The plotters wanted Jacinta Allan gone. Their failure reveals some hard truths about Labor

One of the great things about political journalism is we are never wrong for long.

A breathless headline about an impending move against Jacinta Allan’s leadership is soon followed by another declaring that a well-planned coup has collapsed, leaving her job safe until the November election.

The rather more dull alternative is that a leadership challenge bigger in the telling than reality amounted to bugger all.

That may be because the challenge, as far as it can be discerned, never entirely convinced the purported challenger.

Will the non-events of the past couple of weeks stop further speculation about Allan’s leadership? Almost certainly not. This week’s Resolve poll was not good for the government. There are still people within Labor, both inside and outside the parliament, who think a change of leader is needed to avoid electoral disaster.

One is about the character of Deputy Premier Ben Carroll, the challenger who never quite was. In the eyes of his Labor colleagues who were pushing for a change of leader and saw him as the most viable contender, Carroll finishes this week as a diminished figure for not seizing his opportunity to become premier.

They argue that, when Carroll stood next to Allan on Monday morning to announce a new schools initiative, he fluffed his lines by sidetracking into a soliloquy about the woman trying to become the first to win a state election in Victoria.

“I’ve got a young daughter at home and I couldn’t be more proud to make sure she grows up knowing that I supported Jacinta Allan to be a world-class premier,” Carroll said.

From the would-be plotters counting on Carroll to lead their putsch, an audible groan could be heard. This was not the expected script. They now cast Carroll as Brandoesque figure who coulda been a contender, in the mould of other reticent challengers such as Peter Costello or Josh Frydenberg.

An alternative analysis is that Carroll thought carefully about what he was going to say and, when given the opportunity, spoke from the heart.

If we put aside cynicism about the political class, it may just be that being a decent person, a loyal deputy and a man who supports a woman in a difficult job is very important to Carroll. Whatever the outcome of the next election, he doesn’t want to be remembered as the guy who turned against his own leader when things got tight.

As an aside, during the Rudd/Gillard troubles Carroll worked in the office of then senator Stephen Conroy, one of Gillard’s chief factional backers. Labor types who lived through those years saw up close the damage that was done to th