Right-hand man: With former PM John Howard in 2001. Credit:Robert Pearce Across the room, jaws dropped. Abbott was quick to speak, telling his colleagues that he felt "humbled and daunted" by his elevation to the top job. Senator Nick Minchin, one of the party's elder statesmen, who had encouraged and cajoled Hockey to run, walked over to him. "If I'd known this was going to happen, I would have swung 10 votes behind you, to get you ahead of Malcolm," he said. Much later, Hockey found himself walking with Turnbull and his wife, Lucy, to their plane at Canberra airport. "I was filthy," he says. "But I was a bit relieved, too. I thought, 'We are going through all these people. We're clearing the decks. Abbott won't last long and at least that gives me a free run. I'm next, and if I'm next, I'm not going to have all these people undermining me.' " Despite Hockey intervening on several occasions when the volatile Turnbull had targeted a colleague, their relationship had always been warm. Hockey had helped Turnbull get preselected, supported his promotion to leader, and willed him to succeed. "Joe always starts off very trusting with people - in my opinion sometimes too trusting," says his wife, investment banker Melissa Babbage. "His starting position is always positive. But after the leadership thing, that really annoyed Joe and he won't trust Malcolm again."

Hockey team: Joe Hockey with his wife Melissa and children. Credit:courtesy of Joe Hockey Hockey says he had an agreement with Turnbull that the outgoing leader would not stand for the leadership if a spill motion was successful. Turnbull's decision to stand had wrong-footed Hockey, split the moderate vote, and handed the leadership to Abbott. Turnbull recalls events differently. "I can't speak to what he thought, and it was a very confusing and difficult period," Turnbull says. "Emotions were running very high. The fog of war was very heavy but the fact is - and the record shows - that I said publicly that I was going to stand." Indeed two days earlier, Turnbull had given an interview to Laurie Oakes in which he confirmed that he would run. Baggage: With Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull on the day of the spill. Credit:Edwina Pickles EDP By Hockey's account, it was the day after this interview, when Hockey had decided to contest the leadership, that Turnbull told him that he would not run against him in a leadership vote. Turnbull disagrees, saying, "The Sunday before the ballot I said I would stand. Why would anyone imagine that I would then do something different?"

It was only a few days earlier, sitting around his pool with Melissa and their five-week-old son, Ignatius, that Hockey had begun to seriously consider running. With polls showing him enjoying strong community support, he'd believed the leadership was his for the taking from the moment Turnbull wrong-footed himself on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). Turnbull should have acknowledged that the shadow cabinet position in support of the CPRS had not won over the party room. His refusal to acknowledge the view of others had infuriated MPs and the Coalition was tearing itself to shreds, its supporters wound up by Alan Jones and others on talkback radio. "I thought, 'Abbott won't last long ...'": Joe Hockey. Credit:Tim Bauer Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had proposed an emissions trading scheme (ETS, aka CPRS), which Turnbull supported. Hockey says Turnbull knew his leadership couldn't survive, but wanted to drive his ETS position through anyway. "Malcolm said to me, 'You will take over - let me get this through,' " says Hockey. "He was playing with dates for a leadership ballot." But divisions within the party over the ETS grew quickly. Turnbull survived a spill motion moved by Kevin Andrews in the last week of November 2009, but Andrews was not seen as a serious leadership contender. Within days senior frontbenchers, including Abbott, Nick Minchin, Eric Abetz, Tony Smith and Sophie Mirabella, all moved to the backbench, signalling the end of Turnbull's leadership. Abbott, who the previous month had told a colleague he wanted to be a candidate if a spill eventuated, decided he would run against Turnbull. However, he agreed he would change that plan if Hockey decided to challenge. Always the bridesmaid?: Hockey with the man who defeated him, Tony Abbott, now prime minister, in May this year. Credit:Andrew Meares

Hockey had always supported an ETS, but he also wanted to respect those in the Coalition who didn't. All weekend, he vacillated. Fellow MP and close advisor Jamie Briggs encouraged him to run for leader, as did Christopher Pyne, Nick Minchin and Peter Dutton. Minchin, a wily elder statesman, was keen to get the ETS off the table and saw Hockey as a pragmatic leader who would listen to his colleagues. At no point, though, did anyone really countenance a scenario in which Hockey wouldn't have the numbers. A handful of friends and colleagues - and his chief of staff, Andrew Kirk - urged him not to run, but they were the exception. "He hadn't built a case of why he should be leader," Kirk says matter-of-factly. "That requires some years of really focusing on becoming leader. Hockey had only just started that process." Hockey's head was filled with two issues. Firstly, he had two small children and a newborn baby. Was running for leader really fair on Melissa? She dismissed that consideration, pointing out that he was already away many nights each week and she couldn't see that this would make a significant difference. Melissa adds that the potential impact on family was secondary to the issue that mostly filled Hockey's thoughts. "At the time it was not about him being the leader. I remember we sat down at the pool house and talked for hours. It wasn't about him. The conversation was about how he could stop the party from imploding," she says. "The Left was trying to get him to do something; the Right was trying to get him to do something. And he was trying to reconcile the two." In retrospect she believes her husband should have adopted a strong line and made his support for an ETS clear to both sides; he needed a basis for his nomination, and the "structure" for the bid was missing. "Because he felt he was doing the right thing for the party, as he saw it ... he got lost a bit in that. The great lesson of the great leaders is just dogged conviction. Look at Howard. Look at Hawke. Look at Keating. Just dogged conviction. I'm not saying he didn't have conviction, but because he was trying to do the right thing by the party and bring them all together, something got lost in that. He won't make that mistake again."

