With British politician Tom Watson stepping into the fray on Q&A last week, Australian viewers were exposed to one of the few international politicians who has truly taken on Rupert Murdoch and survived.

Prime minister Kevin Rudd has also attempted to neutralise the all-out war being conducted by News Corp’s Australian newspapers, but he’s fighting from a position of weakness.

Even since quitting the diplomatic service and taking the job as chief of staff to then Queensland Labor’s opposition leader Wayne Goss in 1988, Rudd has appreciated the power of the Murdoch press and the importance of working the media cycle. After South Australia, Queensland is the most Murdoch-dominated newspaper market in Australia – and Rudd’s successful entry into political life came shortly after News Corp’s late 1986 takeover bid for the Herald & Weekly Times (HWT).

HWT was the company built up by Keith Murdoch, and Rupert was intended to inherit control of the Courier-Mail and the News in Adelaide after his father’s untimely death in 1952. Alas, much to Rupert’s chagrin, the executors of Murdoch’s estate sold the the Courier-Mail back to HWT to pay for his estate duties before Rupert took charge in January 1953. When the Courier-Mail returned to the family in 1986-87, Murdoch was still happily supporting the Hawke-Keating Labor government after it had granted approval for the HWT deal, which allowed one US citizen to control a majority of the Australian print market.

It was in this environment that Rudd duchessed a supportive Queensland media to help end 32 years of conservative rule when Goss was elected premier in December 1989. Rudd dealt effectively with Greg Chamberlin, Murdoch’s editor of the Courier-Mail from 1987 until 1991, and was well known across the media for being the man Goss wheeled out to explain various policy initiatives when things got a little hairy.

Fast forward 18 years, and Rudd once again used his media skills and contacts to help Labor defeat another long-serving conservative government when Howard was ousted in 2007.

Whilst Murdoch has become increasingly conservative in his old age – as reflected in the launch and development of Fox News – some of his Australian papers were given the freedom to endorse Rudd’s election as prime minister in 2007. In part, this was driven by the expectation that Rudd would win, but the support was nowhere near as emphatic as the way Murdoch's British tabloids got behind Tony Blair as opposition leader, courtesy of all those sex scandals involving Tory MPs in the mid-1990s. Indeed, it also didn’t compare with News Ltd’s enthusiasm for a Whitlam victory leading into the 1972 federal election.

The Australian was arguably the most supportive of Rudd’s rise to opposition leader in 2006 and then prime minister in 2007. This partly reflected the relationship Rudd had developed with Chris Mitchell, Rupert’s hand-picked editor in chief of the paper since 2002.

Mitchell had previously spent seven years running the Courier-Mail in Brisbane from 1995 until 2002, during which time he got to know Rudd well as he campaigned to enter federal parliament in 1998. In February 2006, when Mitchell and his staff journalist turned second wife Christine Jackman were looking for a godfather for their son Riley, they asked Rudd. Rudd’s courting of the Murdoch press also extended to visiting Murdoch at his office in New York in April 2007.

The Sydney Daily Telegraph's front page on 8 August 2013. Photograph: Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty Images

Murdoch’s former New York-based spin doctor, Andrew Butcher, recently tweeted the following after hearing Rudd’s attacks on the Murdoch press:

Funny to hear PM Rudd complain about Rupert. I remember him as Oppn Leader tipping off journos to be outside News Corp NYC post-meeting KRM.

Indeed he did. This is what the Sydney Morning Herald reported of that meeting on 22 April 2007:

Media baron Rupert Murdoch said yesterday he was "sure" Kevin Rudd would make a good prime minister. The Australian-born Mr Murdoch made the comment after an hour-long meeting with the federal ALP leader yesterday in New York. After the meeting the two men were driven from News Ltd's New York headquarters, in the heart of the city, to one of Mr Murdoch's favourite restaurants where the pair dined. Mr Murdoch was pictured smiling with Mr Rudd as they emerged from their meeting. When asked if Mr Rudd would make a good prime minister, Mr Murdoch laughed and said: "Oh, I'm sure." The two men refused to say what they had talked about. Mr Murdoch would say only that they had discussed "a lot of things". And Mr Rudd would say only: "It was just a good chat about things. Life, the world, politics."

