If Gillard had reopened Nauru then, as her own Immigration Minister Chris Bowen had suggested, and it had not worked, she would have been rubbing Abbott's nose in it by now. If the boats had stopped, she would have faced taunts about pinching opposition policy, but she wouldn't have to worry about the boats because there wouldn't be any.
Neither the Greens nor the opposition was prepared to support the Malaysian deal, and plenty of Labor MPs are repulsed by it. There was no point looking to Malcolm Turnbull. The last time he tried to deliver on a Labor policy he lost his leadership.
Before the High Court decision, Turnbull had suggested to shadow cabinet the Coalition should back the Malaysian deal.
Not any more, and definitely not at yesterday's shadow cabinet meeting, which fully backed Abbott and Scott Morrison.
Abbott and Morrison will tolerate the dissent of a few backbenchers, but they will not compromise.
The timing of this is especially bad for Gillard, coming as it does when her leadership is so fractured and less than a week from C-day, but as the Prime Minister she is the one who has to resolve it or suffer the consequences.
The Pacific Solution was not devised by the then opposition, or by the public service, or incidentally by Andrew Metcalfe, the present head of the Immigration Department.
It came from within the Howard government, principally from foreign minister Alexander Downer, as the National Security Committee of Cabinet, with the prime minister at the helm, held a succession of meetings to work out what to do with the boatpeople rescued by the Tampa.
The Prime Minister has to accept the Malaysia Solution is kaput and the present situation is untenable, and adopt the opposition's policies or devise acceptable ones of her own.
First she has to discuss with Indonesia precise steps to be taken next time -- and, the way things are, there will be a next time -- a vessel in its waters sends out a distress call.
Gillard has squandered the enormous goodwill that greeted her prime ministership. She would probably kill for the Thatcher analogy now, but the promise and the expectations remain unfulfilled, and she threatens to leave a legacy of sequential policy miscalculations and political misjudgments.
It has left her colleagues in a state of despair and suspended animation. They don't expect a move on her leadership this week, saying the July 1 deadline must pass to prove a point that the arrival of the carbon tax will not restore the government's credibility. Sensibly, they also refuse to rule it out completely.
"There could be a Karl Rove moment," one backbencher says, referring to Kim Beazley expressing sympathy to the US political operative when he should have been extending it to Australian entertainer Rove McManus over the death of his wife.
It finished off Beazley's leadership and convinced even the most ardent Rudd haters in caucus to switch. Such a moment, on top of all the other moments, could see history repeat itself.
