CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The spillover effects

On the day he announced he was resigning from parliament after 26 years, Christopher Pyne maintained the same sprightly demeanour he had when he first arrived as a 25-year-old. That was the public Pyne. The private Pyne had confessed to friends that he had come to see parliament as a hateful place. Turnbull’s removal factored into his decision to leave, although he maintained he probably would have gone anyway, even if Turnbull had survived.

Pyne felt then that he was going out on a high, when people were sorry to see him go. Always leave them wanting more, he would say. Despite efforts by others to claim he had been in the thick of it, in 2015 he was not involved in the coup against Abbott. In 2018, he was instrumental in whipping his factional enemies on the right, even if he could not save his very good friend, and he had to do it by sacrificing Julie Bishop. For a long time afterwards, he was completely unsympathetic to Bishop for taking it so personally; later, he realised how devastating it must have been for her, and how difficult it would have been to deal with such a public humiliation. This does not mean he regretted his actions. His objective and that of the other moderates was to defeat Dutton and to give the right a belting they would long remember.

After Turnbull’s defeat at the Friday party-room meeting, all Pyne wanted to do was get out of the place as fast as he could. He shared a quick glass of champagne with his staff in his office to celebrate Dutton’s demise and Morrison’s victory. Yet Pyne, who loved politics, with all its intrigues, was miserable. He left Parliament House an hour after the vote. He was crying as he left the building, cried all the way to the airport, and was still wiping away tears on his flight back to Adelaide. He was shattered.

Pyne has been friends with Turnbull for decades. They had first met at the constitutional convention called by John Howard in 1998 to debate the republic. Turnbull was leader of the Australian Republican Movement. Pyne, along with Andrew Robb, was co-convenor of Conservatives for an Australian Head of State. Pyne was also Peter Costello’s proxy when he couldn’t attend.

Pyne recalls his first impressions of Turnbull: ‘Charismatic, articulate, determined.’ Also, back then, headstrong. ‘He was convinced that his way ahead was the right way, and he didn’t bring the direct-elect republicans into the tent. As a consequence, the referendum was doomed from the start. A number of the direct-election republicans, many of whom were my friends, were aghast that he left them a choice between the parliamentary model or to campaign against the referendum. Sadly, many of them chose the latter.’

It was the start of a beautiful friendship. Pyne’s proud boast is that he voted for Turnbull in every ballot. Pyne had been through nine leadership changes. This one left him distraught. He wasn’t the only one. ‘I haven’t cried so much since my father died,’ he told me later when I interviewed him in his Parliament House office. Then he choked up again. He wasn’t the only minister who teared up during post-coup interviews.

Pyne had a four-word explanation for Turnbull’s denouement: personal ambition, revenge, hatred.

‘The right hated him, and they were prepared to destroy the government to get rid of him. They never ceased from the moment he became prime minister,’ he said.

A few days after the coup, at the swearing-in at Government House, Pyne was seated next to Mathias Cormann. Pyne could not bring himself to look at Cormann, nor even to speak to him. He had admired the finance minister, but could not understand why he had behaved as he had. Pyne says he was ‘incandescent’ with rage at Steve Ciobo, whom Turnbull had appointed as a shadow minister, who had been dumped by Abbott, and was then rescued again by Turnbull and promoted into cabinet, only to be betrayed by him – twice in the space of a few days. ‘Ciobo stabbed him in the back,’ Pyne said.

Morrison appointed Pyne as defence minister. He stripped Ciobo of the trade portfolio, which he loved, kept him in cabinet, and then, without even a hint of irony, made him Pyne’s assistant minister for defence.

Ciobo understood the anger of his colleagues. However, for him it wasn’t just about political friendship; it wasn’t just about political loyalty. He also cried from the stress of it all, but waited until he got home. His son, Asher, had been born with a heart defect, and that ranked as the worst time of his life. Dutton had provided moral and physical support during that awful time, so their relationship went well beyond a political alliance.

After his son’s illness, that week in August 2018 was the next worst in Ciobo’s life. He has been through it in his mind over and over, any number of times since, trying to work out if he would do anything differently in retrospect. It was so fraught, whichever way he went, that he was done for.

‘Either way I jumped, I would have been stuffed,’ he said later. ‘It’s like Sophie’s choice. I was close to Malcolm, and close to Peter.’

He knew he owed Malcolm, but he says he was trying to weigh up who was best to unite the party, who was best to ensure its supporters held firm, and who would be best-placed to win the election. He feared Shorten would glide into office and implement policies that would take years to recover from. He decided that the person best equipped to handle this was Dutton, not Turnbull – a choice that would cost him dearly.

Ciobo resigned from parliament, only a couple of weeks after a candid interview with me in his office, saying he had been weighing up his future for a while. There is no doubt, however, that events in August influenced his timing, before an election that the Coalition seemed destined to lose, and the limited career prospects that would follow for him if he stayed and went into in opposition.

There was a fine symmetry to the separate announcements made on the same day by Pyne and Ciobo that they were quitting parliament. Both of them wanted out while they still had time to build other careers.

Yet each of them will carry the scars of what happened that week. Pyne, at least, left knowing who his friends were and who were not. As far as any politician can.

The swearing-in of the Morrison ministry had been incredibly awkward. For those watching, it made for uncomfortable viewing. Josh Frydenberg, the new treasurer, now ranking second in the Liberal Party, had many reasons to feel proud, and perhaps one not to. He hugged his old friend Greg Hunt and gave him a peck on the cheek. It was stilted, and to this day their relationship has not been properly repaired.

Michaelia Cash wore a broad, fixed, determined smile for the cameras. As well she might. Cash should have been dropped long before. She had been a great asset, and then turned herself into a giant liability.

Cash had been unable to do media for months. Not only was she under a cloud over the tip-off by her office to media about an impending raid on the AWU by the Australian Federal Police, but she had threatened, when Labor was questioning her about the role of her staff, to talk about rumours involving some of Bill Shorten’s younger female employees.

