CHAPTER SEVEN

My learned friend

As Malcolm Turnbull fought for his political life, he pinned his hopes for survival on questions about Peter Dutton’s eligibility to sit in parliament, based on the ownership of child-care centres by Dutton’s wife Kirilly, which had received subsidies from the government. Turnbull was convinced there was a strong case for Dutton to be found to be in breach of section 44(v) of the constitution, which prohibits MPs from an office of profit under the Crown.

The section states that any person with ‘any direct or indirect pecuniary interest in any agreement with the Public Service of the Commonwealth’ is disqualified. Dutton’s position was revealed in the audit conducted by Turnbull of all MPs after the dual-citizenship fiasco. The story ran exclusively on Network Ten on Monday night, 19 August, then blew up the next day, after Tuesday’s party-room meeting, leaving Dutton convinced it had been leaked by Turnbull’s office or supporters in an effort to damage him – to knock him out of the race or out of the parliament. Both Ten and those around Turnbull deny this emphatically.

Turnbull has a brilliant legal mind, but he met his match in those final days with his attorney-general, Christian Porter. Porter had been both treasurer and attorney-general in the Western Australian government before transferring to the federal seat of Pearce. If he had stayed in state politics, he would have become premier. If he lasts in Canberra, Porter has the qualities and the potential to lead the party and become prime minister. He is bright, has cut-through communication skills, is an effective performer in parliament (recognised by his appointment as leader of the House to replace Christopher Pyne), and is in touch with popular culture. He is a movie buff – a Star Wars aficionado – and promised his staff he would get a tattoo if he increased his vote in his marginal seat of Pearce. He doubled his margin to 6 per cent.

Porter had travelled to Canberra on Sunday night, 18 August, with his wife, Jen, and their two young children, Lachlan, two, and five-month-old Florence, hoping that, once the sitting day had ended, he would be able to spend time with them. It didn’t happen. To make the week even tougher, his father, Chilla Porter, who won a silver medal in the high jump at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, was suffering prostate cancer, and in those days underwent his first chemotherapy treatment. It helped Porter put his own ordeal that week into perspective.

As he sought to respond to the extraordinary events, which he later recounted to me in an enthralling narrative combining language befitting both a top-flight lawyer and a tradie, Porter battled to separate his political self from his legal self to ensure that the process surrounding Dutton was scrupulously followed to the letter of the law. He was prepared to abstain from the final vote on the leadership, if necessary, to prove he had been punctilious in the process and observance of the law. He was ready to resign as attorney-general if he had to, but was determined to stay to ensure a fair outcome and to avoid a constitutional crisis unseen in Australia since 1975, because the prime minister was threatening to advise the governor-general that the cloud over Dutton meant he could not be sworn in. Porter told Turnbull he was wrong, and threatened to publicly contradict him and then to quit his post. He had a letter of resignation in his pocket.

Ultimately, despite everything that passed between him and Turnbull, Porter says he voted against the spill that would unseat the prime minister, and then voted for Peter Dutton. He was not convinced in the wake of events, which he described as tumultuous and momentous, that Julie Bishop had the authority within the party to be able to hold the show together. Besides, he and Mathias Cormann had been friends for 22 years, he was also mates with Dutton, and they all had a similar world view.

The week was marked by high-stakes meetings and phone calls, leading Porter to write to the solicitor-general, Stephen Donaghue QC, instructing him neither to speak nor to offer advice to anyone other than himself, including the prime minister. At one meeting on Wednesday 22 August, Porter told Turnbull he should resign – advice not welcomed by the prime minister – and the following day, during a tense meeting, offered his own resignation, which was not accepted by the prime minister, who referred to Porter as ‘my learned friend’. It was not a term of endearment.

