Something had to give, and it was never going to be an attorney-general famous for his inestimable assessment of his own talent.

This was a substantially self-made crisis. Noisy. Distracting. Ultimately pointless.

For reasons that have never been convincingly laid out, George Brandis had quite explicitly impinged on the functional separation of the Solicitor-General, expressly limiting that office's capacity to furnish legal advice unfettered by any conditional say so of a political nature.

It put the incumbent, Justin Gleeson SC, into what he believed was an untenable position.