John Howard was damned if he went and now is damned because he stayed

So, like a game of political scissors, paper, rock, we know the polls last year were saying that:

• A Howard beats a Beazley
• A Costello beats a Crean, and
• A Beazley beats a Costello

We also know that back then Mark Latham wasn’t in the game, and most thought that a Beazley would beat Crean.

So, when the bottles of bubbly came out for the Prime Ministerial 64th birthday, the pressure was on for him to make a call. Using the information he had to hand, the logical decision was that his staying on offered the best chance for the Coalition to keep government.

Certainly the Coalition parties were highly relieved by the Prime Minister’s decision to stay in the Lodge – if only occasionally actually sleeping there.

But what might have happened if Mr Howard had decided to hand over the Liberal Leadership slippers?

Labor would have just pulled the switch and run the known quantity of Beazley against Costello – because the polls showed Beazley would have had his measure.

Instead, when Mr Howard said he would stay on, Labor faced the near certainly that neither Crean nor Beazley were going to claw back the required seats.

Instead they went for the wild card entry – Mark Latham. They had nothing to lose. So far it’s working for them, more by unexpected good performance than a plan or expectation from either Labor or the Press Gallery. This was most starkly detectable in the sharp intake of breath heard from the assembled media when Mr Latham was declared the new Labor leader.

Supporters of Peter Costello may be right - he may be capable of a Latham-esque metamorphosis, but the evidence to date hasn’t supported that.

While Internet polling is not the most accurate - only indicative - the Ninemsn poll from Friday showed that less than a third of the tens of thousands of respondents warm to Peter Costello’s leadership of the Liberal Party over John Howard. So voters are still not warming to Peter Costello in any numbers.

Today there are plenty of noise-makers prepared to decry John Howard for staying on, but at the time he made the best decision with all the information before him.

And for the poll-watchers, it’s worth considering that this time three years ago, at the beginning of an election year, all analysts pointed to a Labor election whitewash.

We know now that the wily John Howard machine clawed that back and actually improved its position in relation to Labor.

It would be a foolish person indeed who wrote off John Howard’s chances at the next election. And it would be a foolish backbencher who got spooked by current election-year poll numbers nowhere near as dire as those over which the government prevailed at the lest election.