The Prime Minister’s potty, semantic quibbling in London has taken up with characteristic zeal by Peter Van Onselen. His column for The Australian, ‘Reactionaries are destroying Liberals’ philosophical foundations’, makes for an (also typically) uninspiring read.

To his credit, Van Onselen says what the PM didn’t have the guts to: ‘This is my party, and if you don’t play by my rules, I’m telling my daddy!’ By the by, Daddy here is – not Turnbull – but the necronomically reanimated corpse of Sir Robert Menzies.