So how did it all go so wrong for Rudd?

News Ltd was placed favourably on the drip of Rudd announcements over the first year of his prime ministership, which is partly how Mitchell found himself having dinner with Rudd at Kirribilli House on Friday 10 October 2008.

US president George W Bush rang at 10.40pm, and Rudd spoke to him for half an hour. Two weeks later, on Saturday 25 October 2008, the Australian published a front page story headlined PM Rudd’s role in international crisis summit.

It was written by Rudd’s current press secretary, Matthew Franklin, who at the time was chief political reporter for the Australian. The key extract read as follows:

Informed sources have confirmed the discussion took place on a speaker telephone with a Rudd staffer taking notes. After the president explained the pressure from Europe for a G7-brokered action on supporting the credit sector and reforming regulation, Rudd immediately insisted the G20 was the solution. Rudd was then stunned to hear Bush say: ``What's the G20?'' During the spirited 30-minute discussion that followed, Rudd continually brought Bush back to his contention that political imperatives and economic common sense demanded the involvement of China in any response to the crisis.

The public humiliation of the US president was a major problem for Rudd. However it wasn’t until February 2009 that News Ltd really went to war. The trigger was Rudd’s 7,900-word essay about the global financial crisis in the Monthly.

At its heart, Rudd effectively declared that markets had failed, and the time had arrived for the sort of big government interventions which he announced that summer to stimulate the economy. You can just imagine the acute embarrassment this caused Mitchell with Murdoch. It was akin to Blair suddenly declaring Britain was joining the euro – something Murdoch has long resisted.

Suddenly, Rudd was no moderate Blairite but instead a big-spending lefty who was openly hostile to markets and trying to secure a major propaganda victory for European-style social democratic governments. The Australian in particular published dozens of articles attacking Rudd’s essay, as Robert Manne articulated in his September 2011 Quarterly Essay cover piece Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the shaping of the nation.

Later in 2009, News Ltd launched a now discredited campaign against Rudd over the “utegate” affair – this was the first time Rudd directly attacked the Murdoch press in retaliation, calling out individual stories and mastheads in the process. News Ltd also went to town on the Rudd government’s school building stimulus program and, to a lesser extent, the National Broadband Network.

When Rudd was removed on 23 June 2010, it was the Australian which later published an extraordinary 5,155-word demolition job on July 3 which was headlined Rudd Undone by the Enemy Within. The piece carried eight bylines, and published every conceivable nasty anecdote linked to Rudd.

Amazingly, the later Rudd revival during Julia Gillard's prime ministership included a warming of relations with Mitchell and meetings at News Ltd’s Sydney offices. Rudd’s return would not have been made possible but for the awful treatment Gillard received from the Murdoch press.

Murdoch’s current enthusiasm to remove the Labor government sits comfortably with his state of mind. He likes to back both winners and aggressive conservatives like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan.

Whilst Labor’s National Broadband Network might be a nuisance for Murdoch’s Foxtel pay-TV monopoly in the longer-term, the broader motivation is simply to bring down an ill-disciplined left-wing government which has been fiscally reckless and far too beholden to the union movement. Politicians who openly criticise the Murdoch interests must also be taught a firm lesson.

Murdoch is also quite a committed Catholic, and therefore sees no problem with Tony Abbott forming what Peter Costello has joked will be "Australia’s first DLP government".

However, if an Abbott government fails to act in tearing down some of the Labor edifices, it won’t be long before the dogs start barking. Just ask former Victorian Coalition premier Ted Baillieu, who was savaged by the Murdoch press for being a “do nothing” premier. He also failed to include the News Corp papers in his daily government routine.

Don’t expect Abbott to make the same mistake – News Corp journalists will be firmly on the drip from day one of his prime ministership.

• This article was amended on 2 September 2013 to correct the number of years of conservative rule in Queensland before Wayne Goss's election as premier (32) and to add the correct name of Chris Mitchell's son Riley.