CHAPTER ELEVEN

Queensland: perfect one day, shitty the next

They had different reasons for taking the decisions they did, and they got there in different ways. For a few, like Abbott and his small band of followers who despised Turnbull, his removal was a time for rejoicing. For others, it was incredibly tough. Men and women cried. Julie Bishop was visibly upset as her staff broke down in tears around her in her office after her humiliation. When they spoke in the days and weeks afterwards about what had happened, and what they did, their emotions were raw.

Luke Howarth, who had helped precipitate Turnbull’s decision to vacate his leadership, ducked out of the party room after the final vote on Friday, slipped into his office across the corridor, closed the door, and wept. ‘The whole week was pretty shitty,’ he told me later. Anne Ruston walked into Michaelia Cash’s office, stood before one of her staff, and said, ‘Tell her I am disappointed in her and with what she has done to us.’ Ruston then burst into tears and walked out.

The discontent had crystallised in Queensland with the disastrous primary vote in the Longman by-election, was stoked by Abbott in the debate over the NEG, and was accentuated by the continuing dispute with the Catholic education sector, which was taking months to resolve.

Queensland, where there was lingering distrust of Turnbull, was the epicentre, and the state’s most senior party official fuelled the discontent.

The Liberal National Party state president, Gary Spence, was a chief urger behind the scenes for Turnbull’s removal. Spence had become convinced that the prime minister and/or his office was background-briefing the media that Longman had been lost because of a bad campaign. I have no direct knowledge of this; however, I do know that Liberals from Queensland to Tasmania were attributing the loss to four factors: a poor choice of candidate; a poor campaign; no money to match Labor’s big spend in the last week; and the raising of expectations that a victory was possible.

Nevertheless, Spence blamed Turnbull and or his office for briefings against the LNP’s campaign, and swore to get even. Malcolm Turnbull did not help himself by casting the by-election as a contest between himself and Bill Shorten, Mathias Cormann framed it as a referendum on tax, and the media pumped out a plethora of unreliable polls showing that the government had a once-in-a-century chance of winning a seat from the opposition.

Expectations were wildly out of control, and there was no reining them in. The member for Brisbane, Trevor Evans, whose family hails from Longman, attended branch meetings in his electorate where enthusiastic young LNP members were convinced they could win. He kept trying to hose them down, but they wouldn’t listen. Like others, he had rung around a few people trying to get a better candidate. No one wanted to run. Attempts were made to recruit former state MP Lisa France. As someone with strong local connections, she would have been ideal; however, since she had lost her seat of Pumicestone in 2015, France had secured a well-paid career in the corporate world and was reluctant to return to politics. She summed up the problem faced by the Coalition in recruiting women: those who support the conservative side of politics tend to be in small business or the professions. At least, they used to be. It is difficult to persuade them to give up that life, disrupt their families, take a pay cut for the uncertainties of politics, deal with the hostilities that go with it, and submit to rigid party structures.

Ruthenberg was simply the best they could get. Evans, whose first election campaign had been as a volunteer for Peter Dutton against star Labor recruit Cheryl Kernot in Dickson, and then went on to work for Dutton as his chief of staff, said in an interview for this book that he was not even surprised by the near–10 per cent drop in the primary vote. It was exactly what he had expected.

What Evans did not expect, or welcome, was what it triggered, which he later described as bordering on traumatic. Like his colleagues, he faced a difficult choice. Dutton was his former employer, friend, and mentor, whom Evans describes as a decent person. As an openly gay man in an inner-suburban electorate, which he describes as similar to Wentworth for its diversity, Evans felt that his best chances for re-election lay with Turnbull. All the candidates courted him, and fellow moderates tried to sway him. He refused to sign the petition for the second meeting, and he would not tell his friends from the class of 2016, fellow newbie MPs, which way he voted. He has not told family or staff; however, although he was philosophically aligned with Turnbull, he was open about looking to the future. He was open to persuasion about which candidate was best equipped to secure that future. No one was absolutely confident they knew where he stood. He did participate in one early tactical meeting with Sally Cray, leading the Turnbull camp to believe he had voted for the prime minister in the first ballot on the Tuesday. Later, both the Morrison and Turnbull camps had him in the Dutton column.

Unlike Trevor Evans, fellow Queenslander Luke Howarth made his views, if not his explicit intentions, well known.

The class of 2013 – MPs elected in the great Abbott victory – held Monday-night dinner rituals during sitting weeks. On the night of 20 August, Luke Howarth, Craig Laundy, Sarah Henderson, Melissa Price, and David Coleman gathered at the Chiang Rai at Kingston.

Laundy didn’t think much of it at the time, but they all saw another group of MPs walk in and head for another part of the restaurant: Stuart Robert, Steve Irons, and Alex Hawke. The Morrison men. It clicked later.

For the class of 2013, leadership was on the menu, and Laundy was keen to know what Howarth was thinking. Howarth had decided to get up in the party meeting the next day to ask both Turnbull and Abbott to resign.

He insisted after it was over that Dutton had not asked him to do this, and that he was acting on own. He says he had not consulted anyone, and that he directly told only one person about his plan, and that was his office manager, who had been with him for five years and whom he said was 100 per cent trustworthy.

Howarth says he told Laundy over dinner that he thought Peter Dutton would make a good prime minister. He thought he was tough and could carry a message. He was the only one at the table who thought this. Testy exchanges followed. Laundy pleaded with Howarth to think of what would happen in seats like his own of Reid, with a margin of 3.3 per cent. He said those who wanted change were a pack of dills.

Laundy says Howarth was convinced the government was ‘fucked’. ‘We are gone, Turnbull is gone, your mate’s gone.’ Laundy says the conversation was feral.

Howarth says that Henderson, whose seat of Corangamite had become notionally Labor after the redistribution and sat next to him in the House, could barely bring herself to speak to him the next day. Henderson disputes this, saying she was not offended by or put off by what Howarth had said over dinner, even though she says she strongly disagreed with him. She regarded him as a friend, and still does.

Howarth found the whole thing very difficult. He complained that Turnbull had not met any of his own KPIs (key performance indicators), particularly on Newspoll, and that he had not taken seriously the result in Longman. He says now he can’t remember exactly what he said at dinner. He thinks he said he would have preferred Turnbull to step aside. He had no doubt that Laundy would report his comments to the prime minister’s office. Which he did.

Although Howarth swears he did not tell his colleagues that night exactly what he planned to do the next day, he said enough to set off alarm bells for Laundy, who later that night debriefed Turnbull and Sally Cray on his conversation.

‘I definitely did not say he would be a suicide bomber, but I had real concerns he could do something stupid in the party room,’ Laundy says. ‘I was very clear with them [the prime minister’s office] that I was extremely concerned, given the anger and venom Luke showed, that he would do something stupid.’

That piece of intelligence confirmed Turnbull’s thinking to bring the spill on. And, as it turned out, Laundy was right. Howarth was definitely planning to do something.