Her threat to relay salacious scuttlebutt was made in anger after provocation; however, Cash refused to apologise, ignoring advice from friends and colleagues alike, including Cormann, urging her to admit in the cool of the day that she had made a mistake. Her intransigence compelled them all to defend her, even though their hearts weren’t in it. She was the perpetrator of another bleak period for Turnbull, who was forced to back her, and then she betrayed him even after he had confided in her about the darkness that had enveloped him after he lost the leadership in 2009. He had told her that if it happened again he would leave.

Morrison kept her in the cabinet, even though there were other good women who should have been promoted ahead of her. Cormann had insisted on this, just like he insisted that she walk out with him and Mitch Fifield to tell the world that Turnbull was done for. Turnbull staffers watched, shaking their heads in disbelief. They said later that Cash had received more help from their office than any other cabinet minister, down to them writing her lines for her press conferences.

Six weeks after the swearing-in, at the beginning of the parliamentary week in the third week of October, Pyne had mellowed enough to invite Cormann to dinner at Canberra’s exclusive Commonwealth Club.

When I asked Pyne why he had issued the invitation, he replied, ‘I felt sorry for him. He has shredded his reputation. He has suffered personally immeasurably. I can see it on his face.

‘I am a nice person. I could see how broken he was by the catastrophe he was involved in. I couldn’t add to that pain any longer. I had frozen him out for six weeks. I wanted the world to swallow me up [at the swearing-in]. I couldn’t bear to talk to him.

‘I couldn’t keep adding to his pain. He made an incalculable error of judgement.’

It was a difficult dinner. Pyne asked Cormann why he had done what he did. Cormann replied they had convinced him they had the numbers to topple Turnbull. ‘So what? Who cares?’ Pyne said. ‘Malcolm made you. It was your responsibility to stay with him to the end.’

Pyne also says he told Cormann that night he had overheard their conversations in the monkey-pod room. He told Cormann he had heard him say he was going to sound him out about being Dutton’s deputy. Pyne says Cormann responded by saying, ‘I wouldn’t know, mate – I was never in the monkey-pod room.’ Pyne insisted he was. ‘I said, “I heard you talking in the monkey-pod room.”’

It sounded like two fibs from Cormann. Dutton supporters also confirm he was in the room, and while he told Pyne subsequently and others during the days of madness that he was convinced Dutton had the numbers, he told a different story to Ciobo over dinner in January 2019 in Davos at the World Economic Forum – he never thought Dutton had the numbers, and he had not been involved in planning the challenge.

It left Ciobo questioning everything and everybody he thought he knew.

Beyond his comment about his close friendship with Cormann, which says it all, Dutton is reluctant to give a blow-by-blow account of what happened before and during the coup, including whether Cormann voted for him in the first ballot – although the strong inference is that he did.

While Cormann was in Davos, his lunch buddy, factional ally, and fellow Dutton backer Michael Keenan quit on Australia Day. To those who knew Keenan, it was not a surprise. He cited family reasons, including the birth of his fourth child, for not recontesting his seat of Stirling, which Liberals at that stage feared they would lose, along with a slew of other seats in the west. They ended up holding them all after a last-minute rush of undecideds to the much-safer harbour provided by the Liberals.

The friendship between Ciobo, Keenan, and Dutton was strained, to say the least. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, Keenan was white-hot with rage against both Dutton and Cormann. According to what he told others, both of them had assured him that all the planning and numbers were solid. He felt humiliated, and believed the events would leave a stain on his career that would never be erased. He was shattered.

They all insist their friendships have now repaired. All is forgiven, if not forgotten.

After revelations that her colleagues had banded together to block her leadership bid – with not a single MP from her home state of Western Australia voting for her – Julie Bishop quit as foreign minister, and then in February 2019 announced her resignation from parliament altogether. The two most popular Liberals were gone. Bishop was humiliated by her low vote for the leadership, felt betrayed by the strategy that had wrought it – which, she says, blindsided her – and then was infuriated by Morrison’s decision to keep Cormann and Dutton in the cabinet in their previous positions.

According to Morrison, Bishop quit the frontbench because she could not bear to sit in the same room as Cormann and Dutton. Bishop herself was not convinced that Morrison really wanted her there, and admits she was furious that Cormann and Dutton had paid no penalty for destroying Turnbull and wrecking the government. She blamed them for the catastrophe, and then watched them get off scot-free. She was convinced that Cormann had been part of it all along, and that Dutton had been plotting for months, and yet no punishment was meted out for what they had done.

‘I was disillusioned by the fact that those who tried to bring down Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, who didn’t have the numbers to do so, were prepared to continue, and there were no consequences,’ Bishop told me.

‘There’s no message sent to those to say, be very careful when you embark on such an exercise.’

This contrasted with Morrison’s offer for her to stay in her foreign affairs portfolio, which she regarded as lukewarm and half-hearted. Her strong impression was that her services were no longer required. Before the coup, Turnbull had shunted her aside, preferring to rely on Cormann and Dutton, and then she felt Morrison regarded her as surplus to requirements, even though she remained the most popular Liberal, and one who worked tirelessly for marginal-seat holders to raise money and get votes.

‘By that stage, I didn’t want to be part of the cabinet,’ she said. ‘I understood Dutton and Cormann were going to retain their positions, there were no consequences.’ She decided not to accept Morrison’s offer on principle, and then, after turning it down, held a press conference in a striking pair of red heels that became an elegant piece of political history – like their owner – and retreated to the backbench. Relations with most of her West Australian colleagues were frosty, with other MPs saying she barely spoke to them after the coup.

Morrison never had any intention of punishing either Dutton or Cormann. He calculated that he needed them both more than he needed her to keep the government together; not because he valued their counsel as much as Turnbull had done, and not because he relied on them as conduits to conservatives, but to provide some semblance of unity, particularly for the all-important base.

