They usually involve a period of intense public speculation with various insiders anonymously cited as backing this option or that.
It is a process which can leave voters suspicious of motives if only because change, division, and conflict, make great news copy.
Some of the reaction is just straight-out incredulity.
“Surely Labor wouldn’t make the same mistake again,’’ one might wonder. “Surely this is just a media beat-up, an attempt to make something out of nothing?’‘
Given that these political storms invariably start with dire opinion polls, commissioned and published by newspapers, there seems a direct enough causal link.
The inconvenient truths however are (i) that the polls, while not predictive, do not lie, and (ii) that few inside the Labor caucus doubt that their leader is now extremely vulnerable.
The timetable of course is unknown but one thing is pretty clear: for leaders under threat, parliamentary sittings are the danger zone. Nothing happens when MPs are in their electorates but brought together in the hot-house of Canberra, discussions occur, complaints are aired, and harsh critiques shared.
To this extent, Ms Gillard’s scheduling of Sunday’s caucus strategic planning day might prove unfortunate. Parliament returns for the first of five weeks (with some breaks) of pre-Budget sittings on Tuesday - meaning MPs would normally fly in on Monday.
Instead, they’ll be coming a day earlier to attend the session which, given their current dark mood, has not gone down too well with some.
As the long-serving former SA premier, Mike Rann can attest, caucus love-ins designed to rally the troops can sometimes rally them in the wrong direction.
His Kangaroo Island planning seminar preceded and perhaps fomented a factional dialogue to sanction a new leader.
Nobody is going to Sunday’s affair with much hope of a morale lift.
“We’ll all go along there - probably nobody will talk about the elephant in the room, and then we’ll go, but you can bet that the unofficial chatter will be all about the elephant,’’ said one.
That elephant is the poor standing of the PM and a rapidly spreading acceptance that the government is drifting in the grip of a debilitating leadership stand-off.
With rumours and speculation swirling about, senior figures are canvassing opinion trying to gauge just how deep the despair is.
According to one source, some favour a so-called third-way option such as Simon Crean and have been spruiking the former leader’s traditional Labor values and “blue collar appeal”.
But others say that mention of Crean or Stephen Smith or Bill Shorten is all a “side show”.
They say if there is to be another change, and it is a big “if’‘, it only makes sense if it is framed not as change but rather “change-back’‘.
The theory is that some voters might view restoring Kevin Rudd to The Lodge as a wrong being righted, an egregious error squared up to.
But it would be foolish to underestimate the level of internal animus toward the former PM and the complexity that adds to the equation.
Senior figures in the Gillard-led party, not least the fabled “faceless men’‘, have reportedly told colleagues they’ll never to allow the Queenslander back and would not serve under him.
They say he was a disaster as PM and that his destructiveness since has made his replacement’s job impossible from the get go.
Brooking no doubts about his role in the devastating leaks during the 2010 campaign, they plan to argue to anyone considering the change that they would be rewarding someone who tried to engineer defeat in that poll.
Kevin Rudd himself is away on Foreign Affairs duties in Munich. He returns on Monday.
But his absence or otherwise is hardly the issue.
If the Rudd push is gathering momentum, it has resulted in few new numbers showing up in his column.
But this is not about Rudd’s popularity among colleagues. If it were, he would have no chance now and would not have been leader the first time around.
Then, as now, his potential attractiveness is about voter appeal.
MPs will be asking, can we win with Kevin or at least avert annihilation?
If enough conclude that the answer is yes, then it’s game-over for Ms Gillard.
Party etiquette, however, dictates that hostilities be put on hold while an election is underway in Queensland.
Assuming that the etiquette holds - which seems pretty laughable given the more basic rules of loyalty currently being trashed - an attempted change-over is unlikely before the Budget session in May.
But then, as with the spontaneous combustion of Rudd’s own leadership in 2010, these things can quickly develop a momentum of their own.
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