Howarth’s seat of Petrie borders Longman, as does Dutton’s. They have known one another for 20 years. Howarth’s wife, Louise, whom he married in 1999, is a first cousin of Dutton’s. (Their fathers were brothers.) In 2011, Howarth’s pest-extermination business was doing well, so he pulled his three young sons out of school and went on a family road trip for five months. The business continued to do well without him. By the time he got to Western Australia, he decided it was time to give politics a real go, having unsuccessfully stood for a state seat in 2001. He rang Dutton and told him he wanted to run in either Petrie – where he grew up – or Lilley. In the end, along with 12 others, he ran for preselection for Petrie. Dutton helped him, while John Howard vouched for another high-profile candidate. Howarth won that battle by one vote.

So, as well as being family, Howarth also regarded Dutton as a friend and mentor.

It was the feeding frenzy that erupted in the wake of the Longman by-election which rocked Howarth. However, there had been no sign of panic or despair from him on the night of the by-election. I texted him at 9.37 that night (28 July) to say I was doing Insiders the next morning, and to ask what he made of the result.

He responded:

Gary Spence LNP President summed it up well. Difficult for a government to win bi-elections history statistically shows this. Australians are over the dual citizenship issues and have returned everyone on both sides.

Disappointing the primary swing in Longman, Wyatt Roy still had a strong following and part of his vote has gone to one nation and labor. Labor definitely lied again, there are NO cuts to CABOOLTURE hospital funding is going up if you could ask the media to fact check claims in future.

Me: What does it mean for general election?

Howarth: Not a lot. It’s next year. Longman may even get a swing back next time. Labor’s campaigning is effective, obviously, but it’s disappointing because a lot of it is based on lies, and it’s not good for our country.

They may eventually get in Labor 2019, 2022, but government with higher taxing policies that they have will be very bad for the country.

However, by 10 August, Howarth’s anxiety levels had risen. He texted Turnbull to say that he and Julie Bishop needed to do more media interviews with conservative commentators like Paul Murray and Ray Hadley. He understood why they would not do interviews with either Jones or Credlin. He was worried that conservative Liberal voters were shifting to One Nation and independents, and that only a small percentage of them were coming back via preferences.

Although Howarth thought the company tax cuts were good policy, he suggested they should be put up in the Senate for a vote, and then, when they went down, they should be dumped. He also wanted the prime minister to be doing more on the drought. He was not thinking about regime change. It wasn’t even the energy wars that caused him to change his thinking, even though he had been warning for a long time of the impact of power-price increases. But he said people were ‘going feral’. They were even telling him he shouldn’t run again.

Turnbull texted him back, thanking him for his ‘good advice’, assuring him that he would be talking about some of those things ‘today’.

A couple of days later, reports surfaced that Turnbull had done a deal with Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm on euthanasia to get the Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation through. Howarth was again worried that this would trigger another outbreak of disunity. This faded after the Senate voted against Leyonhjelm’s Bill to grant territories the right to make their own laws.

On Friday 17 August, Howarth received a message from Turnbull saying he had been working intensively on the energy policy, and that he wanted to run a few things past him.

Howarth did not return Turnbull’s call. Instead, he called Dutton.

He had flown home from Canberra that day, and when he landed, checked with his office to see what was happening. He says they told him that Ray Hadley, who was seen as close to Dutton, had gone on air urging people to ring their MPs to tell them Turnbull had to go.

What Hadley had actually done that day was break into Chris Smith’s 2GB program at 2.10 pm to confirm ‘100 per cent’ that Dutton would challenge Turnbull for the leadership. It would be after the Newspoll scheduled for Monday week (27 August), and not because of another losing Newspoll, but because of the dispute over energy. He also predicted a push by ‘disaffected conservative constituents who talk to you, me, and Alan, and our colleagues all the time, they will be saying to those constituents, “I want you to ring your local member, you know, the pants-wetters, I want you to tell them that unless there is a change in leadership we won’t be voting for you.”’

A few days later, Hadley sharpened up his campaign to influence MPs by publishing their email addresses, just to help the push along. But Hadley’s Friday message, garbled though it was, registered with listeners in Howarth’s electorate. Howarth says his office got something like 20 calls.

After getting the message from his office and from listeners, Howarth rang Dutton to ask him if anything was happening. Dutton, despite Hadley’s certainty, told him it wasn’t, and that Hadley had done it ‘off his own bat’ – although Howarth got the distinct impression that Dutton was not unhappy that the idea of a challenge was now out there. Howarth told me that Dutton did not tell him he was planning to challenge.

Howarth spoke to a few people after that. He spoke to Spence, and asked him what he thought about it all. Spence told him he would be happy if there was a change, and that he would support a change.

Howarth spoke to Bert van Manen, who was close to Morrison. Then Morrison himself rang Howarth on Saturday asking, ‘What do you think?’

Howarth told him, ‘Well, I think if there was some sort of challenge, I would vote for Dutton.’

Nevertheless, Howarth says he decided, on his own initiative, to get up at Tuesday’s party meeting to tell Turnbull – and Abbott – to resign. Again, he says he did not tell Dutton what he was planning, nor did he tell his dinner companions on Monday night.

As is now well known, Turnbull got in before Howarth was able to call on him to resign, declaring both his and Julie Bishop’s positions vacant.

Howarth voted for Dutton in Tuesday’s ballot, and then sent Turnbull a message via WhatsApp. In it, he said, verbatim:

PM I was going to ask you to resign before the poll. You set the KPI of 30 opinion polls we are now nearly at 40. You have lost the base in Qld and the support of the LNP. We can’t win without the base. We will lose the next election as Abbott will continue to wreck. You and Abbott both need to go at the next election.

What’s the point of hanging on as PM for nine months, you could of retired gracefully.

I won’t be out in media actively encouraging this I hope we can unite but I seriously doubt it.

He received a four-word reply from Turnbull: ‘United is the key.’

Howarth showed the text to Laundy after that first vote. Laundy had ducked into Howarth’s office to use his loo because it was the closest one to the party room. Laundy pleaded with Howarth to stop, ‘for all our sakes’. Howarth replied, ‘Craig, you are too close to him. You don’t get it, we need a change.’

The events of that mad week took a toll on Howarth, as they did on everyone else. He said then, like many of them did, that the experience was much worse for him than when Turnbull deposed Abbott.

On the Friday, after the vote and after the speeches, when Morrison emerged triumphant, Howarth was touched by Morrison’s call for unity and regeneration. Howarth sought refuge in his own office, just across the corridor.

After breaking down in his office, Howarth took a few minutes to compose himself, before going back into the party room to shake hands with both Morrison and Frydenberg. ‘It was the enormity of it,’ he said later. ‘It was upsetting. The whole week was pretty shitty.’

Although the putsch had originated in Queensland, support for it was far from unanimous, and not everyone was happy with Spence’s intervention to campaign actively against Turnbull and for Dutton.

