Something strange has been happening at the Daily Telegraph. Two of its rightwing columnists who have hitherto been in lockstep on all the issues that count – like the depravity of Muslims, climate scientists, and the left – are having a tiff.

After Malcolm Turnbull suffered a bad Newspoll, Miranda Devine launched into “delusional conservatives” who were crowing about the fact. She wrote that some of them had been barracking against Malcolm Turnbull since he defeated Tony Abbott in a party room vote.

The fires of her anger were such that they melted her metaphors into an undifferentiated sludge:

when there are conservatives cock-a-hoop about the prospect of a Shorten Labor government, you know they have jumped the shark.

Encouraged in their delusions by a lucrative new industry of talking heads, whose bread and butter is political turmoil, the delcons have decided they want the Liberal Party to go down in flames.

If the cock-a-hoop sea creatures and flaming turmoil sandwiches weren’t enough, some of these “delcons”, as she christened them, had delivered a final, unconscionable insult: “They even deride me as a ‘leftie’ now.”

For Devine, the danger presented by the delcons is that in helping Abbott to white-ant his successor, they risked gifting the upcoming election to Bill Shorten.

At the same time she outlined this mortal threat, she moved to reassure readers that everything was A-OK with the current prime minister, that bad polls were just a blip, and that everything was under control.

It was a difficult balance to strike, but her ability to bluster through her own contradictions is precisely why she gets the big bucks.

The attack was presented in general terms. But those who could read between the lines understood that the delcons in question included colleagues of Devine’s from News, like Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, who have been railing against Turnbull ever since he struck down Abbott, the great tribune of the hard right.

Blair struck back on his blog (complete with a woeful, reader-supplied meme) and later in a column. His substantive claim was that the delcons gave voice to “a substantial number of voters, who recognised that a Turnbull-led Liberal party would threaten conservative values within the Liberal party, and who felt an election win by Turnbull would drag the party substantially to the left.”

Blair and his ilk, then, share at least one illusion with a certain subset of progressives: the belief Malcolm Turnbull is in some sense a leftie. Even though the prime minister is looking to muscle up to unions, and is constantly caving in to the likes of Cory Bernardi, the difficulty appears to be that they want him, like Abbott, to performatively witter on about “death cults” and do pressers in front of massed Australian flags.

It’s gone on from there with another Devine column, risibly illustrated with her as Joan of Arc on the stake. Self-dramatisation is the name of this game. You can expect it to go on longer: conflict drives clicks, the minor soap opera chimes with the Tele’s signature blend of frivolity and aggro, and in the absence of a beef, these folks struggle to find anything new to say.

How much of it is WWE-style playfighting from people who work under the same masthead we’ll never know. In any case, the spat is most interesting as a sign of the cleavage in conservative ranks that these always-opportunistic hacks are playing to.

The fact that they’re prepared to stake out their respective positions shows that there is a constituency for each. There’s ample evidence that Blair is right about an extensive rightwing contempt for Turnbull.

You can find it expressed in the comments threads of News blogs, in high-membership Facebook groups such as “I stand with Cory Bernardi about halal certifications”, and on Twitter, where Turnbull has even been taunted by the rightwing rank and file as a “cuckservative”, a term of derision imported – just like every recent idea the Australian right has had – from US conservative politics, where it is used to describe Republicans not considered conservative enough. It combines the word “cuckold” and “conservative”.

Meanwhile, Turnbull’s poll numbers might be heading rapidly south, but the same polls show that there is still a diminishing band of Liberal voters who, in the face of all evidence, consider him their saviour.

Turnbull’s increasingly parlous electoral position shows that, like Abbott before him, he just can’t effect the balancing act of pleasing the base and at the same time cultivating enough broad appeal to win elections.

Abbott had the hard right locked in, but he was electoral poison. Turnbull had a honeymoon with the voters at large, but core conservatives have hated him from day one.

Neither has been able to generate sufficient authority to keep their restless parties under control. And that’s because the right, like the rest of the political landscape, is in an increasingly advanced state of fragmentation. This, in turn, is in part because no one is able to gatekeep and moderate internal debate.

Just like the Liberal party itself, the Australian right is evidently more divided than it has been in recent memory. It’s a far cry from the days when the entire conservative commentariat would obediently line up behind John Howard, and by extension the neocon crusade led by the Bush administration.

Expect the fireworks to continue, as conservatives, and the party that claims to represent them, fail to reconcile the imperatives of ideological purity and winning electoral politics.