The only Newspoll that matters for Turnbull is the thirtieth

As the 30th Newspoll looms Malcolm Turnbull is caught in a web of his own making. Picture: AAP.

Poor Malcolm Turnbull, caught in a trap, a web, a snare, ambushed and assailed, boxed in and brutishly bushwhacked by Malcolm Turnbull.

Malcolm Turnbull set the trap for himself on September 14, 2015. Standing on the parliament lawns, he announced his resignation from cabinet and challenged a first term prime minister who had been in the job for two years to a spill in the party room.

Turnbull gave three reasons. A lack of economic leadership. A lack of cabinet process and the loss of 30 consecutive Newspolls.

“The one thing that is clear about our current situation is the trajectory. We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott’s leadership,”

Last year he told Miranda Devine he had regrets.

“I do regret having said it only because it allowed people to focus on that, rather than substantive reasons,” he said.

This is classic Turnbull. He doesn’t regret making the statement. He regrets only that his words have been manipulated and misconstrued his words by others.

There is another way of looking at this. He regrets his words now because what he thought would occur did not. He believed the old Turnbull charm would rub off on the Australian people and, enamoured by that cheeky grin, we’d pump out the love for his leadership.

We didn’t.

Indeed, he may have thought that having established Newspoll as the primary metric for his success, so devilishly clever would he be at being prime minister, we would forget all about the 30 consecutive Newspoll line.

We haven’t.

Since then the Coalition’s two-party preferred has risen no higher than 48 per cent but has sunk as low as 45 with a 47-average mark deeply etched in to the point where the margin of error can be measured only in the fourth decimal point and beyond.

Turnbull did win an election in 2016 but went so close to doing the unthinkable, reducing a 2013 landslide to leave his government on the brink of minority government within the space of three years.

It is worth remembering what happened on the eve of the spill. On the Sunday evening, at a rural property outside Queanbeyan owned by the then member for Eden-Monaro, nine Coalition MPs assembled at Peter Hendy’s men’s shed. Instead of standing around the pool table and having a few beers and a laugh, they plotted the removal of a first term prime minister who had delivered the party government in a landslide win just two years earlier.

Three of those Machiavellian geniuses are gone. So clever were they at establishing an alternate political future, they neglected to consider their own and became part of its past — Mal Brough, Wyatt Roy and Peter Hendy. Brough jumped before the 2016 poll while Roy and Hendy sought the verdict of the people and received unequivocal nays for their trouble.

Three are in cabinet, including Turnbull, Arthur Sinodinos and Mitch Fifield. Scott Ryan is in the outer ministry. Craig Laundy and James McGrath are assistant ministers. Minister for Education and Training, Simon Birmingham was not present at the shindig but phoned in to assess the mood.

As with Labor’s conspirators when they dispatched Rudd as Prime Minister, this group failed to comprehend, let alone execute, a basic plan beyond removing their target and installing their chosen one.

This afforded them one day’s worth of celebration before they began to appreciate the enormity of what they had done and the great, gaping hole in the plan became apparent. What would the toppled leader do?

And now we know. In fact, we’ve known almost from day one of Turnbull’s ascendancy.

The day after he was knocked off, Tony Abbott pledged he would not snipe, would not white ant, would not plot or needle his successor but has done nothing but and really, can you blame him?

This is a man driven by politics his entire life. Anyone who thought Abbott would go quietly, wander off into the sunset to a highly paid drinks trolley around the world, is a fool. Revenge is his best friend now.

Turnbull, having disparaged Abbott for government by slogan now babbles out ‘jobs and growth’ mantra-like. The only strategy the government has is Kill Bill and while Australians have every right to be sceptical about Bill Shorten as a prospective PM, the plan is not working.

As with Gillard post Rudd’s crude dispatch, Turnbull loosed upon himself a war on two fronts and we all know how that story ends. Crushing defeat, obliteration, Götterdämmerung in Gungahlin.

Let’s be clear. Turnbull will survive the 30th Newspoll and the 31st, the 32nd and beyond. There will be no challenge, at least not in the foreseeable future, even if he does the unlikely and calls a spill to assert his authority as a few commentators have speculated.

I would not discount a furniture saving exercise from the Liberal Party once we start getting into 40 plus Newspolls with the numbers stubbornly refusing to budge. It may or may not be Abbott but it will be someone who lays claim to bring the base back to the fold.

The alternative is a grim and grotesque death march to the next election and the prospect of political oblivion for many Coalition MPs, as many as 20 by the 53-47 numbers, should they be evenly expressed across the country.

To paraphrase the old political axiom, the only poll that counts is the 30th Newspoll. The big day of reckoning is almost upon us and Turnbull is like a fur trader caught in a bear trap, clutching at his bleeding, broken leg, ruefully thinking, “Oh yeah, that’s where I left that.”