Spence says he had supported Turnbull, and then fell out badly with him in the wake of Longman. He was angered by commentary after the by-election that canned the Liberal National Party’s campaign. He claimed that the commentary only came from Canberra-based columnists (including yours truly), The Australian’s Paul Kelly, and others from interstate. According to Spence, locally based reporters knew better and reported differently. He rang one of those Canberra-based columnists (not yours truly) to tackle them about it. According to Spence, this correspondent told him that the information had been sourced from ‘the highest office in the land’.

That was it for Spence. He got on to senator James McGrath, once a key numbers man for Turnbull, to get him to deliver a message to the Turnbull office.

McGrath was having his own problems with Turnbull. They had grown distant, and his relationship with Sally Cray had ruptured. He didn’t think they understood Queensland, and he felt they weren’t listening to him.

McGrath rang Turnbull’s chief of staff, Clive Mathieson, and told him that the prime minister had to speak to Spence.

Turnbull tried to ring Spence soon after. They played a bit of phone tag, and then, when they finally hooked up, it was a hostile conversation that lasted about half an hour. Spence told me subsequently that this occurred around two weeks after the by-election. He says Turnbull told him he had not briefed against the LNP, and nor had his office. Spence did not believe him.

On such things are lasting enmities built, with devastating consequences. After that, as far as Spence was concerned, whatever relationship he had had with Turnbull was fractured beyond repair.

However, perhaps before declaring war on Turnbull, Spence should have spoken to the former president of the Queensland Liberal Party, Paul Everingham, who was appalled that Ruthenberg had not been properly vetted and that the medal mix-up had not been corrected. (Ruthenberg had been pinged during the campaign for wrongly claiming he had been awarded the more prestigious Australian Service Medal rather than the lower-order Australian Defence Medal.)

Or to senator Richard Colbeck, who was intimately involved in the Braddon by-election campaign in Tasmania, where the former member, Brett Whiteley, almost succeeded in winning back the seat. Colbeck contrasted the Braddon campaign, which was disciplined and well run, with Longman. The swing against Whiteley on primaries was 1.9 per cent —almost half that of the swing against Labor, thanks to a strong local independent and a sliver of a 0.1 per cent two-party-preferred swing to Labor’s candidate Justine Keay. If the Liberals had won that seat, it might not have appeased the Queenslanders, but at least it would have mitigated Longman’s loss and created a more sustainable environment for Turnbull.

While in the south the mood was relatively benign – despite Georgina Downer’s inability to regain Mayo from independent Rebekha Sharkie – it didn’t matter, because it was toxic in Queensland. As Dutton would say later, it didn’t matter what happened in Tasmania, the election would be won or lost in his home state.

When the story broke about Dutton, Spence – who spoke to me for this book – says he was called by some Queensland MPs, asking him what he thought they should do. He also admitted he spoke to Dutton. He will not reveal exactly what was said between them, although it is obvious he encouraged Dutton to run. He said he told the MPs who called him that if there was a spill, they should not vote for Turnbull – they should vote for Dutton. At this stage, Morrison had not announced he was running, and Spence told Queenslanders that with Dutton they would hold on to their seats.

He also admitted that he initiated some calls himself to tell MPs the same thing. He reckons he spoke to five or six MPs.

Then someone dobbed Spence in to Sky daytime host Laura Jayes, whose reporting during the week of the challenge showed the breadth of her contacts in the coalition.

‘The you-know-what hit the fan,’ Spence said.

Spence rebuts suggestions that he circulated polling in marginal seats showing the LNP was way behind under Turnbull. He says the cash-strapped organisation did two polls during Longman. The first, at the beginning of the campaign, showed that Ruthenberg was way behind, at 42 per cent to Labor’s 58 per cent; the second, two weeks out, showed that he had made up some ground to reach to 47 per cent to 53 per cent. (Labor held the seat with a 54.5 to 45.6 per cent margin.)

He was adamant that they were never going to win the seat, and he blamed Turnbull for raising expectations that they would.

One of the cardinal rules in politics is to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Turnbull did the latter and neglected the former, as the breakdown in the relationship between him and McGrath showed.

Turnbull had been introduced to McGrath by pollster Mark Textor. After a meeting at his home in Point Piper, and before he lost the opposition leadership in 2009, Turnbull ensured McGrath was appointed the federal Liberal deputy director, to work with the director, Brian Loughnane. That did not end well. After Loughnane sacked McGrath, the Queenslander headed home, where he became state campaign director in 2010. He was at the helm when Campbell Newman had one of the biggest wins in Australian electoral history.

McGrath is completely eccentric and unconventional in many ways – witness the figurine of a polar bear in his office cradling an empty bottle of Bundaberg rum, the photo of Margaret Thatcher on the wall, and the shoes and socks strewn across the floor as he walks around barefoot in a business shirt and shorts after a nap on the couch – but he is a complete genius on Queensland and what it takes to win there.

He knows southerners think that Queenslanders are mad. He also concedes that they do get mad very quickly, often for no real reason. He reckons they get cranky and go off. He doesn’t care. He argues, and there is evidence to support, if not prove, his proposition, that if the Coalition can’t win Queensland, it can’t win government. All you have to do, he says, is just give them something, pay them some attention – lots of attention, actually – and be very nice to them.

McGrath not only helped elect Newman, but he was a key member of the group that restored Turnbull to the leadership in 2015.

The messiness of his personal surrounds stands in stark contrast to the meticulous planning of his political life. His attention to detail in the 2015 coup was incredible. It left scars that are still obvious. He got no pleasure from Abbott’s removal, but he had one clear motive, and that was to prevent Bill Shorten from becoming prime minister in 2016, which he remains convinced would have happened if Abbott had been left in the job.

In mid-2018, McGrath thought Turnbull was making good headway. McGrath thought Turnbull’s speech to the LNP annual conference around that time was brilliant. It was self-deprecating and confident, and he made jokes about Big Trev. He thought it was Malcolm at his best. Three days later, Turnbull gave a very different kind of speech to the Queensland Media Club on energy and electricity, which McGrath also thought was very good, even though he didn’t think anybody understood it. It was obvious that Turnbull knew more than anybody else about the subject; however, the message was not getting through.

After Longman, everything turned to custard.

McGrath had an angry phone conversation with Turnbull. He told people that the prime minister basically blamed him – as the patron senator for the seat – for the loss, and along the way called the LNP a bunch of dickheads. McGrath reminded him that the only reason he was prime minister was because of the Queensland LNP.

McGrath dismisses claims it was a poor campaign in Longman. Rather, he says, it was a poorly funded campaign. They had no money. McGrath had tried but failed to get a woman to run in the seat, which is what Turnbull wanted, particularly after one of his closest supporters, Jane Prentice, had lost her preselection in Ryan to a male former staffer.

