Tuesday’s spill nearly unfolded a month ago. Liberal MPs, furious at Brad Battin’s hamfisted reallocation of frontbench portfolios, hit the phones and started plotting to dump their leader. The only reason they didn’t is that Jess Wilson , the woman they wanted to take over, could not be convinced to run.

The fateful moment passed and another ragged week in parliament followed. At the end of it, Battin found himself in a private, unguarded conversation with Wilson. “If you had challenged, you would have had the numbers,” he told her. “Now it is time to settle down.”

That mid-October exchange, recounted to this masthead by three sources with knowledge of it, was still burning in Wilson’s ears as she began discreetly calling select colleagues and Liberal powerbrokers to tell them she w

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