Porter also called in lawyers from his department and asked them for advice on the legal and constitutional situation if a prime minister refused to surrender his commission, or sought to prevent the commissioning of another person. He feared Turnbull was ready to announce he would advise the governor-general not to swear in Dutton. Porter’s view was confirmed that the only interest the governor-general could have was whether the prime minister had the confidence of the House and could be guaranteed supply, and not with questions of a new leader’s eligibility to sit in parliament, which Turnbull believed – and hoped – would disqualify Dutton.

Early on Friday morning, Porter sent an email to the governor-general to say he was ready, willing, and able, as was the solicitor-general, to provide any advice Sir Peter Cosgrove might need, or to answer any question he might have. Porter was prepared for anything, including preparing briefing notes to answer every conceivable question in the party meeting, if it came to that.

Porter holds no grudges. He knew he was dealing with a man fighting for his life, with a formidable legal brain, determined to explore every legal avenue in an effort to preserve his own position and eliminate an opponent. That’s politics. As attorney-general, Porter was determined to ensure that the letter of the law and the constitution were not breached.

Days of trauma, high stakes, and legal parrying ended on Friday afternoon when Porter shared an emotional embrace with Turnbull’s legal adviser, Daniel Ward, by all accounts a brilliant young man – the same Daniel Word who had worked for Brandis – who Porter says behaved with dignity and great common sense. Porter said Ward had a tear in his eye, and confessed that he was moist-eyed himself.

When Porter had arrived in Canberra on the Sunday night, he had no idea what lay ahead. He had dismissed the leadership speculation as just that. Then he got a call that night from Turnbull. They had a seemingly casual conversation, during which Turnbull asked what was happening. Porter’s radar went up. It reminded him of a similar call he had received from Turnbull just before he launched his challenge against Abbott in 2015.

Porter told him directly that he had heard nothing about a challenge, that no one had contacted him either by phoning or texting, and that no one had sounded him out. He had no knowledge or forewarning of any coup attempt. He attended Monday’s cabinet meeting, which discussed the latest iteration of energy policy. Nothing unusual there.

On Tuesday morning, he strolled down to the party room and sat in his usual seat between Andrew Hastie and Linda Reynolds. When Turnbull declared the leadership positions vacant, he almost fell off his chair. Porter was thinking to himself that no one would take the bait, but when Dutton put his hand up he gasped, and a murmur went around the room. When he heard the vote was 35 against Turnbull, he thought it was inevitable that the process would end with Turnbull no longer prime minister. He was astonished. ‘It was the beginning of the end,’ he said later.

That night, he had dinner with Cormann at the Italian restaurant Belluci’s, a noisy goldfish bowl in Manuka, and a favourite hangout for Cormann.

‘I think that we’d both, at that point, formed the view that the likely outcome was that Malcolm couldn’t sustain his control of the party room and thereby the prime ministership,’ Porter told me subsequently.

‘My position was that I would never contemplate voting against a prime minister unless I’d first resigned.

‘My sense of it was that the best thing for the party, at that stage, would have been for Malcolm to resign and vacate the field. I think I indicated to Mathias a view that I would be prepared to say that to him [Turnbull] at an appropriate point on the Wednesday. Which I did. And I think at that point, as well, Mathias was contemplating whether he would also have that conversation with him – which conversation would be a much more powerful thing coming from Mathias than it would obviously be from me.’

Porter said it was not an ‘I will do this, you do that, type of conversation’. He described it as a ‘fluid and dynamic set of circumstances’ that they were both trying to digest, as well as trying to work out what they should or could do to resolve it.

‘But I volunteered my view that it would probably be necessary at some point over the next day or two that people express a truthful view to Malcolm about the sustainability of the position,’ Porter said.

Porter remembers Wednesday as the day that ministers were falling like flies, punctuated by reports suggesting that Morrison was counting numbers for himself. Turnbull held a press conference with Cormann and Morrison, which Porter thought had been arranged for the prime minister to announce his resignation. Then, in question time, Turnbull was asked if he had sought advice from the solicitor-general about Dutton’s eligibility.

