With a likely Liberal party room ballot looming, the Coalition’s predicament has become impossible to ignore. The parties are haemorrhaging votes to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, struggling to connect with the wider electorate, and oddly muted in their prosecution of Labor.

Against that backdrop, an idea once dismissed as fanciful begins to look less so: a return to parliament – and perhaps the leadership – by Tony Abbott.

Abbott, for all his flaws, has confronted such a predicament before. In 2009 the Coalition was bitterly divided and political obituaries were being written for the party of Menzies and Howard. Kevin Rudd, then prime minister, inhabited the political stratosphere. Malcolm Turnbull, by contrast, inspired little alarm in government ranks – or much curiosity beyond them.

Media sophisticates dismissed Abbott as a right-wing throwback to a bygone era. Yet as opposition leader he united warring tribes and reconnected the Coalition with outer-suburban and regional Australia. He confounded his critics, came within a whisker of toppling a first-term government in 2010, and then secured a thumping victory in 2013 – delivering Labor one of its heaviest defeats – a huge parliamentary majority that Turnbull nearly lost three years later.

More recently, Abbott has sketched a diagnosis of contemporary conservatism that reflects former Spectator publisher Andrew Neil’s thesis on the broader malaise afflicting centre-right parties across the Western world.

Across Britain and Europe, Neil argues, mainstream parties have often pursued a similar mix of policies: lax attitudes to mass immigration; sweeping and costly decarbonisation programs whose burdens fall disproportionately on ordinary households; and the embrace of fashionable cultural orthodoxies that cast a jaundiced eye over national history. All this has unfolded against a backdrop of stalled social mobility and rising living costs. In such conditions, establishment parties have struggled to adapt – and voters have drifted toward insurgent or populist alternatives.

Abbott could arrest that haemorrhage on the Coalition’s right flank. His forthright interventions on immigration, the economic costs of net zero targets, and Labor’s failure to exercise fiscal discipline amid falling real incomes channel a brand of common-sense conservatism that could reconnect the party with middle Australia.

Abbott has been out of parliament since 2019 – long enough, perhaps, to have absorbed the lessons of his turbulent prime ministership. Although he is 68, he is eight years younger than Winston Churchill was in 1951 when he returned to Downing Street – and men today can expect to live far longer than in the post-war era. Ronald Reagan, incidentally, was a few weeks shy of turning 70 when he became US president in 1981.

Abbott is certainly fitter than most MPs and senators. He is also battle-hardened without being consumed by office, and he would subject Anthony Albanese’s government to a level of forensic scrutiny conspicuously absent since 2022. Politics is his vocation.

During his years in the political wilderness, he has remained immersed in policy debates. He played a prominent role in defeating the 2023 Voice referendum. His weekly IPA videos circulate widely among conservatives and party activists. He writes regularly for The Spectator, the Australian and the Wall Street Journal. His recent book on Australian history attracted rave reviews not only in this magazine but in (of all places) the Guardian.

True, during much of his 25-year parliamentary career Abbott was widely regarded as a polarising figure. For many metropolitan voters – particularly in Teal seats – his brand remains controversial. Any Liberal revival built around Abbott would therefore carry real electoral risk.

That is precisely why a second act could look different. Experience has a way of sanding down rough edges. Abbott has learned message discipline, understands the new media ecology far better, and no longer needs to prove his ideological purity. He might be more inclined to govern than to posture.

The Canberra press gallery – with rare honourable exceptions – is unlikely to take such speculation seriously. Never mind that political history is littered with second acts: not just Churchill, but Menzies, de Gaulle, Nixon, Clinton, Howard, Abe, Netanyahu and Mahathir, who returned as Malaysia’s prime minister at 92. Political comebacks are rarely tidy, but they are hardly unprecedented when parties lose their way.

There are two obvious objections, one of which is likely to surface in the coming week: a party room contest to choose the next Liberal leader. Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie are formidable figures who merit serious consideration. Would a former prime minister back from exile be a distraction for the new leader or, if she somehow prevails, Sussan Ley? Perhaps. But the timeframe remains a year or so away. In any case, the opposition bench is thin on depth, experience and what is crudely called ‘cut-through’. On those measures, Abbott scores highly.

The other objection is logistical: how does Abbott return to parliament? His old seat of Warringah is now firmly Teal territory. Any comeback would require the active cooperation of party organisations – state divisions, local branches and federal strategists – prepared to clear a path in the name of electoral revival. That might mean a Queensland or NSW stronghold whose members want a champion, or a western Sydney electorate tiring of a Labor party seemingly captive to identity politics.

I do not pretend to know where such a seat might be found. But Australian parties are highly pragmatic institutions when threatened. Machines mobilise, retirements are negotiated, by-elections contemplated, organisational vacancies weighed as staging posts. When political will coalesces inside a party, mechanisms have a habit of following.

Churchill once remarked that politics is ‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics– many times’. The question is whether Tony Abbott wants to test the proposition again.