As is said of the Gallipoli campaign of the first world war, the only real strategic success of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership was achieved in the way he left it. His tactical move to force the Dutton camp to produce the petition with 43 signatures for a party-room meeting bought the anti-Dutton forces time to get behind Scott Morrison. It meant that Turnbull’s successor would in some small way be of his choosing (even if that choice was forced upon him) and it brought the added bonus of allowing the nation to dodge a very big bullet.

But where are we now?

It is true that Morrison essentially has no blood on his hands, but that only really matters when you spend your days glued to Sky News and ABC24 following the minutiae. For most voters, forced to turn their eyes with annoyance towards political machinations, the overwhelming response will be one of, “what the hell just happened, and why?”

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At no point did Peter Dutton, Julie Bishop or Morrison really explain why they were running for the leadership. Neither did the triumvirate of Mathias Cormann, Michaelia Cash and Mitch Fifield make clear why they no longer supported Turnbull. They said they were resigning because Turnbull no longer had the support of the party room, which the spill results showed was a fib – with their support, Turnbull would have retained a majority.

Thus we have a new prime minister and no one could really tell you why, other than that the festering ideological stupidity that consumes the conservative elements of the party had burst to the surface.

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The trigger for all of this was essentially the national energy guarantee. Wading into climate change is always treacherous for any conservative leader given the party remains filled with those who see it as a great leftwing hoax.

There’s not much you can do to negotiate with people so divorced from reason and logic, but Turnbull did the worst possible thing and caved.

He and then environment minister Josh Frydenberg on Monday announced that they were completely gutting the Neg. And standing next to them both was also then treasurer, Scott Morrison.

The reworked version of the Neg was so utterly stripped of anything to do with emissions targeting that it immediately rendered Turnbull devoid of purpose. He was clearly Liberal party leader in name only. In conceding to the climate-change deniers in the party, he effectively handed them the knife with which to end his political career.

But there was more to come.

He then capitulated on company tax cuts. By this stage, so loud was news about leadership challenges that this barely made a ripple in the news cycle, and yet in many ways it was a bigger collapse to the populists in the party.

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This was the key signature economic policy of his government. Unlike the income tax cuts, which have actually passed into law, the company tax cuts were taken to the election.

And yet, after years of telling voters that they were essential, Turnbull told the media that they needed to be dumped because, of all things, a lack of consensus.

It was an acquiescence to the same group of conservatives opposed to the Neg, and seemed to declare that his leadership of the Liberal party was void, and his prime ministership without purpose.

Effectively, he was saying that despite his belief that lowering company tax cuts was vital for the economy, would bring greater prosperity, higher wages, and was needed given the changing international context, he would be not willing to argue this to voters. At that point, it was pretty difficult to point to anything Turnbull stood for.

And yet here we are: the company tax cuts were marshalled by Morrison, who is now the prime minister, and the national energy guarantee was pushed by Frydenberg, who is now the deputy of the Liberal party and treasurer.

Try explaining that to voters.

It is the most abject failure of a leadership challenge in Australian political history. Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott have engineered the end of Malcolm Turnbull only to simultaneously achieve their own humiliation.

So where to now?

On one level, there is unlikely to be much change. No one is more closely linked to Turnbull than Morrison. As treasurer he has claim over all the economic policy of this government.

On the one hand that is fine, he will just keep rolling out the talk about employment growth and lower unemployment. But it still means he has to explain why he, and not Turnbull, is in the job and he will likely wish to differentiate himself from his predecessor with some new policies.

Morrison has appeared in parliament holding a lump of coal, so no one should be expecting any increased intelligence from the Liberal party on climate change, and so presumably the latest bastardised version of the national energy guarantee will remain.

But Morrison is saddled with the problem of weak wages growth. As was the case when he was treasurer, his job will be to explain to voters why they should stick with his economic policies in spite of falling real household incomes at a time of strong employment growth.

So in a sense his job remains the same but the big difference is that he has to explain this to voters who are now wondering: “Wait, who are you, and what happened to Malcolm Turnbull?”