Turnbull sought to return the Liberal Party to the progressivist non-Labor tradition that began with Alfred Deakin and ended with Malcolm Fraser. He was not tempted by the kind of populist conservatism that had flourished in the party since Howard had gazumped One Nation over border control and won the 2001 election. Turnbull regarded the apology to the Stolen Generations as simple decency. He was “relaxed and comfortable” about the consequences of the cultural revolution of the 1960s – feminism, gay liberation, multiculturalism – which the right wing of his party regarded as the politically correct excesses of self-hating, anti-Western elites. Turnbull sought to unsettle the government over economics, especially after Rudd’s assault on ideological neo-liberalism, by characterising the prime minister as a Whitlamite big-spender and a born-again Keynesian. More deeply, however, he sought to distance the Opposition from the do-nothing climate-change denialism that had dominated the Liberal Party under Howard, at least until its eleventh hour. For Turnbull, no less than for Rudd, climate change was the greatest challenge of the age. Rudd under-stood that without the support of the Opposition he could not secure the passage of his emissions trading scheme. Turnbull believed that if the Liberal Party opposed the scheme the Coalition would be crushed at the forthcoming election and, even more importantly, no longer worthy of respect. In late November last year, these different political judgements provided the basis for an admittedly extremely timorous deal.

The right wing of the Liberal Party was never reconciled either in general to Turnbull’s brand of liberal progressivism, which the arch-reactionary John Stone had labelled the philosophy of Wentworth Man, or in particular to his support for action over climate change. Yet if Malcolm Turnbull had been a cannier politician he might, none-the-less, have prevailed. By mis-characterising the balance of the numbers in a heated party-room debate, Turnbull triggered a rebellion led by Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott. In the face of this rebellion, Turnbull staked his leadership on his refusal to accept the compromise offered by his enemies – to delay the passage of the emissions trading legislation until after Copenhagen – and openly described the Minchinites as the right-wing wreckers of the Liberal Party. If Joe Hockey had accepted the Minchin compromise he would today be leader of the Liberal Party. Unfortunately, he was either too principled or too foolish to agree. By advocating a nonsensical conscience vote on the most important political issue of the day, Hockey was the first candidate to be eliminated in a three-cornered leadership contest. The contenders now represented the most progressive and the most conservative interpretations of contemporary Liberalism – Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. Abbott became leader of the Liberal Party by a single vote. He had finally to be taken seriously.

Tony Abbott has told us he became genuinely interested in politics in 1976, at the age of 18, when he accepted an invitation to attend a conference of the National Civic Council, the Catholic political organisation run by BA Santamaria. The Santamaria movement that Abbott joined was characterised by belief in Catholic rural settlements and social justice for the ordinary working class; by militant domestic anti-communism and unflinching military support for the US in the Cold War; by a staunchly conservative version of Catholicism, which had responded with alarm to the liberalising tendencies that had blown up since Vatican II; by a profound faith in the sanctity of family and traditional male and female roles; by an equally profound hostility to the new social movements – feminism, gay liberationism, environmentalism – and to the forces of  “nihilism” and “relativism” that had supposedly taken root among the intellectual class.

In the early days the Santamaria movement focused on the daily struggle against the communist leadership of the trade unions. By the time Abbott joined, the focus had shifted to the struggle against the left-wing university students thought to be providing the new social basis for violent revolution. Santamaria now believed that a new Dark Age was approaching, like at the time of the fall of Rome. “We are living,” he told a National Civic Council audience in 1978, “in the moment of the waning of Western Christian civilisation.” Despite the apparent hopelessness of the task, the role of young Catholics like Tony Abbott was to devote their lives to the grand battle to save civilisation and turn back the cultural tide.