When I spoke to him, Morrison conceded that Cormann had been damaged by the events, saying that was why he had warned him against defecting. But, he said, he has helped Cormann with his ‘rehabilitation process’.

He described Cormann as a ‘bloody good minister’ and a very important minister in the government, stressing that his job as prime minister was to ‘put the show back together quickly, and the show needed him’.

While he was disappointed with the decision that Cormann took that week, Morrison asks himself, ‘Do I think that he was plotting for months, and all of that? No, I don’t. I take him at his word that none of this began for him until, at the very earliest, that spill on Tuesday.

‘I don’t believe that he was either aware or involved up until that point. Now, I may have been naive, I may have believed him too much, I don’t know. And frankly, now, it doesn’t matter to me. It just does not matter; it’s irrelevant. He took some decisions that week, like a lot of people took decisions that week in the circumstances, and that’s politics, and you’ve got to get over it and move on and work together, and that’s actually what has happened.’

Morrison says he and Bishop got along very well that week. He understood why she was running, and there was no antagonism. They had an ‘affable’ conversation the night before the ballot.

But he says it’s ‘rubbish’ to say his offer to her to stay in cabinet as foreign minister was half-hearted. He says he wanted her to stay.

‘I wanted her in – I wanted her to be foreign minister,’ he said.

‘She told me that she couldn’t sit in a room with Dutton and Mathias. And that’s why she couldn’t take the job. And I said, “Well, if not you, who should the foreign minister be?” And she said, “Marise”, and I said, “Good, because that’s who I would have given it to.” But I was fair dinkum in asking her, and she said no.’

Morrison says Bishop did not put it to him that it was either her or Dutton and Cormann, because she knew they were in and did not ask him to rethink that.

‘I had no beefs with anybody. I mean, I wasn’t – they weren’t running against me,’ he said.

‘My point was, look, Malcolm’s lost. I was sad about that, but I ran, Peter ran, I won. So why would I want to carry on the venom? There was no venom between Peter and I [sic], at all, or Mathias and I. I was annoyed at the decision Mathias had made, but, you know, Mathias and I have had our disagreements over the years, we get over them – we’re professionals.

‘To rebuild the party, you have to bring everybody in. And I wanted her in, but she chose not to be in.’

In February, when Bishop announced she would quit parliament, she gave a short, dignified speech, and then bolted from the chamber without staying to hear Morrison and Shorten respond. Subsequent comments she made that she was the one who could have beaten Shorten were deemed by some of her former colleagues to be unhelpful to the government, and even Warren Entsch said he regretted having voted for her.

Bishop was wrong in one important respect about Cormann and Dutton. They might have kept their cabinet positions, but they had each lost a lot. Cormann was a much-diminished figure. His influence in the government had waned. He was hollowed out, and was not expected to stay in parliament for long.

Dutton’s prospects of re-election were not helped early on by his dumber-than-dumb accusation that his Labor opponent, Ali France, an amputee, was using her disability as an excuse not to live in the electorate. France gave as her reason the fact that she could not find a suitable house, but would move into the electorate and renovate one if she won the seat. Dutton apologised but, incredibly, it took him a couple of days to do it. A concerted campaign by GetUp! to dislodge him failed miserably. On election night, he quoted Paul Keating from 1993 to describe his win as ‘the sweetest victory of all’.

Not content with killing him, the delcons also wanted Malcolm Turnbull dismembered. Turnbull did not help himself by refusing to tweet or even do a robocall in favour of his preferred candidate, Dave Sharma, for his old seat of Wentworth during the by-election campaign, and then by appearing in a special Q&A on the ABC as the sole guest.

He stayed mute during the campaign. However, when friends, former colleagues, and former staff cautioned him against doing Q&A, he told them he was not going to be a ‘trappist monk’. And he began writing a book about his own life and his own version of events. It was never in his nature to stay silent or avoid the spotlight, but he was in danger of wrecking his legacy and becoming another Abbott, or another Rudd.

Apart from registering his initial support for Sharma, who was a former diplomat and generally regarded as an outstanding candidate – the sort that the Liberals would need to rebuild – Turnbull refused pleas from everyone, from Scott Morrison down, to do something to support Sharma.

Turnbull’s son, Alex, made a number of interventions, all against the Liberals, which did nothing to help his father, and created turmoil in the family. It put Turnbull in an invidious position. He could come out in support of Sharma and fuel the soap opera surrounding his family, or stay silent and face the accusations of not wanting to help or, worse, of acting in concert with his son to sabotage the campaign.

Morrison, his office, and other Liberal MPs were 100 per cent convinced that the leaking of the Ruddock report on religious freedom in the latter stages of the Wentworth campaign was the work of former Turnbull staff. The staff denied it was them. They pointed the finger at members of the review committee.

The leak was very unhelpful because it alerted people to existing legislation, passed by the former Labor government, that not only allowed schools to ban gay teachers, but gay children, too. The report actually recommended making it more difficult for children to be banned; however, the fact they were able to do it at all – and ban gay teachers as well – played very badly, not just in Wentworth.

The government also didn’t help itself with a series of blunders. Morrison jumped into the middle of a dispute incited by Alan Jones doing his bully-boy routine against the CEO of the Sydney Opera House, Louise Herron. Jones, well known for his love of the sport, wanted the opera house to be used to advertise the Everest horse race. Morrison agreed with Jones, describing the opera house as Sydney’s biggest billboard. Morrison was thinking like the marketing man he used to be, not like the prime minister.

Equally crass was Morrison’s announcement only days out from the Wentworth vote that the government would consider moving the Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was a crude attempt to appeal to the 12 per cent of Jewish voters in Wentworth. It had nothing to do with Australia’s national interest – he knew the Indonesians would not like it – yet he announced it anyway. Cabinet ministers were both appalled and fearful. It did not win Sharma, a former ambassador to Israel, a single vote. The blatant politicking behind it probably cost him votes, when he already had that section of the Jewish vote locked up. Sharma had written an opinion piece months before suggesting the move, but it was Morrison’s call. It was Sharma’s first outing as a candidate, and although he was consulted about its merits, after putting the case for and against the move, he was happy to leave the decision on whether to throw it into the middle of the campaign to the supposed experts. Morrison made the wrong call. It rattled his MPs because it looked panicked and desperate. Which it was. It reminded them of the Gillard government’s abrupt ending of the live-cattle trade with Indonesia after the Four Corners documentary on the cruel treatment of the animals in abattoirs.