Turnbull couldn’t understand why it took so long to find a candidate. McGrath reckons it was because those approached either didn’t like Turnbull or didn’t think the government was going to win the election. The delay in finding a candidate contributed to the lateness in announcing the date for the by-election, and then there was another long campaign period, which also did not help the vote. Labor had more money, more volunteers, and ran hard on banks and company tax, and on the alleged funding cuts for the Caboolture hospital.

McGrath defends Ruthenberg as a decent person who had worked for charities all his life, who, thanks to the campaign, became unemployable. ‘He is a good person who made a mistake,’ McGrath says, referring to the medal muddle.

McGrath believes that the LNP never liked Turnbull because of what happened in 2009, when Abbott wrested the leadership from him by one vote because of Turnbull’s support for Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. After 2015, McGrath spent a lot of his political capital telling people that Turnbull was like Howard and Menzies – terrible first time around, but someone who had learned from his mistakes.

Early on in Turnbull’s tenure, there was angst over the revival of plans, later abandoned, to increase the rate of the GST. The eight-week-plus 2016 election campaign also caused angst. As did Turnbull’s speech on election night. Turnbull was late appearing – at close to midnight – by which time McGrath reckons only party members were watching, and they didn’t like what they heard.

After Longman, sentiment in Queensland soured abruptly. McGrath noticed it was immediate, it was brutal, and it was across the state, not just rural and regional.

McGrath had a terrible weekend in early August. He went to three events in three electorates, beginning with his launch of Luke Howarth’s volunteers’ campaign at Clontarf, with a barbecue on the esplanade. He couldn’t get over how many of those present told him he had to get rid of Malcolm. They said they were prepared to help Howarth, but would not vote for him, ‘because we don’t want Malcolm’. It terrified McGrath that they were saying that to him, because if they were doing that, what were they saying to their friends and family?

Deeply worried, he called Dutton after the Howarth event to tell him that party members were not going to vote for ‘us’. Dutton said he was getting the same message. Dutton said that what people didn’t understand was if they lost the next election, they would be out for 10 years – it wouldn’t just be for one term.

The same weekend, McGrath went to the Hervey Bay seafood festival in the electorate of Wide Bay, which he attends every year. Same thing. People were coming up, asking him when they were going to get rid of Malcolm. They didn’t like Turnbull because they didn’t think he was one of them, they were terrified that Bill Shorten would end up prime minister, and they were angry with the LNP for not doing anything to stop him.

His last gig was a branch meeting in Stanthorpe on the Darling Downs in the electorate of Maranoa, where 60 people turned up. All of them wanted to tell McGrath how angry they were with Turnbull and the NEG.

McGrath described Longman as a movie trailer. It was a preview of what the next election would be like.

When McGrath returned to Brisbane on Sunday 12 August, he tapped out a long, detailed WhatsApp, which he sent to Turnbull, telling him that Queensland had ‘turned against us’,

In the message, he told Turnbull that people were disappointed, that they wanted the government to be better, and that they were terrified of Shorten. He said the government should dump the company tax cuts for banks, and dump the tax cuts for the big end of town.

He said at the Stanthorpe meeting, branch members had ‘unanimously’ called for the tax cuts to be dumped. He told Turnbull that few people understood the NEG, or how it would work to cut power prices. He feared that at the upcoming party meeting on Tuesday, Abbott’s theme of ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t support it’ would resonate.

McGrath said his parents were pensioners who could not afford to put their heating on. ‘It may sound mad to you but they are not alone,’ he told Turnbull.

‘Not one person I spoke to thinks we can win.’

Turnbull’s response was unsympathetic, and dripped with sarcasm. ‘With your support, I fear no challenge,’ he replied.

Turnbull went on to reassure McGrath that the tax cuts would be sorted shortly. He told him he should understand the NEG, and asked whether he had read the available material. Turnbull said he needed McGrath to ‘understand it and sell it’.

The next message McGrath got from Turnbull was on Saturday 18 August. They spoke that day. Turnbull was keen to know if McGrath was hearing ‘anything’ – code for ‘anything happening on the leadership’.

McGrath said he hadn’t, but he did fill him in on what had happened at the usual meeting of Queensland MPs in the monkey-pod room on the previous Wednesday night. The Liberal’s federal director, Andrew Hirst, was due to deliver a post-mortem on Longman. Before Hirst appeared, there was a discussion among the MPs, which McGrath later described as brutal.

George Christensen, Michelle Landry, Luke Howarth, and Warren Entsch all spoke. They were either worried they would lose their seats, or angry that the prime minister was not listening to them or not getting back to them about their concerns. In a room full of crankiness and complaints, they realised they all felt pretty much the same.

‘They were basically pooing themselves they were next in line to lose their seats,’ one attendee said later.

Hirst’s presentation showed they had been outcampaigned by Labor. Labor had clearer, sharper messages that cut through, like the alleged cuts to Caboolture hospital. Exit polling showed that even though not everyone believed it, close to 90 per cent could remember the claim. There was also blowback against Ruthenberg. Hirst’s slide show also told them that the party had made up a lot of ground during the campaign, which, given the result, did little to lessen their anxiety.

McGrath spoke to Dutton and Howarth the weekend before Tuesday’s party-room meeting, but claims not to recall any discussion of a challenge.

At the meeting, McGrath thought Turnbull had made a pretty good speech, and then heard him finish up by declaring the leadership vacant. McGrath was, as usual, sitting next to Dutton. He turned to him, saying, WTF, did you know about this? No, Dutton said. McGrath told him he would vote for him.

It was clear that the Dutton camp was in chaos. They had been caught completely unprepared by Turnbull’s decision to bring a spill on, and it showed. McGrath went first to Dutton’s office to offer him material as well as moral support. Around 5.00 pm, he went to Turnbull’s office to offer him his resignation.

Turnbull asked McGrath if he wanted him to accept it, then asked what he could do to keep him. McGrath told him it was all about Queensland, it was about Turnbull not visiting a drought area after going to a solar farm at Barcaldine, about not getting dust on his boots, and it was about him – McGrath – not having a relationship with a key member of Turnbull’s staff. Bottom line: they didn’t understand Queensland. McGrath agreed to think about his position.

Turnbull had described the Dutton forces as terrorists. They were wreckers, tearing down the government. McGrath felt terrible, sick to his stomach. But after what had happened in 2015 (when Turnbull overthrew Abbott with McGrath’s help), he wasn’t going to take any lectures from Malcolm.

‘I always thought it would end in tears. I didn’t think it would end in bloody tears,’ he would say later.

That night, McGrath took his staff to the Kingston Hotel for steak, chips, and a beer, because he knew pretty soon they would be out of work.

The next day, McGrath decided to force the issue. He went to see Turnbull’s diary secretary, Jenny Brennan, and asked to see the prime minister.

Turnbull called out to him, ‘Yes, James?’

McGrath said, ‘Prime Minister, I would like you to accept my resignation.’