Porter recalled that Turnbull leaned over to ask him if he had, and Porter responded that he had not.

After question time, Daniel Ward went to see Porter to tell him that the prime minister wanted advice from the solicitor-general about Dutton’s eligibility. Ward said Porter should request the advice, because it would be a bad look if the prime minister requested it.

Porter said he thought that was appropriate, but he wanted to speak to Dutton first to see what advice he had received previously and what documentation he had. As they were speaking, the phone rang. It was Dutton.

Porter went to Dutton’s office, and told him it would be useful if he could assist by providing his documents. Dutton agreed, and asked him how long he thought it would take for the advice to be given.

Porter, in his lawyerly way, said there was ‘no room for luxury in the timing of it’.

He then texted Cormann to ask ‘what on earth’ was the press conference all about. He was referring to the now-notorious press conference where Cormann stood beside Turnbull to bury the tax cuts and pledge his allegiance to him.

‘I think his response was that they’d had a conversation that morning, where Mathias had put the view that it was unsustainable. That hadn’t been met with enthusiasm from Malcolm. So at this point in time, I’ve understood that Mathias has put a view to Malcolm that he should exit, and do it in a way that was bloodless.’

Porter was feeling despondent. About everything. He had just received a message from his sister with a picture of their father after his first round of chemotherapy. ‘And I just, you know, when those things are happening, you just think, “Why the fuck am I here?”

‘So I went in see Malcolm, and I guess I just told him what I thought,’ he said. ‘So I said, first of all, with respect to the s.44(v) issue, I thought my very, very rough assessment was that, generally speaking, that it’s never been considered that schemes of general statutory application – things that by legislation effectively transmit welfare – have ever been considered agreements with the public sector, with the Public Service of the Commonwealth under s.44(v). And that whilst here, there would clearly be some form of documentation which registered the child-care provider as an authorised provider – [the] receiver of the child-care subsidy – that, having had the portfolio [Porter had been social services minister for two years], having dealt with childcare, this was a subsidy that went to end-point users who registered individually and became eligible for subsidy to defray the cost, and the child-care centre was the middleman.’

Essentially, Porter did not believe there was a problem with Dutton’s eligibility.

‘Well, that was a very, very rough view,’ he said later. ‘But I said, whatever happens, I mean, it will always be equivocal. I mean, by its very nature, this advice, I think I may have said, will take the formulation, “The better view is …” And Malcolm then said, well, you should go out and say that. And I said, no, I won’t be doing that.’

Apart from anything else, Porter thought it was ‘bad process’ to try to pre-empt the solicitor-general.

‘Malcolm wanted me to say – the stress that he wanted me to put on – was that the situation was unclear. So he said the words ‘you should go out and say that,’ meaning that there’s a lack of clarity.

‘I’m like Spider-Man sensing danger at that point in time. And I thought, well, that indicates here that this is a drowning man looking for a very big plank to hang on to. I said I’m not going to do that.’

Porter told Turnbull he was going to provide written instructions to the solicitor-general after the meeting.

‘I said that I wanted to control the process of seeking and receiving the advice, and that I would keep him informed at every step of the way – that my preference was that I alone do that, and not the prime minister or people from the prime minister’s office,’ he said.

‘Now, to be fair to the prime minister, he didn’t expressly consent to that, but he didn’t raise an alternative view to my preference that I control the process and that I be the one speaking with the solicitor-general formally asking for the advice, receiving the advice, and distributing the advice. Then he said, would I cc him a copy of the request for advice. I said that, no, I would not do that.’

I asked Porter why not. He replied, ‘Because I had heard stories about Malcolm, George (the previous attorney-general, George Brandis), and the solicitor-general, and the way in which advice sometimes came into being.

