In the end, Barnaby Joyce didn’t so much leave the Nationals as quietly concede they’d already left him.

He stood up from the opposition backbenches in the House of Representatives as though he’d wandered into his own political wake – the guest of honour, the eulogist and, in a way, the body.

“Walking away in part from the party in Canberra is easy. Walking away from the membership is very, very, very hard,” Joyce would later say outside the chamber.

“It’s just quite obvious, when they talk about generational change, that’s code for get out of here.”

His farewell left more questions than it answered. But one thing was clear: the most influential and charismatic Nationals MP since John “Black Jack” McEwen was severing all ties with the party after a colourful and scandal-plagued 20 years in parliament.

It was a resignation that landed with the soft thud of something long expected, delivered in a speech that sounded less like a breakaway and more like the final acknowledgement of a conversation that never came.

Since announcing his intention not to contest his New England seat again weeks ago, amid speculation of an imminent defection to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, there’d been no communication between Joyce and National’s leader David Littleproud, save a perfunctory phone call.

“That’s disappointing,” he said. And it was hard not to notice that he did not need to raise his voice for that to be the sharpest sentence of the speech. Fellow Nat MP Colin Boyce, one of his last loyalists left in the party room, flanked him.

Michael McCormack, a man whose deputy prime ministership was undermined and eventually brought down by Joyce, sat a few seats away. McCormack hung his head when the resignation came. Despite their history he’d begged Joyce to stay.

There was genuine emotion when Joyce apologised “for all the hurt” the decision might cause others. His voice softened, and for a moment, it felt like a private admission inadvertently miked for the record.

There was no bluster nor none of the trademark rolling crescendos. Just a flat, almost weary delivery as he laid out his case: 30 years as a Nationals party member ending not with a bang but a 90-second speech.

But then the pivot – abrupt and Joyceian in its gear-grinding – back to what he wanted to talk about most: cost-of-living pressures; regional struggles; and what he colourfully described as the building of “intermittent power precincts” and “swindle factories” destroying communities such as his own.

“What is really important is the Chinese communist government are breathing down our necks and each day become more provocative,” he added. “What is really important is that we have regional hospitals without doctors in them.”

Joyce said if he decided to continue in politics, he’d need to get himself into “a better position than the ejection chair of the backbench of the Coalition in opposition”.

The sentence trailed off, half-constructed, like a silo abandoned mid-build when the funding ran out. Whatever the political machinations behind him, Joyce wanted it known he was leaving the Nationals with the same grievances he arrived with – the regions doing it tough, the city not listening, decisions being made in rooms where he wasn’t invited.

Joyce was a renegade before his backside hit the Senate’s red leather in 2005, swinging haymakers at John Howard’s mandate with the sort of cheerful destructiveness most MPs reserve for private text messages.

He vowed to fight the Telstra sale. He vowed to fight workplace reform. He vowed to fight whichever Liberal prime minister had the misfortune of sharing a coalition agreement with him at any given moment. And usually, he did.

Many Nationals kept forgiving him – through floor-crossings, clandestine leadership manoeuvres, a dual-citizenship fiasco, the late-night escapades and the spectacularly public collapse of his private life. Joyce was always the exception, never the rule.

He told reporters afterwards he was weighing up all opportunities, even though he is “strongly considering” running for the Senate on a One Nation ticket, revealing he thought politics of the future was not likely to be dominated by the major parties.

“The world is changing and I think Australia is actually last to it, it’s just that with compulsory voting it’s a little more sticky here,” Joyce says.

“And it’s changing because how people get their information is changing.”

If there was a final image, it was Joyce standing there beneath the bright chamber lights, equal parts defiant and wounded – a political veteran whose long innings ended not with the roar of the crowd, but with the quietest sound in Canberra. Silence from his own side.

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