As Tory MPs appear to descend into a panic of buyers’ remorse over the election of Liz Truss, they would be well advised to take a deep breath and reflect upon the absurdity of removing a leader after six weeks. As they do so, they might find it instructive to look across the sea to Australia to see the folly of constant leadership turmoil and the ever more lethal poison it injects into the bloodstream of political parties.

Over the past decade and a half, Canberra – whose politics are famously robust – earned the unenviable taunt of having become the ‘coup capital of the South Pacific,’ as both sides of politics butchered their leaders in a fratricidal game of conspiracy, political assassination and payback. During three consecutive parliaments, the prime minister whom the public had elected was torn down by internal turmoil before they faced another election. On each occasion, the government paid the price at the next election.

Kevin Rudd – elected largely on a ‘time for a change’ sentiment in 2007 after the 12 stable and successful years of Liberal (i.e. Conservative) government under John Howard, was finished by Julia Gillard in a back room coup, orchestrated by faceless trade union leaders whom Rudd had offended, shortly before the election of 2010. There is a near-to-universal belief in Australia that Rudd would have won that election (probably with a narrower majority); the public’s sense of outrage at the disrespect for their choice, and frank incomprehension at how it had happened, left Gillard without a majority. It was the first time in almost a century that a newly-elected government had not won a second-term majority.

Gillard limped on in minority government with the support of the Greens, her position growing weaker by the day. With certain electoral defeat looming in 2013, many of the same string-pullers who installed her orchestrated a counter-coup to reinstall Rudd (who had, in the years since, been white-anting Gillard with unrelenting and barely concealed vigour, even though he sat in her cabinet as foreign minister). The reinstated Rudd was smashed at the election of 2013 by Tony Abbott.

Abbott had every reason to expect to govern for a full term and beyond. It was his misfortune that one of his senior ministers, Malcolm Turnbull, had his eyes on the prize, was none too subtle about his ambitions, and was running out of time (he was three years older than Abbott). Taking full advantage of a number of serious political mistakes which Abbott made, and pointing to his rapid loss of altitude in opinion polls, Turnbull displaced Abbott after only two years. Turnbull led the party in a lacklustre campaign in 2016 and – only just – fell over the line, losing most of the seats Abbott had won from Labor less than three years earlier. Turnbull’s political authority within the Liberal party never recovered. His early success, when he had enjoyed massive initial popularity and was viewed as the party’s saviour from the error-prone Abbott, was written out of history. He was the coup plotter who had knifed another newly-elected prime minister and squandered Abbott’s hard-won majority. His enemies, ardent for payback, smelt blood in the water.

In September 2018, following two more years of the drumbeats that sound with the bringing down a leader – undermining, leaking, negative briefing to the press to create a confected sense of inevitability – Turnbull was challenged for the prime ministership by the right-wing cabinet minister Peter Dutton, who was supported by the right’s other senior leader Mathias Cormann. Turnbull did not trust Dutton though he underestimated his ambition. Cormann however had won his trust; his betrayal of Turnbull was a real et tu Brute moment. As a result of tactical voting by Turnbull’s supporters, Dutton was denied the prize, which was handed to Scott Morrison. He went on to win a famous victory in 2019 – the public did not blame him for the coup, and were inclined to ‘give the new bloke a go’ – and then a massive defeat last May. The irony of the Liberal party’s latest coup – and what made it utterly unjustifiable – is that Turnbull had begun to regain his lost authority and to recover in the polls: at the time he was displaced he was only 4 per cent behind Labor overall and ahead in almost all of the key marginal seats. This was a stronger position, six months before an election, than John Howard had enjoyed in two of the four elections he went on to win. Most people I know (including Lynton Crosby – no friend of Turnbull’s) say he would likely have won in 2019. But so great was the hatred of Turnbull among his political enemies; so fractured and factionalised had the Liberal party become; so deeply had the poison worked its way through the party’s bloodstream; that the inner game of revenge meant more than the big game of winning the next election.

Pardon this brief gallop through the sorry history of Australian politics over the past decade or so. But I must now pose the questions to which this prologue has obviously been leading: does any of it sound familiar? And, more importantly, does the political merry-go-round of prime ministers being brought down by their parliamentary colleagues ever end well? I will leave it to you, dear readers, to answer the first question for yourselves. But the answer to the second question is, emphatically, no.

Any leadership election will, of necessity, have winners and losers. If the rival sides can come together swiftly and bury the hatchet, the party’s interests are best served. If the leadership election results from an incumbent being forced out, that is much more difficult – and, on that score, Theresa May’s dignity and avoidance of troublemaking for her successor after July 2019 was both hugely admirable, and very far from the norm. The worst political scenario of all – and the one which Australia has regularly experienced – is when a leader is newly elected, and those disappointed with the result immediately begin scheming the bring them down: as Gillard did to Rudd, Rudd to Gillard, Turnbull to Abbott, Abbott (through his proxy Dutton) to Turnbull. It becomes an ever-more-rapidly spinning cycle of revenge and payback and, at every new turn, the position of the government becomes worse, as the public looks on, initially with bewilderment then cynicism and, ultimately, contempt.

To those Tories who, looking at the shocking opinion polls, think ‘things are so bad they can’t get any worse,’ my message – and having lived through this, as a member of both Abbott’s and Turnbull’s cabinet – is, emphatically, ‘Yes they can!’ The Hail Mary pass mentality which grips politicians in a difficult position to try anything – anything! – that might change the game, almost always makes things even worse than they were before. To talk seriously about dumping a new leader, who has just won a big victory after the longest and most thoroughly-scrutinised hustings any political party has ever undertaken, is stark raving madness.

But Tory MPs, in my experience, are not stark raving mad (at least, hardly any of them). The problem is that they become so bound up in the inner game of Westminster that the game becomes the political reality. Gilbert and Sullivan mocked this phenomenon 140 years ago, when Private Willis, Grenadier Guardsman and wry political philosopher, famously sang at the opening of the second act of Iolanthe:

But then the prospect of a lot
Of dull MP’s in close proximity
All thinking for themselves, is what
No man can face with equanimity.

The key words here are ‘close proximity.’ What politics looks like from the inside is very different from the way the public – and the rank-and-file members of the party – see it.  Too often, MPs in the Westminster bubble forget that. But the public don’t forget – or forgive – that the MPs have forgotten them. At least that’s the way it looks, and perception is political reality.

The campaign against Liz Truss is being orchestrated from within the bubble. The public can see that. Dumping her after just having elected her would move the dial from seeming desperate to being risible. It would be the political equivalent of someone who, having just bought a house and seeing the market then sharply fall, immediately puts it up for sale.

What MPs need to do is accept they are in an undoubtedly difficult position, but their only option, without making a bad situation worse and the Conservative party a laughing stock, is to settle in for the tough grind ahead. They also need to tell the wannabe Francis Urquharts, fanning the flames from their safe constituencies, to get lost.

It is most likely two years until the next election. Winning will be difficult, but it is not impossible. A lot can happen until 2024, and opinion polls are a snapshot in time. It is only in the six months or so before polling day that they become more reliably predictive. But what is absolutely predictable is that if the herd mentality once again takes effect and MPs madly fly into a leadership contest, they have no hope of winning in 2024. Because they will have gifted Keir Starmer the most lethal line of all: ‘If you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the country.’ It works every time.