Julia Gillard has admitted she gave Kevin Rudd "false hope" that he would remain as prime minister on the night of the spill on June 23, 2010, and says she should have been "more clinical" when she knifed her predecessor.
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The admission is contained in part two of ABC journalist Sarah Ferguson's Labor documentary The Killing Season: Great Moral Challenge, which goes to air on Tuesday night.
The documentary will also create a political headache for current Labor leader Bill Shorten, with candid accounts of his involvement as a "faceless man" in the knifing of Mr Rudd.
There is also a particularly unflattering character assessment of Mr Shorten from one of the other major players involved in the former Labor prime minister's removal.
An excerpt of the documentary reveals the detailed discussions that took place in the prime minister's office on the night Ms Gillard told Mr Rudd she would challenge him for the nation's top political job.
Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard offer at times contradictory accounts of what took place on that fateful night. Mr Rudd asserts that, about two hours into the meeting, he suggested to his deputy he would be willing to step down as prime minister later that year if "I believe I can't win [the election]".
"If by that stage there is a judgement from John [Faulkner, a witness to the discussion] based on the party's independent research that I cannot win the election, I will at that point resign the prime ministership and offer an uncontested succession to you," Mr Rudd states. "Then she began discussing the detail of how that might work."
Ms Gillard says she recalls a "discussion about Kevin having more time, and I participated in that discussion and gave Kevin some false hope" – an admission she has also made in her biography My Story, released last year.
But the nation's first female prime minister says she
But Mr Rudd states: "She not only agreed, but she had interrogated the detail of the formula on the way through. We shook hands."
During a break in the meeting between the pair, Ms Gillard spoke to her political backers in the caucus who made it clear that "the majority support would be with me".
There was no way, Ms Gillard says, of stuffing "the genie back in the bottle".
But Mr Rudd says his deputy "walked in ice cold, ice cold, with absolute determination in her eyes. It was a complete transformation in five or 10 minutes" and the feeling was "pretty gut-wrenching about all that – something which tears open your heart".
The accounts offered by Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard broadly accord with the account of the June 23 events detailed by journalist and author Paul Kelly in his definitive book Triumph and Demise.
Ferguson says that as a journalist, "the joy of this for me is in seeing them tell the story" and the account of that night goes further than that offered by Ms Gillard in her autobiography, in particular.
But the spectacle of Labor's last two prime ministers offering detailed, on-camera accounts for the first time of one of the most explosive nights in recent Australian political history makes for compelling viewing and is likely to deliver a ratings winner for the ABC, just as episode one did.
In episode one of the documentary, Ms Gillard claimed she was intimidated and bullied by Mr Rudd when things didn't go his way during a political tactics meeting when the pair were serving as opposition leader and deputy.
