Okay: I'll be the first to say it.

Sorry, Kevin.

After all the fuss about the Foreign Minister flouncing in post-tsunami and imperiously demanding nuclear updates from the Japanese foreign minister, it's now pretty clear - after a horrifying week - that he was right to do so.

After all the intrigue about Kevin being out of control and off the reservation and personally obsessed with establishing a Rudd-shaped no-fly zone over Benghazi, it might now be time to admit the possibility that it was the Foreign Minister who was right all along, and the Prime Minister who lost a little focus.

And while evidence exists to support the contention that the Foreign Minister is a deeply, ornately strange human being, it's certainly fair to say that if ever global circumstances could suit the characteristic oddities of a man whose very favourite thing is to sit up all night phone-stalking the members of the UN Security Council, then these are they.

Plenty of column inches have been devoted, in the past couple of weeks, to speculation about the workability of the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

First: Relationships are everything in politics. Mistrust between a PM and her senior Cabinet ministers is as corrosive for decision-making as a goanna loose under the bonnet is for trouble-free motoring.

Second: The relationship between Ms Gillard and Mr Rudd is especially compelling - partly because of their seniority, partly because of the relationship's rather lurid immediate past, and partly because, as anyone who viewed the pictures of the pair's Brisbane hostage situation election encounter would readily intuit, these two are a pretty long way away from being comfy around each other.

Thirdly, there's no denying it: We in the media love a blue.

And fourthly, a narrative that has Kevin Rudd pinging around the place as a sort of intergalactic Mr Fixit, reeling off Benghazi rebel stronghold coordinates in one breath and complex calculations of reactor core temperatures and radiant millisieverts with the next is one that is exhaustively familiar around Canberra.

Just ask John Brumby, who tore his hair out behind the scenes when Mr Rudd, as prime minister, developed a strong interest in the grass-roots logistics of the Black Saturday response. Mr Rudd's reputation for occasional obsessive-compulsive overkill is sufficiently entrenched for apparent fresh instances unthinkingly to be filed under T for "Typical Kevin".

None of the above excuses the handling of the Libya no-fly zone and the early days of the Japanese nuclear disaster as nothing more than a fresh episode in the Julia versus Kevin soap opera; to the extent that that happened, it was wrong.

I didn't write a massive amount about it, but I certainly committed thought-crimes on most days.

Sorry Kevin.

Annabel Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.