Turnbull replied, ‘Yes, OK.’

McGrath thinks they shook hands, but can’t remember exactly, and as Turnbull was closing the door after him, told McGrath he would write to the governor-general in the morning to inform him.

McGrath reckons they are the last words he and Turnbull will ever exchange.

McGrath insists he did not make a single phone call to enlist support for Dutton, nor did he walk the petition around. He went to meetings in the monkey-pod room and in Dutton’s office, providing advice and intelligence on where people were at, and how people should be deployed.

He was touched when Simon Birmingham told him that whatever happened that week, friendships were very important.

McGrath was not surprised when Morrison won the ballot on the Friday. Despite the braggadocio of the Dutton camp, he was never convinced they had the numbers. They were too disorganised, and he suspected that the Morrison camp had been gathering intel for months.

He thinks it was a major strategic error on Dutton’s part to insist on another meeting that week. He thinks he should have pulled back, waited, and had another go later, a la Keating, who made two strikes against Hawke, months apart. While Turnbull and his supporters thought delay might have helped them, McGrath believed delay would have only helped Dutton. The government and Turnbull would have continued to bleed, strengthening sentiment among backbenchers that he had to go.

On the day after Morrison won the ballot, McGrath went to the Kingaroy baconfest. Talk about happy as pigs in the proverbial. People were coming up to him saying they were really angry with what had happened in Canberra, but they were happy Turnbull was gone. It was the same at a party meeting at Dalby. People there were telling him they were very angry with what he did, but ‘you should have done it sooner’.

McGrath reckons it was bipolar. He still feels terrible about it; he does not, however, regret it, even though he is convinced they will never speak again. He was furious with Turnbull for not helping out later in the Wentworth by-election.

McGrath has one sentence, a cruel one, on why Turnbull lost the prime ministership: ‘He was never one of us – and all the more reason he should have listened.’

McGrath’s fellow Queenslander Ross Vasta, who voted for Turnbull in 2015, has connections with Peter Dutton going back to when Dutton was 19. They were both hooked on politics, were Young Liberals together, and then lost touch after Dutton joined the police force. They met again by chance at a gathering at a party official’s house more than a decade later. They renewed their friendship. Vasta’s then girlfriend had a friend called Kirilly, who worked as PA to businesswoman Serena Russo. She wanted to introduce her friend to Dutton because she thought they would hit it off. Vasta later split up with his girlfriend. Dutton married her friend, Kirilly, in 2003.

Despite their friendship, Vasta did not see Dutton as the solution to the government’s problems.

When Jason Wood rang Vasta – he believes it was on Thursday 9 August – to ask him if he knew anything about Dutton running against Turnbull, Vasta, who had already concluded that Turnbull could not win, said he was not thinking about Dutton. He told him that he believed their best chance of retaining government was to replace Turnbull with Bishop. She was popular, an effective fundraiser, and a good campaigner. She could call an early election, and with her they could win it. They simply could not afford to allow Bill Shorten to get elected. He said the same thing to Bert van Manen at the weekend, and to Tony Abbott, who had been up in Queensland telling Young Liberals and others they should back Dutton for the leadership.

Vasta believed Turnbull should step aside. ‘Those who live by the sword die by the sword,’ he told fellow MPs.

On Monday, he told Steve Ciobo that it could not be Dutton, and that Dutton would do better if he moved to another portfolio.

Then Turnbull asked to see Vasta. Turnbull told him the whole thing was ‘madness’ and that there was no way they could win with Dutton. Vasta agreed with that, but also thought they could not win with Turnbull. Vasta told Turnbull he thought the government would do better with Bishop as leader and Dutton as her deputy. He said the continuing ‘negativity’ from people like Alan Jones was starting to hurt, that people in his electorate were not renewing their membership and were deserting the party. Turnbull offered to visit to help him with a recruiting drive. Vasta said that would not be enough. The negativity had to stop, and Turnbull needed to sort it out with Jones.

That night, Vasta also spoke to Dutton. Vasta told him he should stand aside and run as Bishop’s deputy; that way, they could win the election. Dutton would not countenance it. He told Vasta he could not work with her. The next day, Vasta voted against Turnbull rather than for Dutton, and then on Friday was one of the 11 who voted for Bishop in the first ballot, and then for Dutton in the second.

Warren Entsch is another eccentric Queenslander. It often seems there is no other kind. Entsch was also unhappy. He had spent time with Turnbull’s chief of staff, Clive Mathieson, on the Monday, the day before Turnbull declared his position vacant, going through unresolved issues. ‘The problem we have here is we have a prime minister who is elected, but has absolutely no authority,’ Entsch says he told Mathieson.

Entsch has been able to survive in the deep north while maintaining his small-l liberal credentials. He says he hates being called a conservative. He is anything but. And he is proud of the causes he has championed. More recently, it was same-sex marriage. Before that, it was mental health. And weird exchanges on this issue with Tony Abbott were what convinced him that the former prime minister should get out of parliament.

At Turnbull’s request, Entsch decided to renominate for his seat of Leichardt. Entsch has kept every clipping of himself since 1996, so he asked staff to dig out a few things for him. He needed a dossier of achievements to put to the voters. In the Howard years, when Abbott was health minister, Entsch made a point of getting up at every party meeting to highlight the desperate need for more money for mental health.

As Entsch said, it killed at least one person a week: either mentally ill people were killed by others, they killed others, or they killed themselves. Finally, before one of the weekly meetings, Howard asked him not to raise the subject that day, because something was about to happen. Something did: the government announced a $1.9 billion mental-health package.

So, when it came to May 2018, Entsch wrote to both Howard and Abbott seeking letters commending him for his efforts in securing funding for mental health.

Abbott texted back. ‘Mate, I got your letter. Yes you did a fine job getting money … that’s done a lot of good, I am happy to say that. For the life of me though, I can’t understand why you opposed me and I would probably want to put that in too.’

Sure enough, the letter came back 10 days later on 25 May, paying tribute to Entsch for having worked so hard to draw attention to the hidden epidemic of mental illness: ‘We need more people in the parliament who aren’t afraid … except for a period in August–September 2015, we always got on well.’

That two-month period covered the contentious same-sex marriage debate in the party room, when Abbott dudded Entsch, followed soon after by the challenge from Turnbull, when Entsch voted for Turnbull. Entsch has never shied away from difficult policies or tough choices.

Entsch had been bitterly disappointed with Turnbull’s third-reading speech in parliament to legalise same-sex marriage. He had pocketed his own speech, giving up his spot to speak to the prime minister, because he thought it was the right thing to do. He thought Turnbull’s speech was terrible. He felt deflated. Then the NEG debate became, as he said, a dog’s breakfast. The majority of MPs had taken a stand on a difficult problem, only to have the ground move under them.

On the day before the challenge, when speculation was rife, he had a message for Mathieson about Turnbull’s critical problem, as he saw it.

