'KILLEN you are magnificent,'' Robert Menzies is said to have telegrammed to James Killen, after the latter saved the government by winning his seat on official Communist Party preferences. He hadn't, actually, and Menzies didn't send a telegram - in truth, Killen made up the story. But the moment has lived on in Australian political myth. The 1961 win, in the teeth of a credit squeeze, gave the Coalition another 11 years.

Will Tony Abbott's party room victory acquire the same status as Killen's narrow win? A one-vote victory, with one informal ballot and one absent member, has elevated a man who appears to provoke fierce differences of opinion in the party, and a great deal of distrust among the general public.

Abbott has great skills and he may manage to unite the party with that most effective of adhesives, political success. But should he fail, then the options for the party are dire - a double dissolution wipe-out of 12-20 House seats, the Greens hitting double figures in the Senate, and the tarring of the Coalition as a reactionary rump, failing to address the most pressing questions of modernity.

For those Liberal MHRs faced with losing their seat, the dilemma must be acute. Most of them are in urban seats, where climate change scepticism is seen as sunstruck rural idiocy. Like the pieds-noirs the French colonial troops sent to endless slaughter in World War I for an empire that was oppressing them, the urban Liberals will go to their political deaths on behalf of a conservative cabal whose loopy assessment of climate science - ''communism by other means'' - is really a rejection of the enlightenment notion of rational inquiry, upon which liberalism itself is based.

Whatever this split is about, it ain't Malcolm Turnbull's shortcomings as a leader. The rupture in the Liberal Party may have made it unsustainable as a unit, suggesting that Menzies' vision of a liberal party be best honoured by splitting, not preserving the party in its current form.