Disunity is not death in the Liberal party. It is a lifestyle choice

It is a long time since normal rules applied to the Victorian Liberal Party.

Anyone with a smidge of common sense and knowledge of political history would assume that, following the events that took place within the Liberal party room on Friday morning, John Pesutto is cactus.

John Pesutto after the vote on returning Moira Deeming to the Liberal party room.Credit: Justin McManus

How else to interpret a chain of events in which Pesutto had to use his casting vote to stop Moira Deeming, a bitterly estranged MP hellbent on his political destruction, from rejoining the team he leads?

Well, that’s where these Libs are an altogether different beast. In this party room, disunity is not death. It is a lifestyle choice.

As antithetical as it sounds, Pesutto does not need a united party room to take the opposition to the next state election and perhaps even win it. With due respect to John Howard’s iron rule of arithmetic, he doesn’t need a majority of Liberal MPs to support his leadership.

All he needs is for the party to be unable to agree on someone else. That was the status quo before Friday’s cliffhanger vote. But is that where things remain?

It is truly gobsmacking that 14 Liberal MPs, at a time of the day when none of them should have been on the turps, thought their party room would be a better place for having Deeming back in it.

Deeming was treated shabbily by Pesutto and her party. Federal Court Justice David O’Callaghan’s decision makes this clear. It was outrageous for Pesutto to falsely accuse her of cosying up to neo-Nazis because a pack of them gatecrashed a rally where she’d spoken about women’s rights.

Deeming deserves an apology from Pesutto and a retraction of the defamatory statements he and others in the party made about her.

But the idea of Deeming returning to the party after spending the past 18 months waging lawfare against its leader is, even by Victorian Liberal standards, completely bonkers.

This tells us something about the obsession that some MPs – and many of the branch members they represent – have with the tension between transgender and women’s rights, an issue which is serious and genuine but hardly at the top level of the state’s Maslow order of needs.

It also tells us something about Deeming’s unfailing capacity to make others around her lose their minds. People will offer different opinions on whether Pesutto’s part in this caper is more akin to Ben Stiller’s bumbling sincerity or Matt Dillon’s con job, but there is just something about Moira.

Deeming thanked the MPs who supported her return, which she declared was now inevitable. “I will get the apology that’s owed to me,” she said. “It is only a matter of time before I return to the party room.”

Pesutto said with a gloriously straight face that the vote concluded the matter. “This marks a bookend to this issue.”

The only certainty about this saga is that more chapters will be written, with each page sillier than the last.

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