One of the first external calls Scott Morrison made after he secured the prime ministership was to the National Farmers’ Federation. After two weeks of frenzied bloodletting, Morrison wanted to stabilise the government by making drought an early focus, and was on the hunt for places to visit.

From the tarmac in Longreach, Morrison called Fiona Simson, the NFF president. She recalls their conversation. “He said: ‘I don’t know much about farmers, I don’t know much about farming and I don’t know much about drought.’ He said: ‘I want to come and listen and learn.’”

Simson, who is a farmer and poll hereford breeder from the Liverpool Plains, was close enough to Malcolm Turnbull for the two to talk regularly, and exchange cattle tips. She’s a direct communicator, not prone to mincing words, and she had some advice for Morrison. “I told him [people’s] bullshit meter is very high. Don’t promise things you can’t deliver, or they’ll pick you a mile away. Just be genuine, and interested, and listen and learn, and you will be fine.” Morrison told her he wanted to debrief at the conclusion of the visit.

By the time the two met up in Canberra, Morrison’s physical world was in flux. He was occupying the prime ministerial office, but his possessions hadn’t yet caught up with him.

Simson and the NFF’s chief executive, Tony Mahar, sat in the suite as people wandered in and out with boxes and personal effects, a mildly surreal experience for the visiting civilians, rather like an impromptu supervision of end-of-lease cleaners. “We were sitting there, relaxing in couches that were probably still Malcolm’s, and there was all this stuff going on all around us.”

Only in Australian politics, with its revolving door of prime ministers, could such an unmoored meeting take place: a prime minister, an important and influential stakeholder, and a bunch of removalists wandering in and out with boxes and pieces of furniture.

It says everything about where we find ourselves: the anecdote speaks to the permanency of our flux.

Scott Morrison with drought envoy Barnaby Joyce, Deputy PM Michael McCormack and truck driver Jeremy Taylor during a visit to the property of Vern Drew at Royalla outside Canberra. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Morrison is building the plane of his prime ministership as it is flying, which should be impossible, and perhaps will prove to be. It’s a discombobulating experience for the passengers and onlookers as the partially assembled fuselage ascends through turbulence hoping to clear the clouds and reach cruising altitude.

Things have been moving at breakneck pace since Morrison took the top job a bit over two months ago. He warned us from the outset to buckle in. The new prime minister borrowed a quote from the American general, Norman Schwarzkopf, to telegraph his disposition to the baying Labor MPs across the chamber. When placed in command, take charge. One confidant puts it this way: “He’s mission focused, and he’s driving it hard, because it needs to be driven hard, and time is against him.”

But the question is where is Morrison driving the operation, and what is the objective? Is it face-saving and furniture-saving after a frenzy of self-harm? Is it recovery, and onwards to victory? Or is the ultimate end point catastrophic collision?

Before the Wentworth byelection, the mood in the government, at least in quarters not already consumed by gallows humour or reflexive despair, drifted towards hope. Some remain optimistic, insisting if Morrison can get enough time, he’ll connect with voters and deliver the goods.

But the recent rout in Wentworth has shaken that optimism. Even before that electoral setback, Morrison’s decision to flag a major shift in Australia’s policy on the Middle East in the context of a domestic byelection ricocheted inside the government and the bureaucracy, prompting questions about his judgment.

One Liberal says: “Prior to Wentworth, people were more optimistic about Morrison being able to change the game, but less so now”.

“Wentworth is a shock we still haven’t recovered from.”

***

Morrison is a difficult political subject to capture. He’s somehow there, and not there, possibly because survival rates are higher for the occupants of the cursed castle of parliament house when they are moving targets.

People who know him well describe a man of family and faith, a hard worker, loyal to intimates, who is also hugely ambitious, and a political animal to the core. One colleague says Morrison is always triangulating, with the mind chasing the latest best soundbite. He seeks information relentlessly, but doesn’t agonise. If things go pear-shaped, he dusts off and moves on quickly.

Andrew Scipione, the former New South Wales police commissioner, and like Morrison a man of deep faith, has known the prime minister socially for about 15 years. He says Morrison is “genuine, authentic and courageous. My impressions are not of the politician, they are of the man. He’s a very genuine Australian … an honest, forthright man, exactly what you’d want, and we want more genuine, authentic, courageous leaders.”

External perceptions of Morrison from stakeholders are mixed. Some decline to speak on the record because they have nothing constructive to say.

