It took the high court to do it, but Malcolm Ieuan Roberts has finally been proven wrong.

The CSIRO could not do it. The weather bureau could not do it. Australia’s, nay, the world’s greatest scientific minds could not do it.

No. If Malcolm Roberts, so often the smartest man in the room, was going to be proved wrong, it would take an intellect equal to his own.

So in the end, Malcolm Roberts took down Malcolm Roberts.

After offering excuses so dense that light could bend around them, Roberts was eventually undone by a failure to understand his own background.

He didn’t need to, he told us, because he chose to believe he was only ever Australian.

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Despite being born in India to a Welsh father. Despite first stepping foot on Australian soil only when old enough to not only feed and dress himself, but walk, talk and complete complex thoughts. Despite having a document which conferred Australian citizenship.

But as Roberts has so frequently proved during the 423 days he spent in the Australian Senate, facts mean nothing when you believe. And Roberts believed his story would be enough.

The man who has the great climate hoax figured out, who knows the secrets of the world banking system and who uses the word empirical like a child who has learnt to swear believed an email asking “am I still British” would be enough to prove his righteousness.

The man who responded to queries into his due diligence with screams of “witch hunt” loud enough to reach Salem, who demands transparency and facts and signed blood oaths in response to every question he asks, refused to show a single document he swore would prove doubters wrong.

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Instead, the man who claims to speak for the people, but views the world through a pinhole so narrow that light would struggle to shine through, demanded the taxpayer prove what was already known by just the barest perusal of the facts.

Even at the end, Roberts refused to admit he was wrong. Only that the court had found him so. The facts, he told Sky, “weren’t assembled in my mind where I could see it all logically”.

And so, he will head through another door. Not into the sunset, but to the sunshine state. Pauline Hanson is not ready to give up Roberts’ particular brand of knowledge or politics and so is preparing to inflict him more directly on Queensland, standing him as the One Nation candidate for Ipswich.

Hanson, who “hand on heart” assured the public she had seen Roberts’ documents and that all was in order, is now “devastated” at the loss of her “unique” colleague and so has decided he is needed to turn that same laser focus that sent an email aimed at the UK authorities to an address ending in sydney.uk, to her home state.

Winning Ipswich is not guaranteed. The sitting state Labor MP has a margin of about 16%, but with LNP preferences, it is on the cards.

But Roberts doesn’t even need those facts. He has the strength of his own conviction. And no matter what others choose to believe, that might be enough in Queensland right now.