‘He is a fence sitter, and where I come from, the top wire is barbed, and if he is pushed one way or another, we know what’s going to be left hanging on the wire,’ Entsch warned.

The next morning, Entsch walked into the party meeting with Dutton. ‘I hope you are not going to pull anything on today,’ Entsch said to him. Dutton replied, ‘Mate, I am not.’

Turnbull’s decision to declare the two leadership positions vacant took them all by surprise. Sitting between Ken Wyatt and Andrew Laming, Entsch said to them, ‘This is crazy. If he doesn’t get well over 60 votes, he is fucked.’ Entsch voted for Turnbull in that first ballot because, ‘Fifty metres before the finishing line, you don’t change your jockey.’

When the vote was read out, Entsch thought, ‘He is dead. He can’t recover.’ Entsch then rang Dutton and told him, ‘He has killed himself. If there is another vote and you are running, I will support you.’

However, before the vote, as outlined earlier, Entsch switched.

Another Queenslander, Scott Buchholz, approached his decision very differently. Buchholz was a fully signed-up member of the monkey-podders. He attended the regular meetings, he was a conservative, and he regarded Dutton as a great mate. Unlike many of his colleagues, Buchholz says he had not spent time in the lead-up to Tuesday’s meeting talking about the leadership. Like all of them, he was stunned when Turnbull moved, and stunned even more when the vote was so high. ‘Holy shit,’ he thought when the number was read out. Then he turned to his sitting companions and advised them not to say who they voted for, because they would be branded with it.

Buchholz says he voted for Turnbull. He says that reports suggesting he voted for Dutton were wrong, so he is happy to correct the record. When Dutton rang him after Tuesday’s meeting to ask for his vote, Buchholz was up-front. He told him he had no reason in the world to be supporting the prime minister, because Turnbull had sacked him as chief whip after he wrested the leadership from Abbott. But Buchholz said he would be supporting Turnbull, because he thought people were sick of the revolving door of prime ministers.

Dutton said he respected that.

On the Thursday afternoon, Buchholz organised a phone hook-up of his branch presidents and the two state MPs whose electorates overlapped his. He had two questions for them: first, should he sign the petition calling for another meeting to resolve the leadership question; and, second, if the spill motion were successful, who should he vote for.

The unanimous view of the 10 people on his hook-up was that he should sign the petition, so he did, writing beside his name in brackets, ‘I support the office of the Prime Minister.’

Their answers to the second question were interesting. Two said to vote for Julie Bishop, two said to vote for Dutton, but the majority – 70 per cent – said he should vote for Morrison. So that is what he did.

‘Maybe my people backed in Morrison because he is the first prime minister in a decade that doesn’t have blood on his hands,’ he said later.

Buchholz also voted for Josh Frydenberg for the deputy leadership. He had earlier committed to Greg Hunt, but when Frydenberg entered the race, he changed his mind. He rang Hunt and told him of this, even though he knew he didn’t have to.

‘Someone told me once that the only people you can believe are those who tell you they’re not voting for you,’ he told Hunt. He didn’t want Hunt to tally up his numbers inaccurately.

Andrew Laming was another Queenslander who did not blame Turnbull for Longman. Instead, Laming laid most of the blame at the feet of the candidate, Big Trev Ruthenberg. Laming said later that even his mother, Estelle, was reluctant to help out in the seat after the news hit that Ruthenberg had claimed he had been awarded one military medal when in fact he had received another.

Laming also blamed Tony Abbott for undermining Turnbull. Laming figured that Abbott was not interested in resolving the internal dispute over energy, and that all he really wanted to do was destroy Turnbull.

Laming now says it would have been better if Turnbull had left the issue alone – not because no one cared about power prices, but because no one believed the government could do anything to stop them rising, and it was the one issue that Abbott could use to undermine Turnbull. He could not use tax, he could not use indigenous matters, and he could not use welfare.

Energy was Abbott’s weapon of choice, and it was Turnbull’s Achilles heel.

‘Tony was the guy with bricks hurling them through the window. Nothing was going to stop him. Even if Turnbull had pulled out of Paris, Tony would have moved on to something else on energy,’ Laming told me.

In Laming’s view, the greater the focus on energy from Abbott, the more wounded Turnbull became.

Laming said the angst felt by fellow Queenslanders in the wake of Longman was both harsh and misplaced.

‘I thought the Longman disaster was candidate-related,’ he said. He thought Ruthenberg’s medal muddle cost him and the party dearly. The only way the LNP could have won that seat, he believed, was with a stellar candidate like Wyatt Roy or Mal Brough, and Ruthenberg was a long way from that.

He also said it was the media, rather than Turnbull, that had been responsible for raising expectations.

Nevertheless, when he arrived in Canberra for the resumption of the sitting week, Laming was still hopeful, in spite of all the weekend speculation, that Turnbull could find a way through.

Early on Tuesday morning, around 7.00, Laming received a phone call from Turnbull. Turnbull told him he ‘had a feeling’ that something was going to happen, and if it did, asked if he could count on his vote. Laming told him that he could. In his own mind, and after having discussed it with his colleagues, Laming had concluded that if anything did happen, and if the vote against Turnbull was 20 or under, he might be able to skate through.

‘Twenty was the magic number,’ Laming said. He did vote for Turnbull, and was shocked when 35 others did not. At this point, Laming thought Turnbull’s position had become absolutely untenable, and that another challenge was inevitable, either within a few weeks or certainly by Christmas.

That afternoon, he texted Dutton and told him that although he had voted for Turnbull for the sake of stability, if there was another ballot he would vote for Dutton.

Ultimately, Laming did vote for Dutton, although he admits that Scott Morrison made a compelling argument when he rang to lobby him.

Morrison’s pitch was simple. He was the one who had stopped the boats. He was not the one responsible for keeping them stopped; he was the one who had stopped them, full stop. He had also, as social services minister, overseen important welfare reforms. Then, as treasurer, he had delivered three reasonably popular budgets. Unlike his predecessor.

Laming had vowed to himself before speaking to Morrison that he would not double-cross Dutton, and he didn’t, but he could see why Morrison’s support was building. He was extremely persuasive.

Unfortunately for Turnbull, the discontent with him had seeped well beyond the Queensland border.

Jason Wood was one of the few Victorian lower-house members to actively campaign and vote for Dutton. Another was Michael Sukkar, and, of course, Greg Hunt. In the Senate, it was young right-winger James Paterson. It highlighted the schism that had opened up in the Victorian Liberal Party.

On the Thursday of the previous sitting week, while he was in the Virgin lounge waiting to fly home, Wood received two phone calls from journalists asking him if anything was happening on the leadership front. Wood said there wasn’t, as far as he was concerned, and then asked Queenslander Bert van Manen and West Australian Steve Irons, who were with him, if they knew of anything. They said they did not.

When he became aware of the Daily Telegraph story, Wood spoke to Dutton. Wood says Dutton told him, ‘Mate, I am not going to challenge.’