Me: ‘So you ask the questions so you get the advice that you …’

Porter: ‘Well, worse than that. I think that, you know, it was not merely the asking of the question. How you frame the question can very much influence the sort of response that you get. But, equally, Malcolm is such a bright and talented lawyer and such an influential and persuasive advocate, that if he’s looking over drafts or talking about ideas or fleshing out general legal concepts, that I think has the habit of driving the ultimate provider of the advice in a certain direction.

‘And I did not want any advice – in what was turning into a pretty high-stakes game – to be anything other than the utterly independent view of the solicitor-general, who was, is, and always remains completely motivated by legal instincts, rather than anything else.’

Porter said that this did not go down well with Turnbull, and it was all downhill from there.

‘So the conversation was getting, sort of, terse at this point,’ he recalled.

‘And I said I also wanted to put a view about the general situation. I said to him, my view is that you should resign.

‘I said, this just won’t stop. I said, they will keep coming at you. And I said, equally, there’s going to be more than one group of people who now appear to be wanting this resolved in a way that doesn’t end with you as prime minister. I said I think that you owe it to the next generation of us in the Liberal Party to have an opportunity to try and put together an alternative from this scenario in a way that’s as bloodless as possible.

‘He … was not happy at me putting this view.’

After Porter left, Turnbull was fuming, and then suspicious, asking those around him, including Craig Laundy, if they thought Porter had crossed to Dutton. Turnbull knew Porter was close to Dutton and was concerned this might be influencing his opinion about whether or not Dutton had a case to answer.

Laundy was convinced that Porter would play a straight bat, if for no other reason than to protect his integrity. In his view, someone with higher ambitions like Porter would not want such a blot on his record.

Turnbull’s dry, rhetorical question to Laundy was simply, ‘Didn’t you say the same thing about Mathias Cormann?’

Porter set about writing the request for advice from the solicitor-general.

It was after midnight when he got home. ‘Everyone’s asleep, I crawl into bed, the texts start coming in from Malcolm, the WhatsApp messages at 4.10 am, 4.20 am, when will I get the solicitor-general’s advice? I ignored those until a reasonable hour.’

Then he received a call, also very early, from Donaghue. ‘He said, “Malcolm’s phoned me three or four times.” I asked him if he had spoken to him, and he said it was unavoidable after a certain point.

‘He said, to be fair, Malcolm wasn’t robust or argumentative, or didn’t try to influence him, but he put some views about the legal issues at play and was most focussed on when advice would come back.’

Soon after that conversation, Porter was back in his office. The night before, he had researched the Law Officers Act.

‘I invoked an ability the attorney-general has to instruct the solicitor-general not to communicate with any other member of the executive government other than me, with respect to a particular matter,’ he said. He wrote the letter, signed it, then emailed it straight to Donaghue early Thursday morning. He did not tell Turnbull what he had done.

He then called in Australian government solicitors and constitutional-law experts from his department – whom he would not name – to discuss the process of commissioning a new prime minister.

‘It had occurred to me that this could all get very messy, potentially,’ he said. His view was confirmed that the governor-general would be concerned only with the new prime minister’s ability to guarantee supply and to command the confidence of the House.

In the meantime, he had received a call from Cormann before his resignation press conference with Fifield and Cash. Cormann told him that Turnbull had said in their meeting that the advice from Porter was that Dutton was ineligible to be prime minister, and that Porter had formed a view that the reserve powers would be used to not appoint Dutton.

‘That is not at all what had occurred in the meeting on the previous day with Malcolm,’ Porter said. ‘I felt at that point that I’d been somewhat misrepresented. Now, to give Malcolm the benefit of the doubt, these are stressful, difficult times. People hear different things, and this is third-hand hearsay. It occurred to me that we were somewhere between Chinese whispers and gilding of the lily of my views on these things.’

He continued to receive numerous texts from Turnbull seeking the solicitor-general’s advice. Porter went to see him in his office. He had typed out a letter of resignation and put it in his pocket. He did not want to resign, but he would if he had to.