The day before Morrison announced the possible move of the embassy, Coalition senators had voted for a motion sponsored by Pauline Hanson stating that it was OK to be white, a slogan with racist antecedents she pinched from the Ku Klux Klan and the American alt-right. It was a monumental stuff-up, and they had to have another vote to reverse it. This incident would play out very badly for the government in the later debate on the emergence of white supremacists in Australia following the murders by an Australian man of 50 Muslims at mosques in Christchurch.

One of Morrison’s less believable lines – as the third prime minister in five years from the same party – was his plea to Wentworth voters not to plunge the Coalition into minority government by voting against Sharma, because it would create instability.

Around the same time, just to add to the sense of crisis permeating government ranks, the Nationals were imploding.

It’s a close-run thing, but Michael McCormack was one of the least charismatic leaders the Nationals had ever had. First prize would have to go to Warren Truss, who was nevertheless well regarded for his breadth of knowledge and his sage political advice, particularly in cabinet.

McCormack failed to fire. The Nationals felt he was being walked over by the Liberals on every issue, but particularly over agri-visas, which farmers were pushing to address worker shortages, and the so-called big-stick energy legislation, which would force energy companies to divest. So leadership speculation, which had been rumbling, erupted. In the run-up to Wentworth, Barnaby Joyce declared on TV that if they offered it to him, he would take it. Those who like Joyce say he stuffed up by putting it out there in the middle of the by-election. Those who don’t like him say he never had the numbers, and that no one was offering it to him anyway. It was too soon – he hadn’t spent enough time in rehab, and he was a big negative for women. National MPs said their wives didn’t like the idea, so if they didn’t, other women wouldn’t like it either.

David Littleproud, a notable absentee from a media event featuring Morrison and McCormack in South Australia to talk about getting more unemployed to work on farms, was keen, and rightly mentioned in despatches as a future Nationals leader, but was way too green – in terms of experience, that is. Nobody had the numbers. McCormack didn’t have enough to secure his position beyond question, Littleproud wasn’t putting his hand up, and Joyce, who was, didn’t have enough support to knock him off, while Darren Chester stuck with McCormack.

Joyce’s frustration built, boiling over in the party room, in the week after the Wentworth vote, against Kevin Hogan, who had gone to sit with the crossbenchers after Turnbull’s ousting. It was a curious arrangement. Despite leaving cockies’ corner for the crossbench, Hogan continued to attend Nationals meetings, and had been preselected again for the Nationals for his seat of Page. Hogan reckons his people loved the fact that he was a quasi-independent. It was all too much for Joyce. ‘You are sitting with the fucking Labor Party,’ he exploded at Hogan. It was duelling f-words as Hogan fought back.

The dissatisfaction with McCormack continued, with eruptions every few weeks, and with Joyce usually at the centre of them. The instability showed no signs of abating until the day after the election. The Nationals had held all their seats, even Cowper, which they had thought they would lose to Rob Oakeshott because of Luke Hartsuyker’s retirement. McCormack’s leadership was safe for the time being, at least from Joyce.

The week leading up to the Wentworth vote was one of the worst of the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison government. Unsurprisingly, it ended with a swing against the Liberals of 19.2 per cent in the primary vote, handing the seat to Independent Dr Kerryn Phelps, who once upon a time had been a prospective Liberal candidate. The final two-party-preferred result, at 52.5 to 47.5 per cent, was a bit more respectable, but it did little to diminish the anguish or the anger at Turnbull’s dumping and around his refusal to help the party.

For the first time that Liberals could remember, in 20 years of volunteering at booths in the electorate, Wentworth had to call for help from interstate so the booths could be staffed on polling day.

As much as he loved and admired him, calling him ‘a great man’, even Pyne was exasperated by Turnbull’s refusal to help out in the by-election. He spoke to him four times in the week leading up to the poll on 20 October. In the end, even Pyne was left wondering whether Turnbull wanted the Liberals to win it.

Dutton said, ‘I think that Turnbull sabotaged Wentworth, and will do his best to sabotage us at the election.’

Turnbull’s argument was that he had left politics, and that if he intervened it would be a distraction. Which, of course, ignored the fact that his refusal to publicly support Sharma was also a distraction. Pyne was convinced that if he had said something, Sharma – who lost by 1,500 votes – would have won the seat. He thought Turnbull’s arguments for not stepping in were ridiculous.

Turnbull’s enemies needed no excuse to hound him – they would have done it anyway – but he gave them reason to. Perhaps he would have changed the result, although it is doubtful. Voters were so cynical by then, they would not have believed anything any of them said, least of all accepted that the wounds were healing.

Occasionally, when his discipline lapsed, Turnbull threw his enemies a bone to keep them in the hunt. From New York, where he sat out the Wentworth campaign, he tweeted that Peter Dutton should be referred to the High Court, and then he was taped describing Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd as embittered (true) and as miserable ghosts (also true).

Turnbull remains deeply unapologetic about his ‘miserable ghosts’ remark. After all, he never said he would never say anything. He just didn’t stay in parliament to do what Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd had done.

Turnbull made the off-the-cuff remark in New York to a group of young Australians. It was supposed to be off the record, showing once again that there is no such thing. He was trying to explain why he got out rather than hang around. He was not the first nor the last former prominent politician to offer advice to his successors. John Howard and Paul Keating did it regularly, and Peter Costello would pop up around budget time to critique the Coalition’s budgets.