The next morning, Turnbull rang Wood. Turnbull remembered his conversation in January with Wood. A very angry Wood had complained to Turnbull about what he saw as his neglect of marginal seats and fundraising, particularly in his own seat of Latrobe, and was unhappy that, unlike Dutton, a former fellow cop with whom Wood had bonded, Turnbull did not seem to get the ‘African gang’ issue then running hot in Victoria.

It was during this discussion that Wood told Turnbull he would do the numbers against him at the end of the year if things did not improve. Wood reckons Turnbull remained calm throughout that conversation, whereas he clearly did not.

Turnbull had the January discussion with Wood in mind when he rang him on that Saturday morning to ask him directly if he was now doing numbers against him. Wood said he was not. He told Turnbull who he had spoken to, and repeated that, as far as he knew, nothing was happening. He says he did make it clear to Turnbull that if there was a challenge, he would not be voting for him.

Wood’s view, then and when we spoke soon after, was that Turnbull should be given until the end of the year to ‘turn things around’. Wood also says he spoke to Sukkar, who told him there was no challenge.

So numbers were furiously being counted, everybody was talking to everybody else, but no one was planning to do anything. Wood was convinced by Monday night that Dutton had the numbers.

Reflecting on this later, Wood came to believe that this view had been encouraged by Morrison’s men – not Morrison himself – because they wanted Turnbull gone.

Zed Seselja is a senator from the ACT, the most left-wing catchment area in the country, only rivalled by Victoria, from where his very good friend Michael Sukkar hailed.

The Liberal’s version of the glimmer twins – they were almost always bracketed together – they stuck by Abbott to the end, and were fully paid-up members of the monkey-pod group that clustered around Dutton. They remained emotionally tied to Abbott, even though Turnbull promoted both to the frontbench.

Colleagues were scathing about the monkey-podders afterwards, claiming they had dressed up personal dislike as ideology to excuse their behaviour. Sukkar’s punishment was to be dumped by Morrison as assistant treasurer, and from the frontbench altogether, in the hope of appeasing outraged women MPs in particular.

It is fair to say that Seselja and Sukkar tolerated Turnbull, but never warmed to him.

Seselja was angry that a coalition government, which was supposed to be about promoting choice, had managed to get not only Catholic schools but also the independents offside. When people complained that Turnbull was too left-wing, Seselja says he did not think of energy policy or the NEG as prime examples – unlike some of his fellow monkey-podders, like Andrew Hastie or Angus Taylor – but of Catholic school funding.

And as much as he says he liked and respected the education minister, Simon Birmingham – describing him as bright, hardworking, and diligent – on this issue, putting it mildly from Seselja’s viewpoint, his performance fell well short of what was required. Seselja was dumbfounded when Birmingham accused the sector of ‘being bought by a few pieces of silver’ in the wake of the 17 March Batman by-election in Victoria. Seselja thought he should have been moved from the portfolio.

‘We had drunk the Gonski Koolaid,’ Seselja told me later. ‘We screwed part of our voting base.’

The by-election had been forced after Labor’s David Feeney mucked up his citizenship paperwork. It was Feeney’s second transgression, after earlier neglecting to record another house on his pecuniary interest register.

The Liberals did not field a candidate in the seat, leaving it to the Greens and Labor to slug it out – the theory being that Liberal preferences would only help Labor get over the line, and that without a Liberal candidate, the Greens’ Alex Bhathal would triumph. Labor had preselected the former ACTU president Ged Kearney, a good candidate, a woman with high name-recognition. The Greens were bitterly divided, and Kearney won easily.

During the campaign, Shorten had promised to restore $250 million in funding for Catholic schools in his first two years of office, if elected. There were reports that the Victorian Catholics had made 30,000 robocalls into the electorate. Shorten later gave them credit for helping deliver victory to Labor, and they were happy to claim it, even though there were doubts about the influence they had really had. Barnaby’s doodle had helped make Shorten Labor look stable, united, and focussed, but it suited Labor and the Catholics to write a different narrative.

Birmingham, who is both articulate and hard-working, had helped restore the Liberals’ standing on education. They were never going to beat Labor in one of its core policy areas, but Birmingham had at least removed some of the angst over cuts to funding that had lingered from the first Abbott budget. However, the overt political campaigning by the executive director of Catholic Education Melbourne, Stephen Elder (a former politician), to the effect that the government’s needs-based funding system had left some Catholic schools worse off, led Birmingham to make a rare mistake.

Birmingham says that everyone except Elder in the Catholic education sector had been working constructively to fix the problem.

The image of Judas and the 30 pieces of silver began bouncing around in Birmingham’s head after Shorten rang to thank Elder for helping Labor win the seat. To Birmingham’s mind, this had a whiff of conspiracy around it, so when he was asked if he thought the Victorian branch of Catholic education had been constructive, out it popped. Birmingham did not mention Judas and betrayal, but said, ‘There’s always somebody who can be bought by a few pieces of silver.’

It sent his colleagues spare. A new inquiry was announced, which took months to report, and the problem festered. The Catholic sector turned the screws after Longman, even seeking to claim some credit there for a very late, minor intervention.

Birmingham says he went to an education forum in Longman, appearing with both Shorten and his shadow education minister, Tanya Plibersek, and reckons there were barely 20 people there.

Birmingham says it was his one mistake to say what he said. Nothing else he had done or said had escalated the dispute.

‘I don’t regret it because I think it was incorrect or untrue. It was a very accurate way of describing what was happening,’ Birmingham says. ‘But, politically, it was a misstep.’ He and Elder subsequently had a number of conversations as they tried to resolve the problem.

As well as being unhappy about the Catholic funding, Seselja reckons that, for him, Longman encapsulated all the problems with Turnbull and the government. It revived memories of Turnbull’s shortcomings as a campaigner; he could not understand why the party allowed itself to be outspent so badly in the final week, and the drop in the party’s primary vote showed that conservatives had drifted away from the LNP. Nevertheless, he had not at this stage reached the threshold decision that Turnbull had to go. He had more or less resigned himself to Turnbull remaining.

Seselja says he didn’t think too much about the reports of Dutton moving against Turnbull. He saw reports of Dutton’s Thursday interview with Hadley, in which he said he would resign if he lost faith in Turnbull, as the Queenslander trailing his coat. It was also obvious to him that sections of News Corp were running aggressively against Turnbull. He thought that Friday’s Daily Telegraph story was part of the general egging-on of Dutton by Hadley, News, and Sky.

Seselja spoke with like-minded colleagues over the weekend, and while there was aggro, he says none of the people he spoke to were talking about a challenge or counting numbers.

He called Sally Cray on Monday, they talked about Catholic-school funding, and he told her that most of the angst was coming out of Queensland.

