Straight from the frying pan of global warming talks in Paris to the flaming embers of the Peter Slipper controversy, Malcolm Turnbull cannot avoid a hot decision on the ministerial future of one of his key numbers men, Mal Brough.

Brough's solicitation of pages from the then speaker's diary, which he denied in Parliament but expressly admitted to in a taped 60 Minutes interview, looks bad. And, as is so often the case in these things, the cover-up is even worse.

The frontbencher is wriggling in quicksand - a process that invariably ends badly.