The Nationals are very very very united behind David Littleproud, with the party room unlikely to second Colin Boyce’s leadership challenge.

My guess? This will generate some healthy headlines for Boyce before he defects to One Nation to sit with Barnaby Joyce.

Usually this would sound crazy, but Reform has set a sort of Westminster norm which makes jumping ship less scary. A ‘leadership challenger’ defecting sounds better in print than ‘a Lower House MP’. And good luck to him, whether he stays or goes. By all accounts, he’s one of their best.

Of the Coalition breakup, Boyce said:

‘We do have to get the Coalition back together again. I will be moving a spill motion on Monday afternoon in the National Party party room to give my colleagues an option. We are now going over the political cliff, so I will be standing for the leadership. David Littleproud has made some bad decisions recently. He has upset just about everybody you can upset. I am not going to be ringing people up and canvassing them for votes. It is up to my colleagues to have a careful think about where they are going in the future.’

From the outside, Littleproud seems to be doing better than normal. Voters perked up when the Nationals defied Cabinet Solidarity in the name of commonsense, and next to Sussan Ley, he looks like a battle-worn conservative hero. That said, this may not be a reflection of internal party politics.

It doesn’t take Nostradamus to predict the Nationals’ future.

They will return to their loveless marriage, sink into old habits, beg for Shadow Cabinet seats, bicker over unpopular policy, and know that their threat to ‘split’ no longer carries any weight with the Liberals. The Nationals have a superior moral core to the current broad church, but they have been successfully moved into a weakened position thanks to the Liberals hoarding urban seats.

What happened to the Liberal leadership spill? That was a whole lot of nothing. Despite everyone agreeing that Sussan Ley must go, she is staying put thanks to Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie chickening out. The party will continue to bleed voters to One Nation until this is resolved.

There is still hope something is in the works for next week, as it was widely reported the political rivals met in Melbourne. According to MSM, there was a little leadership whisper circle involving the usual suspects.

Observers presume the Liberals are trying to orchestrate a bloodless coup. A peaceful transfer of power to a pre-arranged heir…

From MSM: ‘A source familiar with the meeting said that while it was “constructive”, talks are “ongoing”.’

The good news for those holding out hope for the Liberal Party is that both Hastie and Taylor are conservatives, not moderates. What remains unclear is if either of them will have the necessary support to break free of the moderate agenda.

Just quietly, if I were Andrew Hastie, I’d send an expensive bottle of wine to Labor’s Environment Minister, Murray Watt, for his comments earlier in the week.

From Sky News Australia: ‘[Watt] claimed that Mr Hastie’s positions on migration and other conservative policies risked aligning the Liberal Party with One Nation-style politics.’

Such a great wingman! Onya champ.

You might also find this observation from MSM about the leadership negotiation rather amusing:

Senator Paterson, who like Mr Taylor remains in the Shadow Cabinet, told Radio National this morning he believed Ms Ley had ‘the support of the majority of the party room’, including his own.

‘The first responsibility if you don’t support any leader is to tell them, and the second responsibility is to resign [from Shadow Cabinet], and I haven’t done either, so you can assume I continue to support Sussan,’ he said.

To be fair, Paterson would be hard-pressed to resign because the Liberals are running out of warm bodies to fill Shadow Cabinet seats after so many were chastised for ‘disloyalty’. Pretty soon they’ll have to start appointing The Minister for Pretty Much Everything to save space on the door.

Then we had former Prime Minister Tony Abbott wander randomly through the headlines. The ABC reported that ‘three sources’ told them Abbott was encouraging Hastie and Taylor to pick a leader and unite.

One of these unnamed Liberals called Abbott ‘hyper-interventionist’ but what other choice does a former leader have when the grip of the moderate faction is so dangerous? The ABC wrote:

Moderates are maintaining their support for Ms Ley, warning their colleagues it would be ‘unseemly and stupid’ to dump the party’s first female leader for a Coalition implosion that was not of her making.

It is such a strange comment. Whose making was this mess, if not the leader? And why does ‘modern’ politics believe that gender matters when it comes to deciding if a leader should stay or go? How is that progressive? Is the moderate faction afraid of Ley failing, or Ley’s failure proving identity politics has failed?

And can someone tell the smug politicians in the Coalition to stop calling One Nation a ‘protest party’ which is ‘not fit for government’? If they are outpolling you, what does that say about the Coalition? It’s such bad PR. Advisers need to think more carefully. If One Nation is a protest party, what are they protesting against?

Instead of playing hermit crabs with the leadership, the Coalition should get serious about addressing their entire policy approach. Preferably while they still have some members left.

There are good people trying to save the Liberal Party, but they are being attacked by the ghosts of the broad church.