Last year was a gruelling one in Australian politics. The despair of the representative class was sometimes sufficient to brim, then spill from the parliamentary precinct.

Liberal women, bystanders to the destruction of yet another prime minister, ululated. The government’s perennial managing partner, the most patient of Liberal women, Julie Bishop—a model of containment and poise either on the world stage or in the Sunrise studio, rictus locked, eyes glittering as the breakfast banalities tumbled forth—acquainted herself with a feeling that could be characterised as entirely undiplomatic. I’m not entirely sure what it was. Not rage. Cold fury, perhaps. Julia Banks, all at sea in the derangements, first rued, then turned her back on, her late-career conversion, the major-party enterprise, unable to divine its purpose.