Divided Liberals limp to day of reckoning
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Reluctant contender: Joe Hockey in Canberra yesterday (AAP)
What would Robert Menzies make of this day? Three Catholics, fighting over the ruins of his Liberal Party.
Late into last night, the meetings continued, the frantic hamster-wheel of negotiations, the tinselly deals struck one minute and renounced the next.
What is it about this party? Two-and-a-bit years ago, it was running the country. These days, it looks like a speeded-up vaudeville comedy routine, a sort of "Who's on First?" patter in which transitory detail inevitably gives way to the comic effect of the whole.
Yesterday afternoon, Nick Minchin convened a meeting in Joe Hockey's office which was also attended by Tony Abbott, putative deputy candidate Peter Dutton and Opposition business manager Christopher Pyne.
The purpose, hilariously enough, was to try to establish an approach to the emissions trading legislation that everybody could live with.
In the face of Mr Hockey's insistence that the matter be a conscience vote, Mr Abbott eventually lost his temper.
"So," he summarised bitterly.
"Malcolm Turnbull's for the ETS. I'm against the ETS. And Joe - nobody knows what the f**k you stand for."
And so was lost the last possibility that the Liberal Party could use this morning's events to present a united front.
As the day dawns in Canberra this morning, the Liberal Party has three candidates to lead it.
There's the leader it already has - Malcolm Turnbull, who is so determinedly wedded to his deal with the Government that he would rather lose his leadership than give an inch.
For years, his detractors have whispered that Mr Turnbull is not a creature of the Liberal Party.
In recent days, he is more of a Louis XIV figure, whose "Je suis l'etat!" ("I am the state!") fulfils the demand for strong leadership, but scares the bejesus out of foe and friend alike.
In the past 24 hours, talk inside the party has turned from whether Malcolm Turnbull can survive to what he will do after his defeat.
Cause a by-election in Wentworth? Create a new party?
Neither is likely, but the very fact of the speculation suggests that a group conclusion has been drawn about the regent's viability.
Then there's Tony Abbott - the great 'People Skills' himself, whose defiance of political orthodoxy is beginning to rival Mr Turnbull's own.
What other leadership candidate would have had the magnificence, on Sunday, to ignore not just one, and not even two, but three central tenets of the political picture opportunity?
"Don't wear silly hats" has been defied before.
"Don't wear budgie smugglers" has also been defied, though with tragic results for the former NSW Liberal leader Peter Debnam, whose photoshoot in the briefest of swimming costumes heralded his imminent failure at the polls in 2007.
"If you have an extremely hairy back, for God's sake keep your shirt on" is not so much an accepted political maxim as an article of common sense, but it is sage advice nonetheless.
And yet: There was People Skills on Sunday, prancing about in the shallows wearing naught but a scrap of lycra, a lifesaver's cap and a fascinatingly goatish pelt.
Three months ago, Mr Abbott was advocating a vote for the Government's emissions trading scheme, just to get it out of the way.
Last night, he vowed to stand against Joe Hockey because he could not countenance the prospect that any Liberal would vote for it, even as part of a conscience vote.
And finally, there's Joe Hockey, the reluctant candidate who was dragged to the contest by the siren promise that he would be the consensus candidate, and now finds, in the closing hours of the campaign, that he has become the compromise candidate instead.
This isn't a non-viable position for him to be in.
It's just what Kevin Rudd would call non-optimal.
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