Hockey decided to ask John Howard for advice as to whether he should run and what stance he should take on an ETS. This is intriguing given their sometimes tense relationship, but Hockey, despite denying it, wants to be one of Howard's favourite sons. The former PM told him they had to have an ETS because that was what the Coalition had promised. Howard says he presumed the leadership would be transferred to Hockey, and offered him any help he needed. But it was Howard who also, in a roundabout way, provided the inspiration for Hockey's eventual stance - a wishy-washy one in which MPs would be allowed a conscience vote on the ETS legislation. "I don't think it was very good advice from John Howard," Peter Costello says now. "So here's the question: was he trying to help him or not?" On the eve of the leadership ballot, Hockey sat in his Parliament House office. Friends walked in and out. Several of Hockey's advisors played with the idea of a creating a ticket with Julie Bishop, who would bring a number of votes with her. But it was Peter Dutton, a former police officer from Queensland, from the conservative wing of the party, who took second spot on Hockey's ticket - Hockey still wanted to unite both sides of the party. He wanted to be seen as the doer, not the undoer. "John Howard had a free vote on the republic and he had a number of free votes," Hockey reasoned. "I thought, 'That gives everyone the chance to get it off their chest, and gets it through.' " The idea for a vote had sprung from a comment by Senator George Brandis, who suggested the shadow ministry could be afforded the same latitude backbenchers had been given and allowed to vote against the party position without repercussions. Federal director Brian Loughnane jumped on the idea, and Hockey quickly owned it. One of Hockey's good friends, Christopher Pyne, says it settled the problem of having a winner-takes-all approach. "The idea was that nobody should win and nobody should lose. If we could come out of this with everyone feeling they had been respected and their personal positions maintained, he would have been able to say that he had adopted the same attitude Howard had done on the republic." But the shadow health minister, Peter Dutton, didn't like the idea. He tried to talk Hockey around, unsuccessfully. "I knew it would be a fatal blow. Essentially, the leadership battle was a referendum on the issue. Hockey equivocating with a conscience vote meant the passage [of the ETS legislation] was assured through the Senate and that was exactly the opposite of what the vast majority of the party room wanted."

Howard says he heard on the news that Hockey had promised a conscience vote. "I rang him and said, 'You can't - you've got to make a decision. And he said, 'But you allowed a conscience vote on the monarchy.' And I said, 'That's an entirely different thing; this is a basic economic issue.' That cost him the leadership. You've got to have a position. If Turnbull had put keeping the party together ahead of policy purity he probably would have remained leader. Only Abbott was able to undermine Rudd in the way he did. If the ballot had gone another way, I'm not sure we'd now be in office." It was this stance by Hockey - of allowing a conscience vote - that gave Abbott a reason to renege on his promise to support Hockey. He decided to run. Hockey's plan didn't solve the problem in Abbott's mind. It failed to move the Liberal Party in the direction Abbott and his supporters wanted, and it also showed Hockey as indecisive. Nick Minchin remembers sitting in Hockey's office on the day before the vote. Minchin and Abbott had a firm agreement - Abbott, who had reluctantly accepted that a unity position was the best way forward for the party, would back Hockey. That meant the worst-case scenario would be that Turnbull would run against Hockey, who would romp home. At their last meeting, Minchin and Abbott wanted to discuss how they would proceed the next day. Says Minchin, "[Hockey] announced - and I remember the occasion very clearly - that we should have a conscience vote on [the ETS]. Both of us were almost speechless and shocked, and then I said, 'Come off it, Hockey, your first act of leadership will be to say I don't have a clue and you can all do what you like. You've got to be kidding. That's completely unacceptable.' " But Hockey wouldn't budge. "We agreed that in those circumstances, Tony had no alternative but to run." Two considerations had driven Hockey to his decision. First, he supported a ETS and his staff had handed him 17 pages of public records where he had publicly declared as much. Second, he was influenced by Howard and the lure of making everyone happy. In retrospect, it would have been easy to both support the ETS and take a position against it in the leadership ballot. As Minchin says, Hockey could have declared his support for it but highlighted valid grounds for voting against the Bill as it stood. That would have been "perfectly sensible and credible and defensible".

