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In the second instalment of The Godfather, Michael Corleone said: 'Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.' He was explaining his strategy of pretending to make peace with the Rosato brothers. The move worked as a strategy against his enemies, but it came at a price. The flow-on effects triggered a Senate investigation, deepened Michael's paranoia, and accelerated his isolation, culminating in him betraying and killing his older brother and destroying his marriage. That iconic movie sub-plot came to mind after I spoke to various Liberal moderates last week in the febrile environment of the net-zero debate. 'We're f***ed' were the first two words I was confronted with after the very first call I made, asking what happens next for the Opposition in the net zero showdown. 'I've never seen it this bad,' they added in despair. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley is a moderate, but in picking her leadership team - effectively a powerful sub-committee of the shadow cabinet - she's largely surrounded herself with right-wingers. Keeping her enemies closer than she keeps her friends, so to speak. By convention the leadership team consisted of the leaders and deputy leaders in both houses, plus the managers of opposition business. To that grouping Ley added four more: James Paterson, Angus Taylor and Dan Tehan, all right wingers. She also included James McGrath, who is notionally a moderate but, as a Queensland senator up for preselection before the next election, don't expect to hear too many moderate thoughts from him. The unintended consequence of calibrating her leadership group the way that she has left Ley isolated from the moderates who delivered her a narrow party-room win over Taylor in the aftermath of the election loss. But right-wingers in the leadership group (who voted against Ley, by the way) have done little to protect her from the wider conservative wing of the party, which is clearly coming for her now. She's also struggling to manage the Coalition partnership with the Nationals. Ley is managing to upset factional allies and opponents at the same time. She doesn't know what to do about net zero, whether that means signing up to it, dumping it, or finding some sort of uneasy in-between (which is what I'm betting on). In the meantime, Ley is growing understandably paranoid about who she can trust and who she can't, and her once-strong relationships with moderates are fraying to the point where one-time supporters are seriously considering letting Taylor take over, 'despite how odious he is', as one MP bluntly put it to me. 'We might as well let him lead us if [Sussan Ley] is just going to give them [the conservatives] whatever they want.' That was a reference to reports earlier in the week that leadership-group member Senator James Paterson was coming around to the idea of walking away from the net-zero target. Madness from one of the few in the current crop of Liberal parliamentarians with political talent, but there you go. Paterson apparently told the leadership group of his change of heart. Leaking it to the media was designed to make him the canary in the coal mine for Ley to perform an about-turn herself, but moderates surprised their leader by rejecting that looming possibility when they saw the reports and got on the front foot. So a delegation told Ley that if she dumps net zero she'll lose their support, which really is end-of-days stuff for a moderate Opposition Leader who only won by three votes and now has record-low polling numbers. What a mess. So, what happens now? Ley took for granted that moderates would never walk away from her for the likes of Taylor. That is why she surrounded herself with enemies she hoped to win over. So much for that. It's hard to get anyone on the phone within the parliamentary Liberal team who thinks Ley is worth saving, other than to help a new leader arrive with a soft landing. Or to buy time in the search for who that person might be, if it's not Taylor or Andrew Hastie. While Ley kept leadership-group enemies close, the likes of Jacinta Price and Andrew Hastie certainly don't feel the same way. Price was dumped from shadow cabinet and Hastie resigned soon after, ostensibly because he felt he wasn't being heard. Hastie was aggrieved from the moment Ley appointed him Shadow Home Affairs spokesman after the election, because he'd requested a portfolio that would put him in the thick of domestic policy debates away from defence and foreign affairs. That request was ignored. Ley also dumped two senior female frontbenchers to the backbench when she took over, Senators Jane Hume and Sarah Henderson. Unsurprisingly, both have taken public shots at Ley ever since. Henderson chose to front-stab her leader on Friday, when she all but declared Ley now has to go and things have to change. That pair could have become friends and allies of the Opposition Leader in a newly configured sisterhood. Instead, they were exited stage right, for their respective sins of voting for Taylor and sitting with the conservatives. Think about how offensive it must be to that pair of women to fall out of the wider shadow frontbench. The Coalition isn't exactly bursting with talent, much less women, or those with ministerial experience in government. I'm not much of a fan of either Hume or Henderson, to be frank, but the idea that they aren't good enough to fit into the 45-person frontbench is utterly absurd. Worse still, Team Ley justified demoting a pair of well-credentialed women, reducing the number of women in the shadow ministry as a consequence, on the grounds that the leader is female. Seriously. This is the same Sussan Ley who advocated for gender quotas but lost interest in the idea after she became party leader and could therefore do something about it. Ley will probably survive next week's party-room meeting, but it will only serve as a stay of execution. Her leadership is all but over, even if internal opponents aren't in a rush to take her out just yet. Leaving Ley to twist in the political wind serves its own purpose right now. Policy divisions, personality clashes and an ascendant Labor Party are all good reasons not to parachute in a new leader at this moment in time. Let Ley continue to take the hits for the myriad problems befalling the Coalition. It's a variation of Vladimir Lenin's 'useful idiot' purposing. This is especially so given that a coup would mean knifing the federal party's first female leader, almost certainly for a man, just six months after she took on the most difficult job in politics. 'We need to leave her there long enough that the corpse starts to stink,' one Liberal MP told me, using rather repulsive prose to make the point that Ley needs to be left there to wear the pain until offloading her becomes an act of mercy. Which means the Opposition's crisis is going to get worse before it gets better. And in getting worse, it could also get electorally worse, because if the Coalition doesn't get its act together in time for the next election there are no guarantees its share of seats won't fall to a new record low. The party's research on what happens if the Coalition walks away from the net zero pledge suggests a looming catastrophe. Focus groups and polling all add up to voters discarding the Coalition. Which is not to say that challenging Labor on the effects of its way of achieving net zero isn't allowed. The same research reveals that a well-argued scare campaign that points out Labor's plans to make net zero a reality is pushing up energy prices and overwhelming many businesses with compliance costs could be effective. As long as Liberals stick to net zero as their aspiration. Dumping it paints the opposition as climate change deniers in voters minds, according to the research. Liberal HQ will present MPs and Senators with the research findings at Wednesday's party room meeting. Grab your popcorn!
