extent of his condition.