Costello says it wouldn't have mattered if Hockey had changed his mind on the ETS; Abbott had already done that. Andrew Kirk also thought the decision to allow a conscience vote was a poor one. "I said, 'If you do that, everything we've talked about - consistency, discipline - will be chucked out. You'll just be another wishy-washy Kim Beazley.' " Hockey's conscience vote also took Jamie Briggs by surprise. Instinctively, he thought that people were not going to give their precious vote to someone with a foot in either camp. He also believed that Hockey should have taken a position other than Turnbull's, to offer a clear choice. "I always thought - I still do - he [Hockey] had the certain cover to run for leader that he'll never get again, which is right-wing patriarch Nick Minchin running his numbers for him," he says. "Nick basically said to him, 'Hockey, if you support the abolition of [the ETS], I'll throw all of our support behind you.' It would have been game over." In what was another significant setback to Hockey's bid to become leader, he didn't call all the MPs he thought had his back. Short on time, he relied on Briggs, a new MP, to lobby more senior colleagues. At least two MPs remain miffed that Hockey was not making the calls himself. "Any politician worth his salt would have turned over every stone to make sure they were going to win," says one. "After all, Abbott was working his guts out, ringing everyone." Another senior Liberal agrees. "On that occasion, Hockey didn't do the work. After Abbott said he was going to run, he should have got on the phone and called everyone. That feeds the view that he has this destiny thing, where he should get things easily." One of Hockey's supporters took a call from another MP late on the night before the ballot. The supporter explains that the caller "was at dinner with four of his colleagues, so there were five of them at dinner. Some were saying that you either call yourself or you get an elder statesman of the party to call."

Briggs was picking up another problem, too. Those who'd committed themselves to getting rid of the ETS were telling him that they couldn't support Hockey's conscience vote. They wanted him to take a strong stand. "What the f... is his position on carbon tax?" one senior person bellowed down the phone to a Hockey supporter. "When you're in politics and you're asked what your favourite colour is, you can't say tartan." Despite all of this, Hockey would still have won if not for Turnbull beating him on the first vote. No one even contemplated that scenario because Hockey was convinced that Turnbull had told him that he would have a clear run. "Malcolm had pledged to me that if there was a spill motion that was carried, he wouldn't run," Hockey says. "I believed him. I trusted him. I thought I would win." Turnbull is just as adamant that this did not happen. Having come third in the first vote, Hockey, livid with Turnbull, now had to decide who to support in the next ballot: Abbott, who wanted to eliminate the ETS, which Hockey believed in, or Turnbull, who had just delivered his greatest political embarrassment and whom he had already decided he could never trust again. Hockey's vote went to Turnbull, who lost the ballot by a single vote. Had Turnbull won, Hockey's vote would have been decisive, but he would have been left serving a leader he believed he couldn't trust. Abbott says he's not surprised that Hockey voted against him. "The important thing is not what people thought then, the important thing is how they acted. And given the situation that Hockey found himself in, he performed in an exemplary fashion." The only time Hockey lost his cool in the lead-up to the vote was when he saw Family First senator Steve Fielding playing kingpin on television. Fielding held a crucial vote on whether the ETS legislation would go to committee. Hockey asked to see him on Monday, the day before the leadership vote.

Not wanting to talk in front of Minchin and Brandis, Fielding and Hockey went to another room. "I'd be happy to consider sending it to committee but this has to be between you and me," Hockey remembers telling Fielding. Meeting over. Until 10 minutes later, when Hockey was alerted to revelations on Sky News, courtesy of Fielding, that Hockey had requested it go to committee. The following morning, just ahead of the leadership vote, Fielding swung past Hockey's office. Just as they had the previous evening, television cameras captured his arrival. Hockey spoke first. "I said, 'Can you shut the door for a sec?' " The door shut. "I said, 'Listen, mate, I'm going to count to five and if you're still here when I get to five, I'm going to rip your head off. I never want to see you again, you deceitful prick. One. Two. Three. Four.' And he ran out. "And that was the last time I ever spoke to him. I was so angry. You don't treat me like that." Soon after, Hockey's party didn't treat him much better, tossing out his leadership plans in the first vote. Two days later, under Abbott's shiny new leadership, the Coalition voted against the ETS in the Senate, with two of its senators crossing the floor to side with Labor. The loss jolted Hockey, and it took four weeks for him to mull over what had happened. Tony Abbott immediately asked Hockey to stay in the Treasury portfolio. Melissa didn't want him to take it. "My view was that he should go to the backbench. I said, 'Let them do what they're going to do. You've got a five-week-old and a three-year-old and four-year-old - go to the backbench and have another crack at it later.' But he was adamant that he wanted to be part of trying to get rid of the Labor government."

Hockey decided to remain as shadow treasurer, to this day describing Abbott's offer as magnanimous, and an appointment he would not have expected. It was a move Abbott appreciated. "He could have reacted badly to that, but he didn't. He felt a little sore for 24 hours or so, but then he just buckled down and kept at it." Hockey and Turnbull had a make-up dinner at a Canberra restaurant to restore their working relationship. Hockey says Turnbull later told him how hard it had been during that period and how he'd struggled with it. "I think that was his way of saying, 'I'm really sorry I dudded you.' " Has he learnt to trust Turnbull again? "I'm still going through that process, but I won't write anyone off forever." Melissa is more black and white than her husband: "There will always be distrust there." Loading Edited extract from Hockey: Not Your Average Joe by Madonna King, published on Wednesday by University of Queensland Press.

Lead-in photograph by Tim Bauer.