Seselja, who usually sat between Craig Laundy and Andrew Hastie in the party room, thought, ‘Oh shit’ when Turnbull vacated the leadership. He says he had a split second to decide, and he went for Dutton. He was confident that Dutton could win back conservative voters and win the election. He did not think that Turnbull could do either.

When the vote was read out, he judged that Turnbull’s position was untenable. Seselja thought he had a moral obligation to fess up, so he texted Turnbull after question time, asking to see him. When they met around 6.00 that evening, Seselja offered his resignation as an assistant minister. Turnbull told him he did not want to accept it, and would not if Seselja agreed to not take part in any other spill motions against him.

Seselja could not give that guarantee. Unlike other senior members of the Dutton camp, Seselja says he never thought at any stage that it was in the bag. He did not walk the petition around, and while he talked to colleagues to swing them Dutton’s way, he figured a few of them were lying when they said they would vote for him.

Part of Seselja’s allotted task was to go out into the media and spruik for Dutton. ‘That’s a shitty place to be in a leadership stoush,’ he reckoned later. It would have been much easier being in the background, although in this contest there weren’t too many who managed that. Seselja soon found pictures of himself with Dutton, Abbott, and Morrison, highlighting his role in the coup, featuring in ACT union pamphlets, but he was comfortably re-elected.

Once Scott Morrison entered the race, Seselja thought the three-way contest might work to Dutton’s advantage, because it would split votes between Morrison and Bishop. Seselja judged that if it ended up as a contest between Dutton and Bishop, Dutton would win. As it happened, the progressives had already figured this out. ‘The left was pretty ruthless,’ Seselja told me later, referring to the leaked WhatsApp messages that showed they had urged their fellows to vote for Morrison rather than Bishop, because in a Dutton–Bishop contest, Dutton would win. It was a grudging compliment, but a compliment none the less.

Seselja also agreed that Hunt and Abbott were drags on Dutton’s challenge. Seselja doesn’t even pretend to understand the finer details of Victorian Liberal factionalism, but he knows enough to know that Hunt did not add a single vote to Dutton, and is realistic enough to accept that Abbott probably cost him a few.

Seselja reckons that Abbott was never going to be appointed to a Dutton ministry, and remains convinced that the story was put about by Turnbull supporters to damage Dutton.

Less than a week later, Sukkar said he felt emotionally and physically exhausted.

Sukkar says he would never challenge a sitting prime minister, nor advocate for it, and didn’t, despite the claims that he had been urging Dutton to run.

Sukkar says that, later, he thought Turnbull had made a major strategic error in vacating his leadership, and but for that would have still been prime minister. He met with Turnbull in his office after the Tuesday party meeting to offer his resignation. He asked him why he had brought it on, and says that Turnbull replied, ‘Well, they were coming after me.’ Sukkar told him he had voted for Dutton, and confessed he was shocked that Turnbull had called it on.

Sukkar outlined his concerns, which revolved around energy and the Catholic education funding, which he could not believe had not been resolved, even though it had been a running sore, particularly in Victoria, for more than a year.

Turnbull told him he was not obliged to resign, because he (Turnbull) was the one who had called the spill. He told Sukkar, just as he had told Seselja, that he could stay if he undertook to support him in any future leadership challenge. Sukkar said he could not do that.

‘I have never been in love with Turnbull, but he basically ran a good government. He called a spill when his stocks were at their lowest. It was like a domino effect. It’s like the day after the GFC – you don’t liquidate then, you don’t sell at the bottom. It was the worst possible time to do it.’

Sukkar reckons the Turnbull era was marked by tenuous periods, including when Barnaby Joyce was forced to resign, and when people fell foul of the Constitution. ‘There’s always been some sort of fuck-up threatening the government or the leadership.

‘My view always was that we were on track to lose. With all due respect, he is not a good campaigner, and we would probably lose 1 per cent in the campaign. That would be an honourable loss, not a walloping – maybe a dozen seats – but we could rebuild.

‘The wheels started to fall off over energy and company tax. I felt it was going to get worse and worse, and I don’t think he could have picked a worse time. The Queenslanders were agitating because they thought they were going to lose.’

Sukkar says he contributed $30,000 to the Braddon by-election campaign to fund 20,000 phone calls.

He rejects claims by colleagues that the monkey-pod room meetings were used to plot for Dutton. ‘They were whinge sessions. There were 25 people. It leaked like a sieve. Whatever happened there ended back at the prime minister’s office or in the media. It was not watertight. It was a conservative catch-up. People like Dan Tehan and Andrew Wallace would come.’

Fellow Victorian James Paterson riled those of his Victorian colleagues who stuck with Turnbull. They reckoned his involvement smacked of student politics, and ignored the likely electoral consequences in his home state.

In my first discussion with Paterson in the immediate aftermath of the coup, he too was unrepentant.

‘My confidence in the PM, his ability to listen to the party room, was smashed on Monday,’ Paterson said. ‘On Friday, when he took over negotiations from Josh, their solution was to move from legislation to regulation. I and others said we could only support it in legislation, not regulation. He went and did exactly what we warned him not to do. It did not please any of his critics. That was bad enough. On Monday, when he gave his press conference, I couldn’t really tell you what the policy was.

‘Even then, on Monday, I had decided this was not going to end well. I was not pushing for change; I was not advocating change. When he moved that spill, that was another bad display of judgement. I knew his leadership was toast.

‘I was shocked and dismayed he moved the motion. When I heard the result, it reaffirmed the direction I was heading in the last sitting.’

Paterson decided to ‘help make the transition’.

‘I had no appetite for leadership change. I didn’t have any conversation with him [Dutton] about leadership until the Wednesday. I spoke to Sukkar over the weekend about the policy about the leadership.’

Paterson says he voted for Dutton, and in the immediate aftermath had no regrets whatsoever about the coup. The exact opposite, in fact.

‘I feel relieved about the change, particularly [because] the way he has behaved vindicated the decision to remove him. Asking for 43 signatures was a new requirement which did not previously exist. If a challenger says he has the numbers, it is untenable to require a petition. It is an extraordinary act of vandalism.’

Paterson said it was hard to know when Morrison entered the show. ‘We lost people to him immediately,’ he said.

Tasmanian Richard Colbeck stuck with Turnbull, like he had stuck with Abbott. In both cases, he said they went down because they were not, or their governments were not, what people had expected.

In Abbott’s case, it was the broken promises that did the initial damage. Colbeck made the mistake of mentioning the government’s credibility problem at a full ministry meeting in August 2014 after the May budget showcased Abbott’s full reversal. Colbeck told the meeting that the government had no narrative that the backbench could unite behind. ‘We said we would be a government of no surprises,’ Colbeck remembers saying. ‘We surprised ourselves sometimes.’

He said it was as if he had farted in a lift.

Colbeck says the first reason Turnbull was brought undone was because he was not the prime minister that people thought he would be.

And the second? ‘Revenge. There were a few in the party that did want him there, no matter what. They weren’t going to rest until he was gone.’