Simson is positive about Morrison. She suspects what you see is what you get. “I think he’s really fair dinkum. I’ve found him open, approachable, willing to listen and learn, willing to do commonsense things if he can, wanting to make a difference” – although she cautions he is moving at a pace that invites missteps.

She says Morrison needs to understand that when you are at the point of briefing journalists that something new is about to happen, stakeholders also need to be in the loop. “They are doing a lot of things on the run – that has its risks but it has rewards as well for beneficiaries. Some of the things they are doing have the potential to be really really good, or very, very bad, depending upon how they are set up.”

Some stakeholders suspect what you see is what you get with the prime minister. Scott Morrison at a prostate cancer foundation function in Canberra. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Cassandra Goldie, the head of the Australian Council of Social Service, dealt with Morrison when he held the social services portfolio. She says there was a widespread alarm in the sector when he took the job after his head-kicking time in immigration, but she found him “interpersonally engaged, and respectful” to deal with.

“He’s demonstrated that he is capable of pragmatism, of being able to change direction,” Goldie says, but she wonders whether he is in a position to change the government’s direction fundamentally now “because they are not winning with an agenda of tax cuts and smaller government”.

The prominent mental health expert, Pat McGorry, who has dealt with him in immigration and social services, says Morrison is responsive when presented with evidence. “I’ve always tried to work in an absolutely bipartisan way to progress mental health in Australia, and develop a good relationship with whomever is prime minister and health minister. That’s been possible with Scott Morrison.

“He can be decisive. Obviously there is politics around that. He feels he is getting some benefit, he functions as a political animal, but I haven’t had any negative interactions with him.” McGorry said he expected some difficulty when they first met, given Morrison’s combative public persona, but found him cordial and constructive in private discussion.

Morrison learned about the high personal transaction costs of being a player in a leadership crisis

Sean Kelly, in a perspicacious profile of the new prime minister for The Monthly, catalogues a no-fault prime minister, a change agent determined to leave no trace. As one longtime observer of Morrison puts it pithily: “The crime may have been committed, but Morrison is never at the scene, even though forensics would tell you his fingerprints are all over it.”

This pattern can be traced through his portfolios, but the zenith was reached during Morrison’s own passive account of becoming prime minister.

Morrison says he ascended because colleagues wanted him to, disavowing his own ambition or agency. The reality others witnessed was different. Some say Turnbull was actively talked out of the leadership by people who should have been guarding his flank.

The facts of the two weeks of derangement suggest the following: when Peter Dutton and his boosters blundered in their hostile takeover, Morrison took advantage of opportunity, either because he wanted the job and the answer is never no when the moment presents, or because he was persuaded by core supporters (who were out, actively clearing the runway for him) that stepping forward was in the best interests of the Liberal party, because Turnbull’s wounds were now fatal.

People close to him, and in a position to know, insist it was the latter, not the former. They also insist that Morrison, in the critical week when the government imploded, took some persuading, because his sincere desire was to be loyal to Turnbull until the last.

Morrison learned about the high personal transaction costs of being a player in a leadership crisis when Tony Abbott and his caustic coterie blamed him in 2015 when Turnbull returned to the Liberal leadership. The fallout from the Abbott defenestration was intense and acrimonious. When the cycle repeated in August, Morrison wanted to position himself as a cleanskin, a draftee, as the man appointed by the hour.

Since taking the job, Morrison’s presentation, again, is implicitly passive. The main message he wants to convey in the opening period of his prime ministership is “I’m not Malcolm”, and the target audience for that is predominantly Queensland – the state that will determine the outcome of the next federal election. One colleague is caustic about Project Sell Scott. “Is he the prime minister, or is he auditioning to be bogan-in-chief?”

Morrison’s supporters say he’s courting older voters, and outer suburban voters – the folks working hard but not getting ahead that have been squarely in Bill Shorten’s sights for two terms.

Scott Morrison has a selfie taken with racegoers on Melbourne Cup day at the Corbould Park Racecourse on the Sunshine Coast. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP

The Queensland Liberal Luke Howarth, a Dutton supporter who proved a catalytic figure in the leadership implosion by planning to bring matters to a head in the party room – a sortie that was ultimately headed off by Turnbull’s decision to test his own numbers – says older people in his neck of the woods are positive about Morrison. “He’s got broad appeal, and the capacity to connect with people across the board.” Further north in Queensland, the veteran MP Warren Enstch says there’s a “point of familiarity” between his constituents and the new prime minister.