They remained standing during the conversation. Turnbull was pacing, a cup of tea in hand. He was, according to Porter, agitated but not rude. ‘It was an unpleasant meeting, right,’ Porter said.

‘He said to me, “The governor-general will not commission Peter Dutton to be prime minister.”

‘And I said, “Well, has the governor-general told you that, or is that your perception of his position, or have you told the governor-general that?”

‘And Malcolm said that he knows the governor-general, and he will not commission Peter Dutton as prime minister with this doubt hanging over him. Now, I took that to mean the governor-general had not said that, and this is one of the most intelligent, sharp, and strategic men around, finding angle after angle after angle. Like, he’s seeing this thing like The Matrix at this point in time.’

Again, Turnbull asked Porter when he expected to receive Donaghue’s advice. Porter said, ‘Well, you tell me – you were talking to him this morning.’ He then repeated to Turnbull that he would prefer to be the one speaking to the solicitor-general, but did not inform him that he had written to Donaghue instructing him not to speak to anyone else.

Turnbull went back to discussing the governor-general, telling Porter he did not understand how serious the situation was.

Porter replied, ‘But I am saying to you it would be utterly wrong at law and a total misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the reserve powers if anyone were to instruct the governor-general that there was anything other that he should consider, aside from confidence and supply.

‘I went into this meeting having anticipated this angle, and was, as I’ve noted, very forceful with Malcolm about that fact.

‘He then said, “Well, I give the advice to the governor-general.”

‘I said, “What makes you think that it should merely be your advice in these circumstances?”’

Turnbull replied, ‘I am the prime minister.’

‘I then said – and Malcolm was about go out and do a press conference – “Well, are you intending to say this publicly in this press conference that you’re about to have?”

‘And he said, “Yes.”

‘And I said, “Well, if you did intend to do that, I would feel the need to publicly rebut that proposition.”’

Porter told Turnbull, ‘If you are not prepared to take my advice on the reserve powers, you can have my resignation if you want it.’

‘No, no,’ Turnbull said. ‘You are my loyally serving attorney-general.’ Porter says it was dripping with sarcasm, but he ignored it, and resisted the temptation to bite back against a man literally fighting for his life.

‘I felt like saying, mate, they’re doing to you what you did to them. Like, have some perspective on it. But I … at that point, it wasn’t worth being combative – it would have just been gratuitous.’

Porter said he did not particularly want to resign, but said he could offer a formal resignation ‘now’ if the prime minister thought the situation was untenable.

Porter recalls Turnbull saying to him, ‘You’re giving in to terrorists.’

Porter was outraged. ‘I think I said to him I’ve worked my whole life to be in this parliament. Nothing means more to me. I’ve served you in a very hard-working, loyal way. I’ve had nothing to do with this, but what’s now done can’t be undone, and I’m just offering you my honest assessment – the position’s untenable.

‘I said to him, I’ve got a father going through chemo back in Perth. I’ve got a 3.6 per cent seat where I’m constantly out in every spare moment I have, when I’m not working hard as a cabinet minister, going to the opening of every cake stall known to man, and none of this helps me, and I wish it never would have happened, and it has happened.

‘And he said words that I won’t long forget. He said, well, it’s happened because you and people like you are weak, and you’ve given into terrorists. And I said, well, I won’t be staying here to have you call me weak.

‘At the end of that meeting … I reiterated that I thought that it would be utterly wrong at law to suggest or provide advice to the governor-general that he couldn’t appoint Peter if Peter emerged victorious from the party room, because that would be evidence of confidence and supply.

‘And Malcolm was quite close to me when he sort of leaned to me and said, “Well, my learned friend, you’d be quite wrong.”’

Porter went back to his office. He stayed glued to his television set, waiting to see what Turnbull would say at his press conference.Turnbull had not been bluffing Porter, but he nonetheless thought better of it, and pulled back at his press conference while still doing his best to cast doubt on Dutton’s eligibility.

