Loyal Liberals winced at the weekend when Pauline Hanson branded Angus Taylor ‘a smarmy management consultant’, but they shouldn’t. The longstanding joke is that she has terrible taste in men, backed up by a history of falling out with her political partners: John Pasquarelli, David Oldfield, David Ettridge, Rod Culleton and Brian Burston, not to mention Mark Latham, whose feuds are a bipartisan service.

Coming from Senator Hanson, disapproval might just be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Or not.

In any event, as Margaret Thatcher said, ‘If they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.’

Still, given that Hanson was calling on the Coalition to focus on destroying Labor, it was a strange way of sharing the love.

Politics has no shortage of smarmy management consultants. There’s a whole smarmy army. Its distinguishing feature is the ability to sniff out public money whichever way the political wind blows. Climate catastrophe? Sell renewables. Pandemic panic? Sell jabs. When one emergency stops paying, discover another.

Taylor is not one of these people. From his first term in 2013, he opposed wasting money on renewable energy and wrote the policy papers to prove it. As Energy Minister he stuck to his guns, creating a capacity market, which forced energy generators to provide baseload power 24 hours a day. Critics called it ‘Coal-Keeper’. Fans called it keeping the lights on.

It was Taylor and then resources minister Matt Canavan who ensured that the Coalition backed the approval of the Adani coal mine, even when then Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was weeping in then Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office demanding that he block it because the voters of Kooyong were more concerned about cutting emissions in India than earning export revenue to pay for Australia’s health, welfare and defence budgets.

Frydenberg has no regrets about his climate follies. He spent the last week relaunching his political career, with an autobiography, titled A Grateful Son. As former PM John Howard quipped, ‘Somebody said to me the other day, that’s a very modest, self-effacing title’, adding, ‘It must be the only modest, self-effacing thing he’s ever said.’ Everyone laughed, even Josh. Modesty is easier to take when delivered by somebody else.

Since then, Frydenberg has modestly diagnosed Canberra’s lack of political courage, prescribed a new direction for the Liberals and left open the small matter of who should lead them there.

He supports ‘Angus and the team’, he assures us. The personnel, apparently, rather than the policies.

‘It’s a tough job,’ he concedes. Especially with a former treasurer on the sidelines suggesting that the road back to government begins with a higher GST.

This was ‘courageous’ in the Yes, Minister sense: the sort of proposal civil servants pretend to admire while bookmakers lengthen your odds. It didn’t go down well. Even his former staffer, Victorian opposition leader Jess Wilson, pointed out that, ‘The last thing Victorians need is to see the price of everything go up.’

But Frydenberg was undaunted, urging the Liberal party to ‘reclaim’ the centre of politics, saying, ‘We as a party hold very few of the metropolitan seats which dominate the political landscape in Australia, and that’s what we need to win back as part of a broader strategy to get back to government.’

Frydenberg may think that he, and the voters of Kooyong, are at the centre of politics but most political strategists recognise that there are more seats to be won out where the battlers live in the suburbs than in well-heeled inner-city metropolitan seats.

So, here’s a test for Mr Komfortable of Kooyong. Join the commuters heading to Melbourne’s outer suburbs. Visit the firebombed tobacconists and the malls with machete-wielding youths. Ask people juggling groceries, rent and petrol whether a higher GST would improve their lives. If you get a warm reception, check whether the tobacconist is on fire.

Frydenberg also took on critics of his ‘Hey, Big Spender’ Covid budget record, saying, ‘I know lots of people want to go back and rewrite history’ but, as ‘Australians were fighting over toilet paper in the aisles of our supermarkets… we had the deputy chief medical officer come to us and say that up to 150,000 Australians could die’, adding, ‘We were staring into the abyss.’

Yes, we all remember Professor ‘Pantsdown’ at Imperial College London, predicting the United Kingdom would suffer 510,000 deaths and the US 2.2 million.

But those of us who didn’t go Covid crazy remember Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who kept calm and carried on with no lockdowns, kept the schools open, and protected the elderly and the vulnerable.

Thanks to him, Sweden avoided the economic and social devastation that we in Australia suffered. And the cumulative excess mortality was about the same for both countries.

‘Ah,’ Frydenberg explains, ‘What we wanted more than anything was for the Australian people to know their government has their back.’ He says people stop him in the street to thank him for his Covid spending. No doubt. The people still paying for it are probably at work.

Frydenberg was furious when Morrison secretly added Treasury to his collection of ministries. But since Morrison only did it because he was suffering Covid Derangement Syndrome, that seems a bit uncharitable, especially when Frydenberg was equally afflicted.

Now he says he doesn’t want that to detract from what the government achieved. The grievance is in the book; the forgiveness is on the publicity tour.

Frydenberg writes that the Liberal party has become ‘obsessed with who is leading it, rather than who could be voting for it.’ One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce was blunt, asking him to ‘cut the BS’ over his ambitions.

As for One Nation, if the Liberals want to win back the voters they lost to it, they could start by winning back the Liberal MPs who were right about Covid: Craig Kelly and Gerard Rennick; and being nicer to Alex Antic. They could patch up their differences with staunch conservatives like Cory Bernardi. And with Joyce.

But that’s highly unlikely. There are still too many in the smarmy army, watching which way the wind blows, looking for the next deal, and obsessed with backing the next leader rather than winning the next voter.