In one notorious interview with Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7.30 on 7 May, the night before the 2018 budget, Costello disparaged the economic performance of his successors, saying that national debt as a proportion of the GDP, 19 per cent, was at about the same level as when he became treasurer in 1996.

‘It took us 10 surplus budgets to pay it off last time. You’d be doing well to pay it off in 10 surplus budgets this time,’ Costello told Sales.

‘If I may say so, Leigh, I think the probabilities are we’ll never get back to where we were. You and I will die before that happens.’

Morrison as treasurer had always been careful to pay tribute to Costello for his work, and often described him as a mentor. He was both hurt and infuriated by what Costello said. He had been disappointed before by other Costello interventions, but swore that he would never forgive him for what he said in 2018. Undeterred, after the 2019 budget, Costello criticised the Coalition for offering tax cuts beyond two elections, expressing doubts that people could believe they would ever be delivered.

Turnbull’s interventions were pretty mild, compared to his predecessors. Nevertheless, the point of escaping to New York had been to remove himself from politics.

He came home the day after the Wentworth by-election, declaring he was retired and would not be involving himself in ‘partisan politics’.

Days later, Morrison sent Turnbull as his envoy to Indonesia to attend a conference on oceans, and to use his friendship with President Joko Widodo to smooth over the tension caused by the embassy decision. Barnaby Joyce and Abbott were furious.

President Widodo, like so many others, had been blindsided by Turnbull’s removal, and was then taken by surprise by the embassy decision. He asked for Turnbull to attend the conference, seeing that Morrison couldn’t, and then Morrison asked Turnbull to try to smooth things over on the subject.

After his meeting with Widodo, a liberated Turnbull offered his own view that he thought moving the embassy was a bad idea. Even though it was, Turnbull saying so publicly did not help either Morrison or himself.

Alan Jones goaded Morrison into poking Turnbull, and it rebounded, provoking a damaging spat between the former prime minister and his successor. Morrison told Jones on air that Turnbull had exceeded his brief. Turnbull corrected Morrison and the record publicly by saying he had received formal and informal briefings from Morrison and the government on the embassy decision before he left for Indonesia. Whatever relationship they had left was badly frayed.

In that first long-form interview on ABC’s Q&A with Tony Jones, when a member of the audience asked him why he was no longer prime minister, Turnbull said he did not know why – it was up to those who had dislodged him to answer.

Turnbull did not criticise Morrison, but while he did not blame him for what happened, it left a chink.

Asked if Morrison was a Steven Bradbury or Niccolò Machiavelli, Turnbull replied, ‘I take Scott at his word. The insurgency was led by Peter Dutton, was obviously strongly supported by Tony Abbott and others. Scott did not support it.

‘I assume you mean he took advantage of a situation that was created by others. Well, I suppose, you know, that is how he’s presented the circumstances himself, and I’m not in a position to contradict that.’

So the next day, when Morrison was again asked why Turnbull was no longer there, he took a stab at it, saying that his colleagues had felt Turnbull was out of touch with core Coalition supporters. Morrison also defended the right of the parliamentary party to change leaders at any time.

‘Those who had advocated that [change] made points about the need to better connect with the values and beliefs of Liberal, National, and LNP members across the country,’ he said.

Turnbull was growing increasingly suspicious about the role of Morrison’s lieutenants in the coup, and Morrison was angry that Turnbull was going out of his way to either not help, or to be deliberately unhelpful.

This reached a peak in early December 2018. From Argentina, where he was attending a meeting of the G20, Morrison called Liberal powerbrokers in Sydney to secure the preselection of disruptive backbencher Craig Kelly, who was threatening to sit on the crossbench and then run as an independent if he was disendorsed.

The government had had another horror week with the defection of Julia Banks to the crossbenches.

Turnbull contacted members of the New South Wales state executive to insist that Kelly – whose preselection he had saved in 2016 – should face the local preselectors. The moderates had already chosen a candidate, and they had the numbers to dump Kelly. Turnbull’s remarks were leaked, including that he had said Morrison should go to an election on 2 March, as he had planned to do by calling it as soon as the Australia Day weekend had finished, in order to save the New South Wales government of Gladys Berejiklian. As it transpired, Gladys saved herself.

Turnbull was quoted as telling New South Wales Liberal Matt Kean, ‘We should force Scott to an early election because all he’s about is keeping his arse on C1 [the prime minister’s car].’

Turnbull’s ill-advised intervention guaranteed that Kelly was once again, incredibly, saved – this time by Morrison – even though he, along with Abbott and senator Jim Molan, had vigorously advocated for greater democracy in the party when Turnbull led it. Despite the fact that Kelly had to be saved twice from his own preselectors, the executive was not about to side with a former prime minister against a serving prime minister. Once again, it showed there was no penalty for bad behaviour.

Molan, who had been dropped to an unwinnable spot on the Senate ticket, below Hollie Hughes and Andrew Bragg, asked Morrison to intervene on his behalf, too. Even though Molan had lost at a preselection attended by more than 500 people, he attributed his loss to factional vote-rigging and to false assurances from Morrison’s factional powerbrokers. Morrison’s patience had been worn out by Turnbull, and he was irritated with Molan for blaming others for his failure. There were conservative voters, supposedly supporters of Molan’s, who had not bothered to turn up for the preselection ballot. Besides, Morrison’s friends pointed out that Molan had voted for Dutton – so why, they asked, would Morrison go out of his way to help him? Molan was privately scathing about Bragg, and pitched for Liberals to vote number one for him below the line.

This sparked an unwelcome spat with the Nationals during the campaign because of a threat to their third spot on the agreed Coalition New South Wales Senate ticket. Both Hughes and Bragg were duly elected. Molan, whose term expired at the end of June, wasn’t. He was then tipped to take the senate vacancy created by the appointment of Arthur Sinodinos as ambassador to Washington, but moderate liberals wanted him punished for what he had done during the campaign, and – again – Morrison let it be known he thought Warren Mundine should get the slot.