Porter could not help but be impressed by the way Turnbull responded. ‘So clever,’ he said.

‘He [Turnbull] said that the issue around Peter was one of invalidity of decisions. He did not raise the prospect of putting to the governor-general that Peter would be incapable of being appointed prime minister. He said, the seriousness of this and why he wanted the signatures and why he wanted the advice before any further party-room meeting was that it would be a very serious thing, not merely for a minister to have made decisions which could potentially at some point of time be invalidated, but it was a very, very serious thing if a prime minister was in that position. So he changed tack from can’t be chosen, to if he were chosen, it creates a range of difficulties.’

Turnbull was never convinced that the solicitor-general’s advice would clear Dutton. He always saw it in the same light as the advice Donaghue had given about Barnaby Joyce’s citizenship, which had also suggested the ‘better view was’ that the High Court would rule Joyce eligible, when in fact the opposite had happened.

Turnbull was determined to ensure that Dutton was thwarted at every point.

In Turnbull’s view, it was one thing to have ministers (such as Joyce) continue in their roles while there was a cloud over them, because they could be isolated or separated from whole-of-government decisions, but the prime minister was in a whole different league. Doubt would be thrown over every decision of the government and the cabinet. There would be a legal cloud over everything. However, while he expressed his views clearly to colleagues about what would follow, and while he fully intended to write to the governor-general as the outgoing prime minister formally expressing the view that he could not, or should not, swear in Dutton if he triumphed in the party room, leaving Sir Peter Cosgrove to sort out a constitutional crisis, he was more circumspect in his public comments to media, while still fuelling doubts about Dutton’s eligibility.

If Dutton had won Friday’s ballot, it would have triggered the most dramatic days in federal politics since November 1975.

Turnbull made it clear at his press conference that he wanted two bits of paper before holding the party-room meeting to resolve the leadership. One was that a letter/petition with 43 signatures seeking another vote on the leadership be presented to him; the other, the advice from the solicitor-general on Dutton’s eligibility to sit in the parliament.

He expected to have the advice by the next morning. ‘But I cannot underline too much how important it is that anyone who seeks to be prime minister of Australia is eligible to be a member of parliament,’ Turnbull told the media.

‘But that advice at least will mean the party room is informed, and indeed Mr Dutton is informed. That may impact on his decision to run or not.’ Turnbull went on to say that Dutton would have to establish his eligibility, the new leader would have to satisfy the governor-general he commanded a majority on the floor of the House, and he hoped the solicitor-general would be able to deal with the matter conclusively.

Porter spent the rest of the day preparing answers to possible questions from MPs in the party room about the governor-general and the commissioning of a new leader.

His normally orderly office was stacked high with books and notes when his very good friend Michael Keenan decided to drop by.

‘I am literally rereading every piece of constitutional law text I can get my hands on about s.44 and s.44(v). Keenan comes into the room and says, “Mate, do you want to come out for dinner?”

‘I said, “Mate, are you fucking kidding?” He goes, “Aw, are you doing the s.44 stuff?”

‘As it transpires, that was him and Ciobo out at wherever, the Ottoman, drinking champagne cocktails.’ He was glad he missed it. Keenan’s advice to his good friend Porter was to make sure he was ‘on the right side of this thing’.

On Friday morning, Turnbull was on the phone again, trying to ring Donaghue. The solicitor-general, acting on the instructions from Porter, refused to take his call.

Meanwhile, early that morning, Porter emailed the governor-general’s official secretary to say he was ‘ready, willing, and able, with or without the assistance of the solicitor-general, to provide any advice you might need throughout the course of the day’.

Porter says he just left it at that, and then waited for Donaghue’s advice.

‘We are sitting around the table, [and] I have drafted a letter to Malcolm and to Peter,’ he said.

‘In Malcolm’s letter was the cover letter for the advice. I had also, as well as the advice, obtained advice from Australian government solicitors about the proposition that anyone, including the existing prime minister, who advised the governor-general that he couldn’t appoint someone who had some level of doubt around their eligibility, was wrong.

