The morning after the 2007 federal election, TV crews, photographers and reporters crowded outside the Turnbulls' home at Point Piper, hoping for a reaction to Peter Costello's shock decision to go to the backbench.
Malcolm was "having some family time", the journos were told by intercom, but might speak to them after lunch. Seasoned Turnbull-watchers wondered how long he could resist.
There had been a universal expectation that Costello would take over the leadership – some papers had even trumpeted that day that he was ready to serve. But at an 11am press conference in Melbourne, Costello had called for generational change instead.
With Costello gone, and John Howard beaten in Bennelong by Labor's Maxine McKew, the field was wide open: Alexander Downer, Brendan Nelson, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott, Andrew Robb and Julie Bishop were all touted as potential candidates. Turnbull, though, was first, stepping out of his front gate to nominate on the Sunday afternoon. He announced his candidacy with gusto, urging the party not to waste time in a funk, and offering an energetic small-L liberal remake and no looking back.
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull in the House in 2009.Credit: Glen McCurtayne
Paul Keating, elated over Howard's defeat, gave free character assessments of the likely contenders and plumped for Bishop, the only woman. He thought Nelson was better when he wore an earring and Abbott was a "young fogey", while Turnbull was like a firecracker: "I fancy Malcolm is like the big red bunger. You light him up, there's a bit of a fizz, but then nothing, nothing."
The Liberal Party, however, was deeply torn between defending its legacy and recognising a need for change. The divisions were not new, of course, but Costello's failure to challenge Howard meant they were never fully exposed in government.
Turnbull's rapid declaration brought everyone out of the woodwork, although surprisingly for someone who had less than a year's cabinet experience, he was soon the frontrunner, despite dark mutterings about "treachery" over his cabinet leak on Kyoto only days before the election.
Both Abbott and Nelson put their hands up, Downer and Hockey took a few days to rule themselves out, and Bishop and Robb lined up for the deputy's post.
Dr Brendan Nelson becomes emotional during a press conference as he announces his resignation from the federal Parliament.Credit: Kate Geraghty
As Nelson rang around, he encountered a surprising number of MPs who wanted to get Turnbull over and done with: "Look, we've got to get rid of Malcolm, but the only way to get rid of him is to make him the leader. Whoever's going to be the leader now will not be our next prime minister. Brendan, you just need to serve on the frontbench and let nature take its course." He ignored their advice, unwisely, and chose to have a go.
The only conservative candidate, Abbott, pulled out the day before the vote, leaving a choice of two moderates in Turnbull and Nelson. It was purely a tactical retreat.
Turnbull had already frightened the horses that day, criticising Howard for his failure to apologise to the stolen generations, and for getting tied up in semantics over the difference between "sorry" and "regret". The comments were enough to shift six to 10 votes from the hard right into the Nelson camp on the anyone-but-Turnbull principle, because Nelson would soon back the apology himself.
At the Thursday party meeting, Turnbull lost narrowly, by 42 to 45. It was certainly not a decisive win for Nelson, who made Bishop his deputy and Turnbull his shadow treasurer.
Turnbull pledged his loyalty to Nelson but gave him absolutely none: he simply refused to accept the decision of the party room, and the undermining began immediately.
Just after Nelson gave his acceptance speech, he was in his office with federal director Brian Loughnane, Julie Bishop's chief of staff Murray Hansen and a couple of his own staff, discussing the press conference they were about to have. Suddenly the door was flung open, with force, and in stormed Turnbull, yelling at Nelson and poking his finger at him, almost right into his chest.
One person who was there recalls Turnbull calling Nelson a wimp, telling him his address was funereal, he should man up, lead the party to win the next election and on and on. Nelson said calmly: "Thank you for telling me what you think. I don't agree with you. I can only imagine the emotions going through you, you must be extremely disappointed. I'm always happy to see you, but I would prefer it if you made an appointment, and certainly to knock on the door before you come into the room"' Turnbull did not say another word, but somebody leaked news of the spat to the media.
Nelson, trying to smooth the waters, called it a "pep talk". It got worse from there.
In the first week, polls suggested the party had made the wrong choice, showing Turnbull was much more popular than Nelson. On the back foot already, Nelson told reporters: "It's day five, I mean gimme a break."
Soon afterwards, Turnbull called Nelson's chief of staff, Peter Hendy, who later recalled Turnbull telling him that his job was to get Brendan to resign in the next few weeks because Brendan was hopeless and he would damage the Liberal brand so much that by the time, he, Turnbull, took over, the next election would be unwinnable.
"I told him his suggestion was ridiculous, but he was absolutely serious and he kept calling and making it again, and on occasions he called Brendan and made the same suggestion," Hendy said.
In March 2008, Turnbull pulled his old trick, launching a new, comprehensive tax review at the Sydney Institute without telling his leader. By this stage, Nelson's polls had worsened as Rudd enjoyed the longest political honeymoon on record – within four months of the leadership ballot, Nelson was seen as a dead man walking.
By the 2008 budget, the relationship between opposition leader and shadow treasurer was so broken that Turnbull was left out of the loop altogether as the Coalition's centrepiece strategy, a 5 cent cut in fuel excise, was worked up: Nelson was convinced anything he showed Turnbull would leak.
When Turnbull did find out, he slammed the proposal in a detailed internal email as fiscally and environmentally irresponsible and was supported by Costello and Downer.
Nelson's budget-in-reply speech actually went down well, which was no doubt galling to Turnbull, who had earlier proposed that he give the speech, in a break with convention, because he would "obviously" do a better job.