After Turnbull’s remarks about Morrison had been leaked, Turnbull tweeted to confirm his intervention. He then went on Radio National and said it all again, repeating his call for Morrison to go early, dobbed in Kean as the source of his ‘arse’ comment while not directly confirming it, and did a brief doorstop as well.

Friends, as well as enemies, were on fire, and his friends were angry and exasperated. He was wrecking his legacy, as well as looking like he was out to wreck the government. Even though he hotly denied he was behaving in any way like Abbott, he was causing himself needless damage.

Incensed by Turnbull, despite his earlier claim that the party room was entitled to change leaders when they wanted to, that night Morrison called a special party-room meeting to change the leadership rules in order to make it harder to organise coups. Under the new rules, an elected prime minister could not be cut down unless two-thirds of MPs voted for a spill. Such rules would have saved both Turnbull and Abbott.

It was supported near-unanimously, albeit not necessarily 100 per cent enthusiastically. In an effort to quell criticism after the spill, Trevor Evans, the member for Brisbane, sent detailed, thoughtful responses to constituents who emailed him. In response to one on leadership rules changes, Evans said he was in two minds.

‘I understand the aim perfectly, but I’m also conscious that a prime minister being “first among equals” has been part of Australia’s Westminster traditions, as well as every other commonwealth country who inherited this system over the past few hundred years, and it hasn’t seemed to have been a problem for much of that time,’ he wrote.

‘I’m reflecting on whether the root cause is fundamentally a weakness in the system that has become evident only after the breakdown of the traditional media model, or whether the root cause is something peculiar to this current generation of leaders in Australia.’

Good point, and one that other Liberal MPs agreed with, even though they were not game to say it. Evans thought Morrison’s change was useful ‘at least for the purposes of the public looking to draw a line under the leadership change in 2018’, and proved to some people that the government and the party room was listening to feedback and responding to it. Still, he remained unconvinced about its efficacy.

‘Whether the rule change ultimately works remains to be seen. For instance, it is interesting to hypothesise what happens to a future leader’s position, in practice, in the event that a spill motion achieves less than the required two-thirds majority, yet reveals that the leader’s support is less than 50 per cent of the party room,’ he told me.

‘I suspect, ultimately, nothing beats majority support.’

Too true, and something that both past and prospective leaders need to reflect on, particularly those who believe that comebacks are possible, particularly if MPs forget and forgive what happened yesterday.

Which brings us back to Abbott. The internal hostility towards Abbott intensified after the spill. From the top to the bottom, they wanted him gone. They wanted an end to the Turnbull–Abbott wars that had ripped them apart. One cabinet minister who had stuck with Abbott, and then stuck by Turnbull, was disappointed by Turnbull’s subsequent behaviour, but conceded that he, at least, had left parliament.

Angry and exasperated by Abbott’s continuing interventions, he asked, ‘Now how do we get rid of Abbott?’

Abbott finally dropped the pretence that his guerrilla/gorilla campaign was some high-minded battle to save the soul of the Liberal Party.

He admitted it was all deeply, deeply, personal between himself and Turnbull. Writing in The Australian on 29 October 2018, where a cavalcade of commentators and opinion writers had wittingly, willingly, supported his charade that he was putting forward constructive alternative policy prescriptions for the Liberal Party, Abbott said, ‘In my judgement, it’s much less a philosophical divide that’s hurt the party over the past five years than a clash of personalities. I’m confident that the internals will be better handled now that some leading players have changed.’

At least that rang true, unlike what he reportedly told Tasmanian Young Liberals on 20 August, when he was trying to bring Turnbull down over the NEG, after he had held every conceivable position on climate change under the (warming) sun.

‘It is not about personalities, it is not about him, it is not about me, it is about what is going to give Australians the best possible energy system that delivers affordable, reliable power,’ Abbott said four days before Turnbull was deposed.

‘What we have got to get is a contest. The only way we can win the next election is to have a contest over policy, not over personalities. We have got to be the party that is on the side of getting prices down and let Labor [be] the party all about getting emissions down.’

This charade was further exposed in early March during a debate with Zali Steggall and other candidates for his seat of Warringah, when Abbott said he no longer believed that Australia should pull out of the Paris agreement, because there was now a new prime minister and a new energy minister.

This coincided with another intervention from London by Turnbull, when he said he had been deposed because of fears he would win the election, not lose it. He described it as a peculiarly Australian form of madness. It did sound mad.

What he should have said was that there were people who hated him so much they were prepared to do everything in their power to destroy him, even if it meant destroying the government.

Abbott was more upfront about his motivations when he told David Speers for his book On Mutiny that one of Turnbull’s fundamental mistakes was not to hold out an olive branch to him after the 2016 election.

‘[Mr Turnbull] made it absolutely crystal clear that as long as he was leader, I would never be in his cabinet,’ Abbott told Speers. ‘I said, “Fair enough, Malcolm, that’s your decision, but I’ll do my thing on the backbench. You’ve got more to lose than I have.”’

Then he confessed that he went on to make life tough for Turnbull, regularly critiquing him in media interviews. Everybody knew exactly what he was doing, while the delcons, the delusional conservatives, maintained the fiction that Abbott had been trying to help. Abbott’s belated admission was a statement of the bleeding obvious.

Abbott’s admission did not come as a great surprise to Turnbull. Abbott had made threats along those lines to him a number of times. Turnbull was never going to reinstate Abbott. He always believed that as prime minister, Abbott – or his office – had briefed against his own ministers and leaked from the cabinet. Further, he suspected that if Abbott were to be reinstated he would find a reason to resign from his portfolio, ostensibly on a matter of principle, with the aim of plunging the government into crisis. Bottom line: he could not be trusted. In Turnbull’s judgement, it was better to have Abbott outside rather than inside, and most of his ministers agreed with him. Beyond Abbott’s band of delcons, no one was twisting Turnbull’s arm to reinstate Abbott.

When Turnbull was gone, Abbott zeroed in on a new target.

