Scott Morrison has described the Coalition’s election victory as a “miracle”. Doubtless this modest hat tip to the divine is a disservice to Morrison’s efforts, given that the truth is much more human and prosaic: the prime minister ran a superior campaign to his political opponent.

That’s not to say miracles don’t happen, of course, and the Bad Blood documentary on Sky News makes it clear what the real miracle actually was. The miracle we’ve witnessed is a great disappearing act: the Coalition was able to hide its own animus from the voters sufficiently to win an election on 18 May.

Quite something, that pea and thimble operation. Here are five things we’ve learned from David Speers’ typically forensic documentary.

1. Thank heavens for Sky’s comparatively small audience

That’s me, channelling Morrison in the event he curled up on Tuesday night with a packet of Tim Tams to see whether the finished product treated him more kindly than Sky’s advance marketing. If you don’t have Foxtel, and have no idea what I’m talking about, the prime minister has been smirking on high rotation over the past couple of weeks in the promos for the two-part documentary on how the government blew itself to bits last August. As forward sizzle goes, it’s not been that kind. Fortunately from a newly re-elected prime minister’s perspective, Sky’s audience is not large.

Australia's energy future: the real power is not where you’d think | Katharine Murphy Read more

The striking thing about the first episode is how successfully it took me back to the maddest couple of weeks I’ve yet witnessed in 20-plus years of political reporting. Boom. You are back there, watching the protagonists narrate their own self-absorbed madness with varying degrees of comprehension, insight, self-knowledge and candour. You are reminded that this group of people declared war on one another at taxpayer expense, and then managed to sweep their war entirely out of view for the duration of an election contest. It’s a bit like meeting up with the relative you haven’t seen since last Christmas, the one that’s been on the serious health kick, but won’t throw out the old suits just in case the cheese platter proves too hard to resist. He’s nibbling on the carrot sticks but the eyes are on the brie.

2. There was no big reveal

This was a sequence of insights that added texture to a story that has already been carefully documented. The former trade minister Steve Ciobo had a new thought. He told Speers Dutton had revealed to him on the Sunday before everything went absolutely bonkers that he had the numbers to blast Malcolm Turnbull from the leadership. I think Ciobo’s words were he was “relatively confident” Dutton had the numbers. This had been confided during a plane ride to Canberra before a special cabinet session on the Sunday evening that was meant to reconfigure the national energy guarantee in a way that would calm things down. Just in case you were wondering, things didn’t calm down. Sorry if that was a spoiler.

3. Peter Dutton never takes a backward step

It’s not much of an insight to observe that the home affairs minister, he of the “relatively confident” (oops) numbers, only has one speed. If the cliff approaches, accelerate. But the Dutton story arc was memorable in episode one, even if it just played entirely to type. Let’s just call it Peter Dutton: The No Remorse Story. In this version of history, Malcolm had it coming. Turnbull was a dope who called a leadership spill early in the week (“the final act of misjudgment”), underscoring his lack of political nous. Turnbull then offered Dutton the deputy Liberal leadership, which wasn’t his gift to give. Turnbull was the mean bastard who wouldn’t let Dutton just take the prime ministership from him without forcing the plotters to put their names to a petition. Turnbull seeking concrete evidence he’d lost the support of the party room was just “a stalling tactic to damage me” and a sign he had reverted to “merchant banker mode” (possibly that was the counting of names on a petition, it wasn’t really clear). In any case, Pete’s not sorry. He’s a bit sorry he lost when Turnbull called on the death match by demanding that people put their name to their intrigue, in the process handing Morrison, and not Dutton, the prime ministership, thereby outflanking him at the critical juncture. Bit sorry about that. But that’s just Malcolm, isn’t it? An idiot. Obviously. Yeah. Um.

• Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

4. Mathias Cormann is … shook

Just as Dutton’s political character is fixed, seemingly devoid of surprises, the finance minister also opened his participation in part one, perhaps imagining that talking points might be the flotation device to get him through a cameo in some uncomfortable television. The famously on-message Cormann refused to confirm whether or not Turnbull had offered Dutton the deputy leadership in the melee despite being a primary witness to the conversation, and despite appearing on camera in a program where spilling your guts is the price of entry. But after that awkward I’m-not-getting-into-that-David, the Cormann character was prised open a few degrees. The experience of being personally close to Turnbull and then becoming the most significant person in putting him to the sword in WTF week clearly wasn’t easy. At one point Cormann noted it had been a “difficult week” and he had been trying to make the right judgments. He did not betray Turnbull, he insisted, because he’d tried to be straight with him throughout. There were flickers of some emotional range.

5. The Craig and Arthur show

Craig Laundy’s role in the car crash has already been well canvassed, mostly by Laundy himself, who suffered a trauma and, not being an automaton, has needed to process it in a number of subsequent conversations – including one with me last year, which remains the most truthful on-the-record account I’ve heard from a politician about the manifest inhumanity of contemporary political life. Laundy, an outside recruit to politics, and Arthur Sinodinos, the ultimate political insider, piloted Turnbull to the end of his prime ministership on the Friday when Morrison emerged with the prize. Sinodinos explained that vigil for him was about loyalty – Turnbull had been loyal to him when it had counted, and generosity demanded reciprocity. Laundy was asked by Speers whether he was emotional at that moment of walking Turnbull to his political end. “If you weren’t emotional in that moment, you weren’t human,” Laundy said, and the words hung in the air.