‘So I provided him with the solicitor-general’s advice about s.44(v) with accompanying advice from the Australian government solicitors, saying if you were going to do the thing that you suggested you might do, then that would be quite wrong at law. The PM rang: “Where is it, what does it say?” I said, “PM, I have not had a chance to read it because it has just arrived and I’m on the phone to you, and I’m walking it around now.” So I had two staff members walk it round.

‘Probably 10 minutes after that, the PM rang me up and, you know, to his credit, I guess, the PM’s one of those guys that can have these savagely tense moments with you, and the next moment it’s, aw, well, like it’s weird, but there you go. “So what do you think of it?” I said, “Well, it is as I suggested, not without its equivocal components, but the better view is that subsidy is not an agreement, and so therefore even if there were a pecuniary interest, there’s no agreement.”

‘But he says there’s probably not a pecuniary interest, and with respect to the $15,000 grant, he says it’s likely an agreement, but there’s no pecuniary interest in it because it just underwrites the cost of a special-needs educator. I said, “You know, there’s been two cases heard on this in 120 years, so we can’t say anything with absolute certitude, but it is what it is.” And I think, at that point, Malcolm sort of gave up on this being a final silver bullet to restore his position.’

Porter then returned a call from Julie Bishop from the night before. He thought she was ringing to ask him to vote for her. In fact, she did not. None of them did. Dutton never called him. Morrison called him, and said basically, ‘“Mate, whatever happens, I think that you are a good AG and I would like you to be a good AG if I get up”, sort of thing, so I said that’s nice of you, mate.’ But he never asked Porter to vote for him.

Bishop simply pointed out that as she would be running for the leadership, there would be a vacancy for deputy leader, and he should run for it.

He told her what he had told Ben Morton and Bert van Manen when they had suggested the same thing to him the night before.

‘It’s very kind of you, but no,’ he told Bishop. ‘I said, (a) I’m dealing with a matter that I think is of substantial importance legally. I said I don’t want to get involved with the politics of it. And (b) I don’t want to really be sort of in any way seen to be trying to ride a wave of benefit out of a situation that I didn’t have anything to do with and I wish had never happened.

‘[The] party-room meeting happens. I wander down there, prepared to ask … to be asked and answer a hundred questions. Equally knowing no one might give a shit at that stage. No one cared, because the advice, sort of, you know, was more one way than the other. I was sitting in the row again where I was. I said to Mathias, you know I’m not voting in favour of a spill. I said I’m inclined to vote for Peter, but I’m not voting in favour of a spill. I voted against the spill. I voted Dutton round one, Dutton round two.’

Even after all that, he effectively voted for Turnbull first up. ‘Well, yeah. I mean, I just … I just understand the agony and pressure he was under. I’m not angry at Malcolm. And I’d said to him that if I was, you know, not prepared to resign, he’d always have my support.

‘Like, I’ve spent my life as a lawyer. Somehow or other, I ended up being the Commonwealth attorney-general, and I’m facing down a potential constitutional crisis. Ultimately, one that got to DEFCON 4, and then all the army stood down.

‘But, you know, there was a significant likelihood that you might have had Peter Dutton win a ballot in the party room and someone argue to the attorney-general – to the governor-general – that he shouldn’t appoint Peter as prime minister, and then Australia wouldn’t have had a prime minister.

‘Some time after that, I relayed the conversation to Mathias. I said that my view after that meeting had formed that I – if I’d had a view that it would be the right thing to offer a resignation – that I wasn’t going to do that again, because it hadn’t been accepted and I wasn’t going to do that again, because I had a very firm view after that meeting that the best thing I could do was ensure that Australia had an attorney-general through this process.

‘Because I thought that if Australia didn’t have an attorney-general through the process, that it was likely that someone would be acting in the role of attorney-general, and that the process would not be as fair as it could be.’

