Madness when cool head is needed

IF the Prime Minister hoped to start 2015 by uniting his team, the Australia Day knighting of Prince Philip did exactly that. The only problem? The unified position was brutal condemnation of Tony ­Abbott’s judgment.

“What was he thinking?” one Liberal MP asked. “He combines the judgment of Gillard with the madness of Rudd” another said. “It takes a rare talent to turn our ­national day into a joke”, was how one marginal seat MP put it. The view from the frontbench wasn’t any less scathing: “We have gone down the rabbit hole with Alice,’’ one minister said.

For a Prime Minister needing to claw back credibility with voters and re-establish his bond with colleagues after what was a messy end to 2014, the knighting of Philip was at best a distraction. At worst it speaks to how out of touch Abbott is with modern Australia and with the seriousness of his political quagmire.

One frontbencher said he ­assumed the PM would at least use his new, somewhat self-indulgent, classification of honours to award eminent Australians the titles of Knight and Dame. “Instead he picked a 93-year-old royal and didn’t appoint a Dame”.

In recent weeks the PM has been forced to answer leadership questions because of poor polling, low personal satisfaction ratings, messy policy backflips and a lack of confidence in his office. Nonetheless leadership talk has seemed silly (and unlikely) given the mess Labor made of removing a first- term PM.

But we might look back on yesterday as the moment when fence-sitters changed their collective minds on whether talk of removing the PM needs to be seriously considered. That’s how bad the judgment call was. If no one in the PMO tried to stop Abbott knighting Philip that is concerning. If they did, and he refused to listen, that’s even worse.

Either way Abbott is being mocked — dangerous territory for any prime minister, especially one whose colleagues were already ­beginning to doubt his capacity to lead.