We are used to seeing the Prime Minister of Australia looking calm and composed. He struts around the place with a benign expression on his face. He joins hospital patients on their beds and promises to cure the sickly Health System.

He puts on a hard hat and inspects all kinds of factories and nods away as if he really understands what the workers are complaining about. He hugs babies and reads primers to school children. All this in front of the media who trudge along behind him hoping to get a glimpse of the real Rudd.

We have been told that he is unpopular with his staff because he screams at them. We are told he puts on a tantrum if he can’t get a blow dryer for his windswept hairdo. We are told that he does a Naomi Campbell impersonation when he can’t get the food he likes on a plane trip.

Until now, this was all hearsay. Last night, however, Rudd showed his true colours on The 7.30 Report on television.

He had been asked by interviewer, Kerry O’Brien, why he had deferred the ETS or Emissions Trading Scheme. Now according to Rudd, climate change is the greatest moral challenge facing this planet. Nothing is more important than climate change and Rudd was going to show the world how to tackle it.

He would be the Pied Piper of Climate Change and the rest of the world would follow!

But then in a shocking about turn that stunned the people of Australia Rudd decided to put off the legislation…for a while.

Well, things heated up as Rudd went on the defensive with O’Brien. All O’Brien had asked was why Rudd had not called for a double dissolution instead of deferring the ETS legislation. Rudd bristled, gave no answer and then called O’Brien “mate” in the same way that Americans call someone “buddy” when they mean the opposite.

I always suspected that Rudd had a Dorian Gray portrait stashed away in the cellar. Last night, our Prime Minister gave his inner self a proper airing. I predict that as the polls continue to go south and Rudd becomes more desperate, we will become intimately acquainted with that portrait.