“Why are you there?,” I muttered under my breath while watching Scott Morrison settle in a chair next to Waleed Aly on Thursday night, fronting up for one of the more compelling political interviews on television in recent times.

From the minute the lights came up on the two protagonists, it was clear something real was going to happen, and politicians, at least the contemporary crop, studiously avoid situations where something real might happen.

The first thing that could be observed was Morrison’s deep need. Need was etched in his body language.

It wasn’t clear immediately what the precise need was, apart from the practical thing that needed to happen. Morrison went on The Project to try to reframe a past shadow-cabinet conversation now causing him grief, which is a risky venture at a whole lot of levels. His practical imperative was high stakes, but I’d still put it in the category of transactional.

The need I’m referencing was something bigger. It didn’t reveal itself until the prime minister worked through his various strategies for trying to assert dominance over his interviewer – telling the audience that Aly had suggested various thing to him in private, things to the effect of him not being an entirely terrible person.

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Then, skipping to passive-aggressive about Aly’s editorialising on asylum seekers. “What I’m saying to you, Waleed, though is this – don’t sugar-coat this stuff. I’m afraid, mate, sometimes you could be accused of that.”

Mate. All mates here, obviously.

Then, finally the need materialised. “Don’t prejudge me,” the prime minister said – an instruction that was both combative and vulnerable at the same time. The instruction transcended the specific topic at hand, which was Morrison’s relationship with Muslim communities, and it pitched the conversation into something altogether more visceral.

The exhortation was for his host – a specific request, given Aly is a significant cultural figure, with access to a large audience of swinging voters, with absolutely no interest in being co-opted by Morrison or any other politician.

But it was also to us, the citizens watching on. Don’t prejudge me.

It’s a strange request from a person who has been in public life as long as Scott Morrison, the idea that there could be a prejudgment rendered in advance of concrete knowledge.

Morrison has been in the public spotlight, a federal parliamentarian since 2007, an ambitious and assertive figure, and we’ve all been here, watching him navigate the travelator of advancement.

Given all that, prejudgment isn’t possible. What we are judging is a record.

Yet this seemed a request to be judged, minus the weight of his own history – by the standards of the character he is currently trying to project in the prime ministership, the one that came to the job after two of the maddest, most despairing weeks I’ve ever witnessed in federal politics, clutching a talking point about coming together as the proxy of his incipient statesmanship.

Given Morrison is a man of deep faith, I certainly don’t invoke the concept of born again gratuitously, but that’s the suggestive analogy after the plea on Thursday night – that there might be some universe in politics where you can be born again, and be something new, rather than the man who was a state party director, an immigration minister who rose through the ranks by taking no prisoners and playing for keeps, a social services minister, and a treasurer.

That universe, where the board is scrubbed clean, doesn’t exist.

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You can’t summon it up, in an armchair, on the Ten network, a few weeks out from an election, whether you lean forward in your seat or lean back, whether you try to get into the head of your interlocutor, whether you talk over the top of him, or apologise for talking over the top of him.

You are what you have been.

You cannot outrun your record as a public figure, because you are still that public figure, and your identity is the sum of your record.

So there aren’t any prejudgments.

But there will be judgments. The evidence and the record will be assessed, not because there is something special about Morrison that invites a special nasty kind of scrutiny, but because prime ministers are always judged on their records.

Morrison is on the sticky paper, the adhesive oozing over his shoes, because that’s where the office puts you. His personal anxiety is rising, because he’s on the clock, and the various contradictions and the insufficiencies are bearing down, and people aren’t letting him shape shift.

Onlookers are insisting he remains the sum of his parts, not as some abstract special punishment, but because people are the sum of their parts.

Morrison is doubtless what all human beings are: complicated and contradictory, generous and selfish, steady and surprising. But what’s in the frame as Australia counts down to an election, and faces up to the seriousness of this particular moment in history, is not the prime minister’s humanity, but his record as a public figure.

Morrison has presented himself to the voters for most of his career as a pure partisan, one of the most tribal figures in the government. Not Tony Abbott and not Peter Dutton, sure – but right up there, happy to swing and snarl with the best of them to score an intra-day point.

Now, Morrison, prime minister of Australia, believes there is too much tribalism, and the current excess of tribalism is corrosive to social cohesion. “If we allow a culture of us and them, of tribalism, to take hold; if we surrender an individual to be defined not by their own unique worth and contribution but by the tribe they are assigned to, if we yield to the compulsion to pick sides rather than happy coexistence, we will lose what makes diversity work in Australia,” he said this week.

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He’s absolutely correct; I applaud this sentiment. But it would have been more compelling had it been delivered with a modicum of self-reflection. It is unconvincing to point the finger at others for baying in ways that are corrosive to sense and sanity and enlightenment when the reality is your own conduct is a core part of the hyper-partisan complex that has coarsened public conversation.

The fraying that Morrison now laments takes place in hundreds of small steps, in many abrogations of responsibility, and at least some of them have been his.

Literally five minutes ago Morrison was laying up another toxic election fight on asylum seekers, deploying the same exclusionary tropes as the immigration days, and now he wants credit from Aly, other journalists and commentators, and the voting public for being a political leader devoted to soothing and synthesis.

Morrison demands this acknowledgement while still declining to say whether the Liberal party will put the extremists in One Nation or elsewhere last on the how-to-vote cards in the coming federal election – which is a real world test of your bona fides on cohesion, more of a test than fine words.

People don’t care what politicians say. They watch what they do, and prime minister, the people are watching.