Nelson was finally enjoying his first bit of positive momentum as leader when, sure enough, that weekend, Turnbull's email to Hendy turned up in The Sunday Telegraph.
Turnbull flat out denied leaking it, but Nelson clearly had no incentive to do it – once again, the Liberals' hopeless divisions were there for all to see.
The leadership rivalry was fanned into enmity the following week by the Bill Henson affair, when a moral panic was whipped up over nude pictures of a 12-year-old girl, taken with parental consent and prominently displayed on the glossy invitation to an exhibition at leading Paddington gallery Roslyn Oxley.
As the media went into a frenzy, police seized the pictures from the gallery, politicians from both sides lined up to denounce Henson and the work, and child-protection campaigner Hetty Johnston labelled them paedophilic.
Turnbull was the first politician of any stature to question Henson's ordeal. In the face of a force-10 media gale, with a ludicrous hunt on for Henson nudes all round the country, Turnbull declared to the world that he owned a couple of Hensons himself (a face and a sunset), had received the invite in question, and was a friend of the gallery's owners.
"It is important that artists and writers and journalists be able to express themselves freely. Now they have got to do that within the law and there is nothing more important than protecting children and avoiding exploitation of children … I recognise all of that, but we have got to be very careful because freedom is a very precious thing," he said
Nelson, by contrast, was insisting Henson's images "violated Australian values". Turnbull rang and berated him: "Do you know how many art galleries I have in my electorate?"
Nelson rebuked him in turn at a NSW Liberal Party branch meeting at Homebush Bay, where Turnbull was sitting in the front row: "Whatever the law says … we need to be prepared to say that this is wrong … If we define freedom through rights, if we encourage or allow moral licence in relation to the depiction of children, we devalue them and diminish ourselves."
Eventually, the classification board ruled the Henson pictures were not pornographic and the police returned them.
In the Gippsland byelection in June, triggered by the resignation of former Howard minister Peter McGauran, there was a big 6 per cent swing against the government. Howard rang Nelson from London and said it was the best byelection result for the Coalition since the resignation of Lionel Bowen in 1990, and something was happening in the electorate. Nelson agreed, and began to take a tougher line on climate change, arguing Australia should not pass an emissions trading scheme until major trading partners acted.
He was rolled on the policy in shadow cabinet – surprisingly, Minchin was still supporting an ETS – and the leadership instability worsened.
In his relentless campaign against Nelson, Turnbull took disloyalty to extremes. Sources say that at a one-on-one meeting in Nelson's Melbourne office in mid-2008, after a shadow cabinet meeting, Turnbull revealed he had had some private polling done on Nelson, and he had a net negative approval rating of 9 percentage points.
Nelson replied: "If that's true, and I have no reason to believe you would deceive me, Malcolm, then you could be expelled from the party for that". At that, Turnbull pulled back and the polling was never produced.
Nelson had no idea whether Turnbull was bluffing, or if the polling had been done, what questions were asked, and whether they were push-polls. For Nelson, however, the implied threat was clear: Turnbull was sitting on a bombshell of some kind. Turnbull says this story is "completely untrue in every respect" and points out that private polling is taken much less seriously than the many public polls, which give a free appraisal of leaders' ratings and the electorate's voting intentions.
Nelson told his closest advisers about the exchange, but let the matter rest as the private polling was not raised again.
Whatever Turnbull had been up to, Nelson's public polling was bad enough; he was branded a "nevergunnabe" and "unelectable". Nelson knew that the situation had become intolerable; he would have to force another showdown with his shadow treasurer. When Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile announced they would retire from politics, the byelections loomed as a test for his leadership.
Without letting it be known, Nelson earmarked a date for a spill. A week out, he found out from his chief of staff that Turnbull had taken off for a week at the Venice Biennale with Lucy, who was on the organising committee for the Australian pavilion, without telling his leader.
Turnbull was poised to strike, but in the end he barely had time to hit the phones. Nelson brought the spill on himself and lost in another close vote, forty-one to forty-five.
Nelson went to the backbench and soon quit politics altogether – ousted within nine months, and never given clear air, he could have been forgiven for wondering what had hit him. A doctor by profession, Nelson told journalist Peter Hartcher he genuinely believed Turnbull had a "narcissistic personality disorder … He says the most appalling things and can't understand why people get upset. He has no empathy."
Contacted for this book, Nelson refused to be interviewed but would only say: "Malcolm has an intellect that you can't jump over, that would be the envy of any one of us. But while the world loves talent, it pays off on character."
For all Turnbull's undoubted talent and ruthless white-anting, he had not won by much, and it was an act of bastardry that left a lot of bad blood. The party knew the Turnbull experiment was high-risk, but, as Costello later observed, it was something the party had to get out of its system.
According to Newspoll, Turnbull got an 8 per cent bounce as better PM, rating 24 per cent versus Nelson's 16 per cent just prior to losing the leadership. But this had to be set against the overwhelming popularity of Kevin Rudd, who was still preferred PM by 54 per cent of voters, and Turnbull's bounce would prove short-lived.
By April Rudd was back in the sixties and Turnbull was drifting back into the teens. On Newspoll's two-party preferred measure, Turnbull barely made any inroads, with the Coalition stuck 8-12 points behind Labor throughout his entire leadership. The big picture through 2008 and 2009 was that neither Nelson nor Turnbull was able to pull back the most popular prime minister the country had ever seen.
This is an edited extract from Born to Rule by Paddy Manning (MUP, RRP $45.00, eBook $16.99).