Porter walked out of the party room after the vote and headed for home. Before that, he hugged Daniel Ward.

Porter said that he and his ‘lads’, Tim Wellington [legal] and Will Frost [national security], and Ward had worked very closely together.

Porter empathised. ‘And I just – I know that Malcolm can be very, very difficult. Like, I’d experienced it first-hand. I had a very strong sense that they were experiencing it in there as well, because the legal issue became a potential avenue out of a maze for the smartest mouse in the trap.

‘He had a little tear in his eye. I may have as well. I just gave him a hug.’

In the aftermath, when Cormann copped so much criticism, Porter felt for his friend. He was keen to cast him in a good light. He said that if Cormann had not resigned and had instead voted against the spill the second time, the 35 votes previously cast meant they would come back in 10 days’ time and do it again.

‘Now, you know, maybe it was a bad call; maybe it wasn’t. But it didn’t change the fact that it was over,’ Porter said, adding that he did not think his friend was involved in Dutton’s plan.

‘I think he did his best to resolve it,’ he said. ‘I think he formed a view Tuesday, Wednesday, that it was unsustainable, and that because of his position of authority in the party room and in the parliament that it was going to fall to him and some others to put a view to Malcolm that it was unsustainable.

‘I agreed it was unsustainable. I indicated to Mathias that I was going to put that view to the PM. I did that on Wednesday. At that point, my path diverged from the Morrison camp, from the Dutton camp, from the numbers, from the spreadsheets, because I was just in the 44 vortex.

‘I don’t hold any ill-will to Malcolm at all, difficult fellow that he could be at times, but I just tried to sort of navigate it as best I could.’

Porter admits he was swayed by Cormann to vote for Dutton, and although he said later that he did not regret it, he admits that Morrison’s success was a ‘better outcome’.

‘It’s really hard for someone who’s in that conservative wing of the party, whose closest friends are ultimately doing the numbers for Peter Dutton, not to vote for Peter Dutton,’ he said. ‘And I would say one of the things that I’m most reflective on and maybe a little bit disappointed in myself – maybe this is part of a learning experience – but voting for people because they’re from your tribe or that they are your friends, even if that friendship is based on a view about good parts of their character, is not always the best basis for choice.’

As he said later to his wife, Jen, ‘I have never voted for someone who has won a leadership contest.’

Clearly, Porter is an intelligent and thoughtful politician, and he spent time in the days after the madness thinking about what had happened. He was disappointed that some of his colleagues refused to admit they might have made a mistake or stuffed up. Michael Keenan did.

When I said I had heard he was distraught, Porter replied, ‘Look, he’s not in a great way. But I think part of this is because he probably has a feeling that none of us covered ourselves in glory that week, that what happened was not in the national interest. And to the greater or lesser extent that people were involved in what happened, the ones that are most rational say we spend all our lives trying to get here to act in the public interest, and when it was most important, the more involved we were, the less we were acting in the public interest.’

He agreed it was all so unnecessary. ‘But, that having been said, you know, anyone who reads the canons of English or ancient Greek literature, if you come to the job by the sword, there is a 92.1 per cent chance that that is how you are going out.’

Even after it was over, Turnbull could not let it go. From New York, he was texting colleagues to tell them that Dutton should be referred to the High Court. Peter Hartcher from the Sydney Morning Herald got wind of it, and minutes after his story was posted online, Turnbull tweeted from New York, saying, ‘The point I have made to @ScottMorrisonMP and other colleagues is that given the uncertainty around Peter Dutton’s eligibility [to sit in parliament] acknowledged by the solicitor-general, he should be referred to the High Court, as Barnaby was, to clarify the matter.’

It gave his enemies another reason to attack him, and his friends cause for concern. His enemies accused him of trying to destroy the government, while his friends counselled him to preserve his legacy and not become like Abbott, imploring him to behave with dignity and try to let it go.