The plotters who pulled Kevin Rudd down in 2010 didn’t know their man. They knew he was making a mess of government and had lost support in the caucus. They could see his immense popularity fading. But they didn’t realise that Rudd would never give up, the wounds would never heal and he would never go away.

His self-belief is bottomless. There were dark nights for Rudd after his defenestration but it remained a constant comfort that he had never been rejected by the Australian people. His quarrel was with his party, a quarrel he was ready to resume whenever the opportunity allowed.

Rudd had never had an army of supporters in caucus. Nor did those who worked closely with him in his early years have much to say in his favour. As a diplomat, public servant and shadow minister, Rudd had an unhappy knack of making colleagues loathe him.

But the public saw another figure altogether, a new kind of Australian politician, a man of intellect and values. He sounded right. He looked fresh. He was not mired in old Labor conflicts. He seemed a conviction politician of rare courage, a thinker who could take the country into the future.

Whatever the party’s suspicions, their pollsters told them Rudd bridged the old divide in Labor’s following. The fearful were comfortable with him. So were the intellectuals. He pulled votes from the radical left and the Christian right, from the Greens and the Tories. They made him leader in December 2006, but not out of admiration for the man. They did it for the party.

He had always been underestimated. Back in the 1990s, his unhappy colleagues in the office of the Queensland premier Wayne Goss were surprised he was even considering a career in politics. But in those days Rudd hid from view the humiliating childhood that drove him into politics.

He was 11 when his father died and the family were thrown off their farm. A few weeks after appearing as Rubens’ Blue Boy in a fancy dress pageant in the Eumundi school of arts, the boy was dumped in a bleak Catholic boarding school on the outskirts of Brisbane. He never forgot the grim years that followed. The Rudds had no home. One night they slept in a VW in the bush.

Rudd remade himself through politics. Every step of the way was deliberate. He was a loner who learnt to be popular; a backroom operator who taught himself how to campaign; an ex-diplomat who had to master Australian speech in his 30s. He’s never been fluent.

His Labor colleagues, when he appeared in Canberra in 1998, thought his ambition to lead the party one day were ludicrous. He had no substantial faction to back him. He battled for attention until he discovered morning television. That was the unlikely forum in which Australians came to know a version of him.

He won the leadership in 2006 and a mighty victory over John Howard in 2007. He was loved. What followed was the longest honeymoon in Australian political history. A fresh spirit swept over the country after the rancour of the Howard years. His government handled the global financial crisis superbly. The opposition collapsed.

But at the height of his popularity the flaws began to show. He was a micro-manager who found it hard to make up his mind; a national leader with a passion for fine detail, and a big thinker with a short attention span. His office was chaotic. He was impatient with his ministers, thoughtlessly rude to senior bureaucrats and foul-tempered with his staff. He sent distinguished figures out on great missions and had no time for them when they returned.

All this might not have mattered if the results were good. They weren’t. “For all the effort, he doesn’t come up with particularly interesting solutions to problems,” one of his staffers told me in those years. “His policy positions aren’t breakthroughs, not particularly new or exciting. After all the work they are dull.”

It turned out that Rudd couldn’t bear to be disliked. He was oddly unwilling to draw on the bank of goodwill at his disposal. He saw himself as an agent of transformative change but in practice he was a trimmer. Reverses knocked him about badly. He wasn’t resilient.

Australia’s love affair with Rudd began to sour after the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009. A bipartisan pact to deal with global warming had collapsed when the opposition dumped the urbane Malcolm Turnbull for one of the great head-kickers of Australian politics, Tony Abbott.

Abbott got under Rudd’s skin. The great mistake of Rudd’s career was to fail, in early 2010, to take the country to an election fought on climate change, an election he seemed certain to win. Instead he floundered about for six months making dramatic but poorly thought through policy decisions: to take charge of the hospitals of the nation and to tax the super-profits of the mining boom.

He failed to pull off either policy coup. His government was logjammed. His popularity was slumping and an election was looming. At this point, his party made a catastrophic tactical error: instead of confronting him, pulling him into line, imposing discipline on this office, making all that was positive about the man work for the Labor government, they sacked him.

He was only 52. His ambitions were untouched. And he has, since childhood, taken defeats very, very badly. The belief that he leaked against the new leader, Julia Gillard, in the election campaign that year earned him fresh enmity in caucus. The poll he would have won comfortably left Gillard running a minority government.

And Rudd never went away. Though Gillard twice demonstrated he didn’t have the numbers to topple her, Rudd didn’t give up. His belief in himself was untouched. As her fortunes collapsed, the polls kept giving caucus the same old message: that whatever they thought of Rudd, the people had not given up on him. He might yet save the party from ruin – perhaps not win an election but save Labor from a historic wipeout.

So, three years almost to the day since toppling him, despite everything that went wrong the last time, Rudd has been restored – for the sake of the party. The election is only weeks away. That will play to his strength. This time he doesn’t have to govern. He only has to campaign.