Ignoring his promise not to wreck or undermine, he switched his attention from Turnbull to Morrison. Peter Hartcher reported in Nine newspapers an anecdote from 2015 in the wake of the disaster of the 2014 budget, saying that Morrison had told Abbott to dump Hockey as treasurer and replace him with … Morrison himself. Morrison denied this, although he would not have been alone in telling Abbott to dump Hockey. Dutton had, too.

Abbott was also keen to remind people – sotto voce, of course – about the messy battle for Cook, which saw the disendorsement of the preselected candidate, Michael Towke, after allegations of branch stacking. Morrison replaced Towke, and then Towke was later cleared. Abbott thought Morrison was tainted by the whole thing and that it showed a lack of integrity. Fancy that.

Abbott also experienced a second empty-chair moment on Friday 14 September at the Balgowlah RSL at a meeting of the Warringah Federal Electorate Council to endorse his preselection for the 2019 election.

With a beer in front of him, Abbott gave an eight-minute speech, during which he paid tribute to the Turnbull government for its achievements, quickly followed by his declaration that he felt ‘entirely vindicated’ by the policies of the Morrison government. At that point, one of those present later confessed he felt like throwing up. Abbott stressed the importance of everyone rallying around the government and staying united, especially as he still had ‘a good deal of public life left in me’.

Everyone took that to mean he wanted to be opposition leader after the election, which pretty much everyone believed they would lose.

Certainly, as he fought to keep Warringah, he made it much clearer – in subsequent on-the-record interviews with journalists, including Troy Bramston – that, yes, he did want his old job back.

When the time came for preselectors to tick off on his endorsement, a significant number showed what they thought of him, his behaviour over the past three years, and his policy positions. The official vote was 68 for him, 30 for Anybody But Bloody Abbott (ABBA), and two informal. The first time that something like this had happened was in February 2015, when two disgruntled backbenchers decided they had had enough and moved a spill motion. The empty chair got 31 votes. Six months later, his prime ministership was over.

By all accounts, the preselection meeting was boisterous. The chairman on the night, Greg Smith, refused to announce the result, rejecting a formal request from former Liberal senator Chris Puplick to announce it, prompting endless speculation about the numbers against Abbott being much higher.

Smith accused those demanding the numbers of being out to wreck the government. Teena McQueen argued it was for the good of the party to withhold the numbers. His opponents said that the failure to disclose the figures rendered Abbott’s preselection illegitimate, as well as making a mockery of his campaign for greater democracy and transparency.

The strength of anti-Abbott sentiment was accentuated by subsequent votes, where Abbott’s candidate, Walter Villatora, who did have competitors, was smashed for the position of vice-president in two ballots. In the first, he went down 66 to 44, and in the second, 62 to 22, with 17 for ‘other’.

Abbott and the delcons downplayed the significance of that night, although it was a clear warning that a grassroots revolt was brewing against the local member. Abbott’s colleagues, who were not thanking him for what had transpired three weeks before, could see what was coming. The Abbott haters in Warringah had decided months before not to formally challenge his preselection for the 2019 election. They had not wanted to create even more trouble for Turnbull by turning Abbott into a martyr. Nor did they want the prospective challenger – including one well-credentialled woman – subjected to the media Bullies and Co., who responded venomously to any whiff of criticism of Abbott or their own loopy agendas.

Nevertheless, the Abbott critics wanted him gone, so when GetUp! and others began mobilising against Abbott, they were a long way from distressed. Disgruntled Liberals and others coalesced around Zali Steggall, who had been stressing her Liberal history, which sounded good until she admitted she had never voted for Abbott. She did, however, vote Liberal in state elections.

Officials, MPs, and party members all agreed that Abbott was in deep trouble. Even family members of prominent Liberals who lived in Warringah were not prepared to vote for him. As it turned out, there was a massive 12.5 per cent swing against him on primaries. Steggall garnered 57.4 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote, leaving Abbott with 42.5 per cent. The people of Warringah, who had voted overwhelmingly for same-sex marriage, supported action on climate change, and generally wanted Liberal governments to succeed, no longer believed that Abbott stood up for them or any of the things they believed in. Although Abbott congratulated Steggall on her win, he said on election night that he would rather go out a loser than a quitter. The fact is that he lost in September 2015, and a dignified resignation then would have spared himself and the party a lot of grief. He sacrificed respect for the sake of revenge.

Craig Laundy was gutted. He had been considering quitting before Turnbull was deposed, and had foreshadowed this with Turnbull. His youngest daughter, Analise, had been diagnosed with a serious illness, and his father, Arthur, was getting older. The family, along with the family business – a string of hotels – needed him. What happened confirmed his inclination to get out.

Only a few days after the coup, as he talked about what happened, he was raw, his emotions spilling over.

‘I came to Canberra with a business, not political, background. I came here with a good heart, believing in people. I am a loyal bloke. Everything I believed to be right and wrong has turned to crap. I have had enough. I have a career to get back to,’ he told me then.

‘My old man says, “Leave, they are a bunch of pricks”, and he is right. After being nothing but loyal to the end, then to turn around and watch bastardry rewarded! I worked my guts out. At midday on the Wednesday, I texted Mathias to say, “Please can I come and see you, I need your help.” I knew what Malcolm’s numbers were. He [Cormann] said he had a press conference to do, and he would ring me after. He never rang. I texted him at 4.00 pm Friday to say, “If only you had rung” – very, very, sad day.

‘He is supposedly a hard-headed politician, and he stabbed the prime minister in the back. I had the numbers to say, “Stay with us.”

‘My theory: I think Morrison put his numbers – about 10 votes – he put them with Dutton so he could come up through the middle.

‘What I have seen in the last week is enough to last me a lifetime. It’s been an absolute privilege being there to see it. I have had a real chance to see something that was a moment in history.

‘I have been disheartened for five or six months – just the fact everyone was trying to tear Malcolm down. It’s just so brutal. I have had his back since day one. It’s a full-time gig. It’s been mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting.

