And at the very end, we got our guy back.

The Malcolm Turnbull Australians elected, Mr 68 Per Cent Popularity. The outgoing Prime Minister was not wearing his famous leather jacket in body, but it sure clad his spirit.

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At his last ever prime ministerial press conference, Turnbull was cheerful, upbeat, and scattered his speech with references to the progressivism of his government, the success of Australia’s multiculturalism and the proud achievement of the same-sex marriage survey.

He had been, he said, a “reforming Liberal Prime Minister”.

Why, he even boasted about his commitment to renewable energy, seen in his establishment of the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme.

It was a boast Turnbull had not recently dared make in his party room, or anywhere the dark forces of what he called “the insurgency” might be watching him.

There was nothing about keeping the boats stopped. Nothing about protecting Australia from a Shorten Labor government. Nothing about cutting debt and deficit.

He was liberated, finally, from the talking points of a party that was always ambivalent about his leadership, and which treated him about as stupidly as it’s possible to treat someone of Turnbull’s obvious talents.

Climate change redress was the issue which both excited Turnbull as a politician and assured he would never fully succeed as one. He said very little about it, beyond the observation that “the Coalition finds it very hard to get agreement on anything to do with emissions” because of “bitterly entrenched views that are more ideological views”.

He had blueish shadows under his eyes. But he stood straighter. He was unburdened. He exuded the relaxed attitude of a man who has a large and soft pillow of wealth to fall back into, and who never really put all his eggs in the politics basket anyway.

Apart from his wealth-pillow, Turnbull has the more important comfort of his loving family, and at the end of the press conference, he brought them out.

His two grandchildren, Jack and Alice, bounced around the courtyard, and as he took his leave from journalists he scooped up Alice and took her with him. He said he “remains very optimistic and positive about the nation’s future”.

But it wasn’t all cuddles. This is Malcolm Turnbull, and if we needed a reminder of his nerve and will, it came in the preceding 24 hours, when he refused to call a party room meeting until he received a petition of 43 signatures, digging himself in long enough to ensure enough support was rustled up for his chosen successor, Scott Morrison.

He wrote the Labor party’s election campaign lines when he attacked the “madness” of the insurgency that tore him down, and named Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott as its leaders. He criticised the “powerful media voices” that fomented the insurgency and said ordinary Australians were “dumbstruck” and “appalled”. He left his colleagues with the unwelcome prospect of a Wentworth by election.

When Kevin Rudd was ousted in 2010, Turnbull wrote a piece in which he described the “cruel emptiness” which engulfed Rudd.

He quoted Yeats.

It just so happens that it is both these things - the shameless poetry recitation, and the sympathy for Labor - which made him such a suspect figure to so many Liberals.

But actually, Yeats was spot on when he described the Liberal party room back in 1919, in The Second Coming. Things fell apart. The centre didn’t hold. Malcolm couldn’t hold it.

Anyway, the Member for Wentworth has already had his second coming. There won’t be a third.

Whether you blame his sudden disappearance on Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton, the general idiocy of the Liberal Party chookyard, or on his own flaws, is immaterial. Turnbull’s gone. He will leave the political stage before the next election, taking his fine art collection with him.

Unlike his predecessor and nemesis, he won’t look back.

Twitter @JacquelineMaley

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