What is loyalty in politics? Whatever you want it to be, if you're in the Labor Party. Ministers and other MPs working to keep Julia Gillard as Prime Minister have this week launched a sustained attack on Kevin Rudd for what they say is his disloyalty.

Minister and former leader Simon Crean is making a habit of castigating Rudd in public. His mini blitz of the media on Monday morning, in which he urged Gillard to sack Rudd, was a remarkable intervention. Here is one member of the cabinet publicly denigrating a fellow cabinet member comprehensively and with purpose - repeatedly. It is the public nature of it that is so breathtaking.

The assaults on Rudd have centred on the Foreign Minister's desire to return to the leadership, wrested from him by Gillard less than two years ago. There is a world inside politics and a world outside politics. Most inhabitants of the outside world can recall that Gillard, as Rudd's deputy in June 2010, allowed numbers to be counted for her within the caucus.

For weeks, a tight group of factional operators from the party's right had worked away at gathering support for Gillard and undermining Rudd. When they had organised a majority, they told Gillard, who promptly marched into Rudd's office and told him she would be seeking a ballot.

In itself, this was not extraordinary. The process was pro forma: by definition they destabilised Rudd and the government. Again, by definition, for weeks they had ceased to be loyal to Rudd. This is what happens when a political party sets about to change its leader.

Patently, Gillard was not loyal to Rudd. If she had been, he would have gone to the 2010 election as prime minister and not as a backbencher. And if the switch to Gillard had worked out well for the ALP, none of this would matter now. Disloyalty will always be trumped by success.

But it has not worked out well. As Bob Hogg, one of the architects of Labor's greatest period of power in the 1980s and 90s, said this week, all of Labor's current travails flow from that internal campaign to oust Rudd and install Gillard in 2010. Hogg's career as a campaign director, political administrator and organiser was built on his innate understanding of the public mood. He noted the Prime Minister's substantial electoral unpopularity, which is both deep and wide.

Gillard's backers are on solid ground when they blame Rudd, or people close to him, for undermining her in her early weeks as leader. The leaks against Gillard during the election campaign were devastating.

And Rudd's coy way of dealing himself back into leadership contention, with an appearance on the ABC's Q&A on April 4 last year in which he only half-accepted responsibility for the decision to delay an emissions trading scheme, hurt the Prime Minister further.

But while Rudd's Zelig-like presence has acted as a drag on Gillard, it is pure psychedelic fantasy to suggest that when it comes to damage, Gillard has not done most of it to herself. Rudd got very good notices from the public for his Q&A appearance last April chiefly because Gillard had already cooked her own goose via her mishandling of Labor's pursuit of a carbon tax. Rudd was lauded by voters as appearing "prime ministerial", the implication being that this was not a description that could be readily applied to his successor.

By the time he turned up as a panellist on the show, Gillard's poll ratings were already in free fall. And why was that? Because having witnessed firsthand Rudd's catastrophic mess-up of the ETS policy in 2010, Gillard as Prime Minister made an even bigger botch of her switch to a carbon tax. Bear in mind, the animating idea behind her knifing of Rudd had been her assurance that there would be no more cock-ups. She was to be the safe pair of hands.

As her leadership coup success demonstrated, Gillard is a ruthless political operator. She sits at the top of an efficient support outfit drawn from most of Labor's right-wing groupings. The MPs crucial to her move against Rudd have prospered since she became Prime Minister. Senators Don Farrell and David Feeney became parliamentary secretaries after the election.

Mark Arbib late last year was elevated to Assistant Treasurer. He also kept his sport portfolio because, Gillard said, 2012 is an Olympic year and there was a need for continuity. When Bill Shorten helped her in 2010 he was a parliamentary secretary. Now he is a member of cabinet.

They play for keeps. The willingness of Gillard's backers to encourage and in some cases sponsor a public campaign of denigration of Rudd is proof of that. They calculate that although doing it in the open risks hurting an already weakened government, prevailing over Rudd is the overriding objective.

Whatever momentum Rudd was picking up within the caucus, taking him closer to a majority, had to be stopped. By tearing him down in public, undecided MPs could be potentially ushered back into the Gillard tent.

It could work and, in the world inside Labor politics, would be considered by the PM and her friends a victory for "loyalty". Would most voters see it that way? They know what Gillard did in 2010 and have made their judgment of her accordingly.

They have also made a judgment of Rudd and what he owes Gillard. What goes around comes around.

Reaping What You Sow