Turnbull fury still burns

Just like the Terminator, our most recent former PM will not stop ...

IT’S now dawning on the Liberals that Malcolm Turnbull wants the Morrison government dead. Annihilated. Slaughtered at the next election.

Turnbull isn’t just angry at being dumped as prime minister. I think he deeply, achingly needs the Liberals to now go down in a screaming heap.

That is what’s now behind his rampage to drive out Liberal MPs and force the Morrison government to an early election he knows would destroy it.

That is why he refused to lift a finger to save his seat of Wentworth at last month’s byelection, but has lobbied to dump conservative MP Craig Kelly and send Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to the High Court.

That is why he is now privately consulting with Liberal enemies – new independent MP Kerryn Phelps, Liberal defector Julia Banks and even Labor leader Bill Shorten.

It seems he has gone berserk and it stuns me that it’s taken senior Liberals this long to figure out his real game.

It’s risky to perform amateur psychoanalysis, but Turnbull himself has spoken several times, and movingly, of how his mother walked out on his father and him when he was not yet 10.

“Just essentially, the house emptied and she just … she vanished,” Turnbull told the ABC.

Almost choking, he read out a letter he’d kept from his mother to his father: “Poor little Malco. Do you remember once when he was having static asthma and I gave him the white rabbit with floppy ears? He couldn’t breathe but he still smiled and put out his hands for it’.”

Turnbull said his mother’s abandonment had driven him: “If I work harder and do better, will she come back? Is it something about me that has caused her to leave?”

His wife confirmed: “It’s hard to imagine how terrible a kid would feel and insecure and unloved and. you know, not worthy of your mother’s love.”

Well, one way such a child might deal with rejection as an adult is to make the person who dumped them seem the unloved.

In 1991, billionaire Kerry Packer cut Turnbull out of a deal to take over the Fairfax newspapers, despite having been almost a father-figure to the young lawyer.

Turnbull repaid that rejection by leaking damaging information on the deal to the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal, and Packer’s bid failed.

In 1999, Turnbull was head of the Australian Republican Movement, signing up celebrities to say how wonderful his republic would be.

But the public voted ‘no’ in the referendum and Turnbull reacted to that rejection like he’d been cheated of love, raging that the no-voting John Howard “was the prime minister who broke this nation’s heart”.

In 2009, the Liberals dumped Turnbull as Opposition Leader after he tried to make them back Labor’s global warming policy.

Furious at being rejected again, Turnbull crossed the floor to vote against the Liberals and embarrassed new leader Tony Abbott by attacking his global warming stand and claiming Abbott had confessed – in a private conversation – to being “a bit of a weather vane”.

But of all Turnbull’s revenges, this one is the most operatic and no wonder. His rejection this time was huge, robbing him of the huge affirmation that comes with being prime minister of Australia.

The Liberals must now lose the next election, so Turnbull can prove they were wrong to reject him and cannot live without him. They, not he, must be the unlovely and unloved.

Now senior Liberals finally see the truth and they include former allies. Take Nick Greiner, who Turnbull picked to be the Liberals’ federal president.

Told on Monday that Turnbull was now demanding Prime Minister Scott Morrison call an early election which he’d obviously lose, Greiner admitted Turnbull’s meddling was “certainly not helpful and it wouldn’t appear to have been intended to be helpful”.

Same with Matt Kean, a NSW minister from Turnbull’s own soft-Left faction and a member of the Liberals’ NSW executive.

Turnbull rang Kean on Sunday to get him to stop Morrison from imposing a peace plan on the party that would save Craig Kelly from being stripped of his preselection.

Turnbull mocked Morrison for just trying “to keep his arse in C1”, the prime minister’s car, and said he should be forced the polls.

Kean was so appalled by the treachery that he told journalists, and the faction bosses who were about to defy Morrison backed him instead.

Turnbull may have been thwarted this time, but don’t think he’s finished with the Liberals. This war is to the knife.

Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights