AARON PATRICK: Sussan Ley and Angus Taylor helped destroy the Liberal Party. Now they want to run it

Who will lead the Liberals from the desert to the promised land? The Rhodes scholar or the shearers’ cook? The economist or the pragmatist? The man or the woman? Angus Taylor or Sussan Ley?

Upon this deliciously difficult question rests the fate of a pillar of the two-party system.

In an election remarkable for the bloodthirsty conclusion to a bland campaign, the Liberals lost women, the few youth still onside, the once-sympathetic ethnic Chinese and the wealthy suburbs that used to define the term blue blood.

At current counting, the Coalition has fewer lower house members than there are female Labor MPs. They couldn’t fill one of the buses that deposit tourists at the Parliament House forecourt.

As the wreckage of the Liberal Party lies strewn across the political landscape, spot fires unextinguished, two would-be messiahs have stepped forward.

Both seem unlikely saviours. The 63-year-old Ms Ley is a curious mix of a politician within sight of retirement punished for youthful exuberance. (Opponents refuse to let up on the numerologically inspired addition of an S to her name 45 years ago).

Mr Taylor, 58, is a conservative Christian who may have gotten into a fight with feminist author Naomi Wolf over Christmas when they were at Oxford University.

While the facts of the alleged bauble-inspired confrontation are murky, Wolf’s call in 2019 to an inebriated and confused political adviser of Mr Taylor’s to complain the incident was a myth, a call she recorded and published online, provided a lesson to everyone: if you work somewhere important, don’t answer the phone during the office Christmas Party.

Comebacks

Both have been crucified, and risen. Ms Ley, then health minister, was fired by patron Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 because he wanted complaints about her travel expenses to end before the prime minister of Japan visited him in Sydney for a harbour ride on a small ceremonial boat owned by the navy. It took her two years to get back into Cabinet.

Mr Taylor was investigated in 2020 by the federal police, at the behest of the Labor Party, for accusing Sydney mayor Clover Moore of spending a lot on travel. The crime, they said, was fraud.

In circumstances never clearly explained, or even understood by those who paid attention, Mr Taylor’s office shared a document containing numerical errors about councillors’ expenses — figures used, unfairly, to accuse the mayor of climate-related hypocrisy.

Shrugging off the faux outrage, Mr Taylor was promoted to shadow treasurer by Peter Dutton after the 2022 election — which everyone involved with on the Coalition side assumed would be the low-water mark of their electoral unpopularity.

They underestimated themselves. Although their precise contributions are unclear — Mr Dutton’s reputation for playing God has spread over the past six days — Ms Ley and Mr Taylor were in senior positions during the Great Campaign of 2025, when Coalition MPs were slain by the dozen.

Which raises a question their electors will consider on Tuesday: is there anyone better to fix the Liberal Party than the people who oversaw its near-destruction?