‘Suse came down on Thursday afternoon, and as soon as she walked in the door I burst into tears. I said to her, “I couldn’t save him. I let him down.” She hugged me and told me I hadn’t, but I feel I have let him down.

‘As a publican, I have met plenty of people in my time who have done well and done nothing. All this stuff about him being rich, aloof, out of touch is a disgrace. He is one of the most humble and down-to-earth people I have ever met.’

Later, after vicious pieces appeared, ripping into Turnbull, Laundy appealed to Turnbull’s critics to back off. ‘The job is finished. Be gracious in victory. Let him be gracious in defeat.’

Pretty soon, though, Laundy was appealing to Turnbull to temper his criticisms, to think of his legacy, not to wreck, not to be like Abbott. Fearing Laundy’s seat of Reid would be lost to Labor without him, Morrison made a strong pitch to Laundy to get him to stay, but he resigned in mid-March. Laundy threw his heart and soul, not to mention his own money, into helping child psychologist Fiona Martin retain his seat of Reid. Despite a 1.4 per cent drop in the two-party-preferred vote, Martin held on

The emotional and physical toll continued. Mitch Fifield was not alone in lamenting what he had done.

A few months after the vote, Dean Smith said he regretted voting against Turnbull – not because he had come to forgive him for what he says was Turnbull’s belittling of him at a party meeting over same-sex marriage, but because of what followed his ousting. Smith says he underestimated the transactional cost of the change, and the extent to which Liberals had relied on the contrast between ‘Labor leadership shenanigans and our lack of shenanigans, and the lack of depth among frontbenchers to handle such a tumultuous change – the lack of integrity around all that, the immaturity, the naivety. The people who resigned then pledged loyalty, then resigned again, only to remain in the cabinet. They have kept the same faces around the table.’

Smith was not critical of Turnbull’s post-leadership behaviour. ‘I totally understand it,’ he said, although he believed it would have been better for Turnbull if he had behaved better. A few months later still, Smith had come to terms with what he had done. He had no control over those events. He had to make a snap decision on the Tuesday morning, and was glad he had voted for Dutton. As he keeps saying, being popular is not everything.

Smith says the challenge now for the Liberal Party is to find ways to communicate its traditional values in a contemporary way.

‘When you look at the last six or seven years of the coalition government, the very strong theme is this: why did it take the Liberals so long to accept the changing nature of community views on climate change, same-sex marriage, the need for a banking royal commission,’ he asks. Good questions.

Smith says the Liberals have to talk to modern Australian about small and family enterprises, their support for families, about choice for education, health, and aged care, and care for the environment.

In early October, after Morrison spent three days in the West campaigning instead of just flying in and flying out, Ken Wyatt detected a turnaround in the mood. People were reconsidering their vote. Fundraising was going well. He was also personally buoyed by the decision to call the royal commission into ageing. He doubted it would have happened under Turnbull.

MPs on the west coast were sounding more optimistic than those in the south-east. However, that optimism crashed in the New Year, and pretty soon they were rattling off five seats they feared would fall: Pearce, Stirling, Moore, Hasluck, and Swan. They were on a roller coaster. Ultimately, though, the Liberals held all their seats in the west.

Immediately after the change, James Paterson was comfortable with his role. A few months later, though, he too had softened; he was regretful. He admitted that, ‘with the benefit of hindsight’, he should have been ‘more careful’ about what he had signed up to.

He also admitted to underestimating the cost of the transaction, even though people had warned him beforehand about the after-effects of a spill. He says not being there to witness it first-hand in 2015 had influenced his pre-coup assessment of the possible flow-on effects.

‘It hasn’t worked in the way that I hoped it would,’ he said. That was partly because Dutton didn’t win, but also because ‘the change of leader hasn’t improved our political prospects’.

Paterson remained critical of the Turnbull operation and its policies; however, while he had hoped for a change in the ‘trajectory’, it hadn’t happened, especially in his home state of Victoria.

He says he thought it would be unpleasant for a few weeks, and then it would pass. He knows now how wrong he was about that.

He says he also underestimated how badly Turnbull would behave. The second time we spoke, in January, he was pessimistic about what lay ahead.

‘I think it’s going to be pretty bad,’ he said.

Andrew Hastie was unforgiving, particularly resentful over slights or perceived acts of disloyalty going back before his preselection. Given what he must have seen and done as a soldier, he sounds bruised by the brutality of politics.

It confirmed his view of just how important friends are, and reminded him that few true friends are to be found in politics. So he puts in an extra effort to stay close to his family and friends outside.

‘I might seem naïve to some people, but I am taking on these lessons and internalising them, and remembering them,’ Hastie says.

He was convinced that Turnbull would lose the election, and although it takes him by surprise, there is no hesitation when he answers the why-question.

‘There was a failure of leadership both internally and politically. Internally, we had lost confidence in his leadership, his ability to sell our values and our narrative. There was an ongoing and lingering dispute between the two sides of the party.’

He said John Howard had been able to breach the divide, and he was confident Peter Costello would have if he had stayed. He wished Costello had stayed, because if he had, so much of what had happened since 2007 could have been avoided.

‘The NEG was the final straw,’ Hastie said. ‘If we didn’t stand up now, we were just going to get shot down. I didn’t come to parliament to sacrifice my principles.

‘People were angry and disappointed with Turnbull. The Longman by-election was evidence that Newspoll might be saying one thing, but on a seat-by-seat strategy there was no pathway to victory under Turnbull.’

Hastie was not alone in being reminded about the value of true friends. Trent Zimmerman, on the other side of the political divide from Hastie, who turned 50 in October, remembered precious advice he had received from former Nationals leader Tim Fischer when he was first elected.

Fischer told him to make a list of the people he considered his 10 best friends from inside as well as outside politics, and then to check at the end of each month to see how many of them he had spoken to. Zimmerman resolved to try harder to stay in touch with them.