You have to admire Kristina Keneally's fight to the death. Her premiership was a shambles from the day her puppet masters pushed her on stage. Personally, I've never forgiven her for trying to ban T-shirts with slogans that might offend the Pope when he came a-visiting in 2008.

But she is finishing with a gutsy performance. To drum up an analogy from the land of her birth, she is George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn. Flashing those pearly teeth, forcing yet another merry laugh, sizzling an umpteenth sausage, she campaigns as if she has no inkling of the massacre to come. Defiantly, she is going out with a bang.

The whimpering you can hear is from her male colleagues fleeing for the hills, not least among them the notional boss of the ALP's Sussex Street machine, the party's state secretary Sam Dastyari, who disloyally surrendered a week ago.

''Barry O'Farrell is going to win this thing, and he is going to win it big,'' he told a Sunday newspaper. ''We are going to lose the election, but we are winning the campaign, the debates, and they're even copying our policies.''

Winning the campaign! Well that's all right then. The operation was a success. Shame the patient died.