remained undimmed. Mal Brough had been a cabinet minister in the Howard government before losing his seat in the 2007 election.

His unhappy legacy includes the Northern Territory Intervention and all that has since ensued.

It seems as though Brough didn’t like the irrelevance that loomed, post-politics.

After an unhappy stint fighting factional wars in the lead-up to the Liberal-National merger, he decided he wanted back in.

With the assistance of LNP heavyweight Mark McArdle, Brough engineered a deal that easily secured him pre-selection victory for the Sunshine Coast seat of Fisher. The seat of Fisher was held by long-time LNP backbencher, Peter Slipper.

We’ll never know precisely when James Ashby and another of Peter Slipper’s staffers, Karen Doane, stopped working for Slipper, and started working for Brough. But double agents they were.

Theof the character of the new Speaker.

The political blowback was immediate and, as it turned out, devastating.

In the febrile atmosphere of the later Gillard government, the scent of scandal surrounding Slipper proved impossible to rise above.

Slipper was also being pursued by the Coalition over allegations of rorting cab vouchers, and would eventually face criminal charges; in the interim, he was soon in a politically untenable situation.

Unable to recover from the stain on his reputation, Slipper was forced to resign.

In the meantime, the parliamentary manoeuvres to remove Slipper gave Julia Gillard an unexpected opportunity to create her lasting political legacy: an incendiary speech about misogyny that quickly made her famous around the world.

In one of the more hypocritical moments of Tony Abbott’s career, he attempted to justify the removal