It’s that point of familiarity that Team Morrison is seeking to entrench in the minds of voters through a marketing offensive that is about as subtle as a meat axe.

The objective, presentationally, is to make Morrison relatable. If voters have clocked him at all – and he wasn’t well known at the time he took the leadership – they connect him with his hard man period in the immigration portfolio.

The transformation to execute is from headkicker to unifier, which is quite the journey. Can a politician who has built a career around sharp soundbite combat execute the shape shift to genial suburban Dad, more ordinary than extraordinary, in touch with the concerns of everyday Australians?

Australia, meet Scott: the striver from the Shire, the man to bring a fractious, frustrated nation together.

The problem with that rebranding – apart from the obvious risk of voters responding cynically to a heavy-handed, obviously engineered public courtship conducted at warp speed – is the gap between product and reality.

Suburban Scott likes to rail against “the Canberra bubble”, yet he’s prime minister as a direct consequence of his mastery of intricate bubble dynamics. He’s the machine man made good. Even in the era of the faux outsider, this distancing, this disavowing of reality, is absurd.

Scott Morrison takes a tour of a MRH-90 helicopter at the Lavarack Barracks, Townsville on Thursday. Photograph: Michael Chambers/AAP

He’s also not always genial. Colleagues say he has a temper, and the temper ripples away, not far below the surface. If he’s challenged, he gets testy. He’s also not, as genial types generally are, an open book. He can be guarded, and brittle with interlocutors, both internal and external, when the questions aren’t to his liking.

In Canberra, he keeps confidants close and others more distant. To sustain him in the shark tank of political life, he has a tight-knit circle: Alex Hawke, Stuart Robert, Ben Morton, Steve Irons. He’s also friendly with Christopher Pyne, a relationship that began before Morrison entered politics.

Turnbull was institutionally independent – a quality that stuck in the conservative craw at a time when tribalism is the default. Morrison is a creature of the party, a former state director. The Turnbull office served Turnbull with a level of personal loyalty doubtless sharpened by the forces ranged against the prime minister. The Morrison office serves the boss but it is also plugged back into the party machine. Now the transition is largely executed, there is an institutional character to the latest prime ministerial operation.

Australian politics has been chasing the stability of the Howard years since the twin disruptions of the global economic crisis and the internet upended the system a decade ago. That period now lives in collective memory among politicians and backroom types as a lost idyll.

Morrison and the machine behind him is trying to regenerate that comforting vibe, trying to conjure up Howard 2.0. While some of the team are rusted-on Morrison people, Howard-era operatives are installed behind the scenes: John Kunkel, Howard’s former senior economic adviser, runs the office; another Howard-era staffer, and former Crosby|Textor operative Yaron Finkelstein, is principal private secretary; Peter Conran, cabinet secretary under Howard, is doing that job for Morrison.

But backroom players, however skilled, cannot manufacture Howard’s natural authority with the party room. That’s something only Morrison can execute, and his two predecessors, Abbott and Turnbull, have both tried and failed.

Australia, meet Scott: the striver from the Shire, the man to bring a fractious, frustrated nation together

In terms of the major power blocs within the Liberal party, Morrison exists between two stools – a managerial nuance that helped him secure the party leadership. The pitch was about settling war between the tribes and about the party taking back government.

It proved a compelling pitch in the desperation of the moment, but walking all sides of the street is not a consequence-free activity in a political party brimming with ideology. For the moderates who swung in behind him to hold out Dutton from the party leadership, Morrison is something of a cause of convenience. Turnbull had a natural authority with the moderates that Morrison lacks, and moderates are emboldened after the rebuff the voters of Wentworth delivered on 20 October. Whether they’ll insist on their wishlists remains to be seen.

Morrison, having held out the capital C conservative leader, Peter Dutton, from the top job, now faces a reckoning with that faction too. The clear air being provided for Morrison, a courtesy rarely afforded to Turnbull, is entirely through gritted teeth, and is in part related to medium-term self-interest rather than genuine goodwill.

Moderates are shifting on Nauru and on climate change – two issues that are red rags to the conservative bulls. There’s also the issue of sex discrimination protections to settle. This was a landmine Morrison thought he was laying for Turnbull in the aftermath of the legalisation of same sex marriage, when he insisted on a review into religious freedom, and set about front-running that issue.

