I read one time that difference between the first Shah of Iran and his son – the one who was thrown out by the Ayatollah Khomeini – was that to the father no one dared tell him a lie, while to the son, no one dared tell him the truth. Which leads me to this story from Nikki Savva picked up at Andrew Bolt:

The most surprising thing about Abbott’s reaction to the fact 39 of his MPs wanted him gone was that it came as such a shock to him. What it showed, among other things, was that for too long he had believed his own spin, as well as the spin spoonfed to him by those closest to him.

It’s not as if people haven’t tried to tell him what the problems are. They have, for a very long time, in very many ways. They have been dismissed as liars, or stupid, or of running vendettas…

On Sunday, May 25, last year Queensland backbencher Wyatt Roy was part of a group of about 30 marginal seat-holders invited to dine privately with the Prime Minister in the cabinet anteroom. Abbott’s practice at these dinners is to go around the room, asking each member to say their piece.

Roy, trying to be helpful, stood at the table to tell the Prime Minister that broken promises were the fundamental cause of the government’s problems. It might be a good idea, Roy suggested, to apologise to people a la Peter Beattie and move on.

Abbott was furious. He rounded on Roy, yelled at him, then directed his remarks to all of them that there were no effing broken promises and no one should concede there had been.

To the extent that this story is true, it is to that extent that Abbott has made a rod for his own back. If we are into Captain Queeg at the helm, we are in very dark waters. But the final twist in the Caine Mutiny story was that it had been the fault of the crew after all for not giving their captain more support when he needed it in the midst of the storm. You guys will either hang together, or hang separately and take the rest of us down with the ship.