Dammit, former health minister Tony "Too Raw" Abbott has withdrawn from the Malcolm Turnbull Liberal Party leadership coup...sorry, the very competitive Liberal Party leadership race :
His colleagues, eh?Mr Abbott says after talking to his colleagues it is clear he does not have enough support to be a credible candidate.
"It's pretty obvious to me that Malcolm and Brendan have more support and so I am announcing today that I will be withdrawing my candidature and I won't be running tomorrow," he said.
Surely Abbott's decision to cut and run had nothing to do with this massive headline plastered across The Australian newspaper this morning :
The Liberal Party's Future Lies With Turnbull
Former defence minister Brendan "We Went To Iraq For The Oil" Nelson is now taking on Malcolm Turnbull for the leadership. He thinks he has a solid chance.
Or, to put it another way, Brendan Nelson is pretending he has a chance against the Turnbull-Julie Bishop juggernaut so as to give the appearance that the only person left in the Liberal Party with the money to pay for the 2010 campaign, Malcolm "Australia's richest politician" Turnbull, is not being handed the Liberal Party leadership on an eco-friendly hemp-fibre platter.
Do you think all those news stories about the terrible death of Bernie Banton that featured Tony Abbott saying Banton did not "necessarily have a good heart" might have affected Abbott's chances?
The Murdoch media didn't give the shell-shocked Liberal Party back roomers the slightest chance of a fair fight against the Turnbull coup. Turnbull was the Murdoch media's man from the moment Peter Costello quit on Sunday morning. Or perhaps even before then.
It will be interesting to learn in the post-election books if Costello was encouraged to quit because Turnbull was already chosen by the higher powers to lead the Liberals into defeat in 2010 and 2013.
It will also be very interesting to watch as the far right inside the Liberals try to shatter Turnbull by spreading the stories that it was Turnbull's people who leaked some of the most damaging anti-Howard stories over the past year.
The chaos inside the Liberal Party will continue for years under Turnbull.
It's going to be fascinating watching the Libs and Labor battle each over in Parliament over who can claim the mantle as the most anti-global warming party in Australia. Outside of The Greens, of course.
It's going to be even more fun to see how Andrew Bolt, Dennis Shanahan and Piers Akerman sing the praises of Turnbull in the coming months.
Tony "Reasonable People Skills" Abbott will quit Parliament and "go home to his wife" by July 2008, if not sooner.