Now it’s Morrison’s problem to deal with, a bit like the cleanup on Nauru. Morrison was the #StopTheBoats man who got clear of the portfolio before the inevitable reckoning associated with resettlement. Now that human catastrophe is back, squarely, in his lap.

Given the Morrison government has lost its one-seat majority in the House, we are already in a campaign environment. But campaigns have a tendency to bring various inconsistencies, evasions and contradictions to the fore.

One colleague notes Morrison is going to have to make choices, and some will involve balancing his Christian credentials with what the Coalition can plausibly sell to voters at the next election. Internally, there will have to be wins and losses. “You can’t promise to be everything to everyone, and have that not come unstuck.”

***

Morrison thinks about political communication, possibly more than some of his contemporaries. In an interesting speech in 2017, he spoke about the “thick ice” separating voters from the political class. The only way to crack through the ice was to “communicate candidly and with authenticity”. He said the challenge for the Coalition at the next federal election “was not so much to differentiate ourselves from Labor” (something of an heretical proposition in the contemporary Liberal party) “but to differentiate ourselves from being the party of politics as usual”.

The prime minister is research driven. Machine men generally are. A critical review of the Liberal party’s 2016 federal campaign by the former party director and federal minister Andrew Robb identified a number of problems that culminated in Turnbull almost losing that election, one being the absence of a properly funded research and data analytics program.

The Robb review found after Tony Abbott won the election in 2013, no polling was done for nine months, and there was no testing of the 2014 budget – the controversial economic policy statement that plunged the Coalition into political crisis and sowed the seed for Turnbull’s return to the party leadership. The campaign in 2016 had also been hampered by “completely inadequate campaign spending earmarked for nightly phone calls”.

When Morrison came to the treasury portfolio, he insisted research be done ahead of the three budgets he delivered to ensure he wasn’t flying blind. One internal version of the story has him fundraising to cover the costs of the Crosby|Textor pre-budget research, another has the Liberal party stumping up to pay for it. In any case it was done. The three budgets Morrison delivered are pragmatic outings, designed to help the government gradually undo the political damage done by Abbott’s first budget.

Morrison will be tracking his own performance carefully in the polls, both private and public. The immediate aftermath of the leadership change was a hammer blow for the Liberals. Labor stretched its lead to 10 points – the first time that a leadership change had caused the government of the day to go backwards. Voters weren’t particularly negative about Morrison though, he remained ahead of the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, as preferred prime minister. Sentiment towards Morrison remained broadly positive until the latest Guardian Essential survey, which revealed his personal approval had slid backwards by nine points in a month.

Scott Morrison thinks about political communication, possibly more than some of his contemporaries. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Labor has also been closely monitoring the impact of the leadership change. According to ALP research, the initial voter impressions, after the shock, were positive. Morrison enjoyed the benefit of low expectations because he wasn’t well known, and voters were positive about his down to earth mode of communication. He was seen as energetic and decisive.

But by mid-October, in the intense public furore over whether advertising should be projected on the Opera House and as the Wentworth reckoning loomed, Morrison’s rise stalled. As he became better known, voters became more conscious he had come to politics from a marketing background, and concern bubbled in the background about whether the new prime minister’s less varnished communication might be a dark arts manipulation of some kind. Ever present was a sense that division in the Liberal party was now a chronic malaise.

People familiar with Liberal party research insist the government’s position is salvageable, despite all the problems, because Shorten is deeply unpopular and voters are troubled by some of Labor’s revenue raising measures. But accounts of the research suggests Morrison’s makeshift plane has turbulence from the leadership turnovers and voter perceptions of chronic division. Too many holes have been punched in the fuselage.

Cue Malcolm Turnbull, who sailed back into public life, cool as a cucumber, on the ABC on Thursday night. While the former prime minister’s appearance lacked introspection, prompting some onlookers to scratch their heads, the intricacies don’t really matter. The damage for the Liberals politically is the perception that their legacy wars are now hardwired into the system.

It’s corrosive. People with busy lives don’t have time to grasp the ins and outs, they are just reminded when conflict returns that a party of government is more intent on score-settling than facing up to the challenges of governing. That perception kills governments.

People in the Coalition insist there is material to work with, but overall, as the government bumps towards the summer break, exhausted after what feels like the longest year, the mood isn’t hopeful. One MP says Morrison is “going down OK, but the voters are really over us”.

With a sardonic chuckle he tells me: “If we can ever get Labor between our gun and our foot, we could win this.”