Yes, it's a jungle around here. And for weeks now the beasts have been baying at the full moon, the scent of blood thick in their nostrils. Julie Bishop, Liberal deputy and shadow treasurer, is the latest politician to display signs of potentially fatal weakness. While it would be wrong to cast her as an innocent victim of the media and her fellow Liberals who are now circling, the sins for which she was initially pursued were largely trivial.

Bishop's problems began with well-documented plagiarism by her or on her behalf in a speech and in a recent chapter for a book about Liberalism post-John Howard. She was lazy for allowing the plagiarism to occur in the first place, naive to think she wouldn't get caught, and stupid for denigrating her pursuers (always a fatal mistake in politics) when she was. Bishop, who had hitherto performed credibly as shadow treasurer, compounded the initial error and became an embarrassing distraction to her party's economic arguments. The bells that tolled the end of the parliamentary year have saved Bishop for now. But unless she rises to make a compelling intellectual case against Labor's carriage of the Australian economy through the global crisis, Liberal insiders insist she'll not be shadow treasurer in a year.

Focus has rightly shifted from Bishop's peripheral plagiarism to a point of critical relevance: her style and substance. It is often unfair and trivial, I believe, to focus unduly on a politician's style - that is, the way they look, move, walk and talk. But in the case of Bishop, the two are so inextricably linked by force of her gender that it is impossible to appraise one without the other. Some context. Bishop, a highly successful commercial litigator before she entered Parliament just a decade ago, is a polarising figure. Not least in her own party, where her rapid rise through the Western Australian branch is linked by many to the patronage of powerful Liberal men.

If she were a man, this would be called politics. But because she's an attractive woman, then regardless of merit - and Bishop's background made her a natural for politics - there will always be innuendo. This is an unfair reality in such a male-dominated game. In the testosterone-charged boarding school environment of Federal Parliament, Bishop's appearance at the dispatch box elicits more bipartisan sexually-charged under-the-breath one-liners and elevator stares (think top to bottom) than perhaps any woman before her. Watching the blokes across from - and especially behind - Bishop in question time had always made me queasy on her behalf.

Until early last year, that is. That was when Bishop, the then education, science and training minister, adopted what I described in print at the time as the persona of schoolboy fantasy-head-mistress-dominatrix to attack then opposition leader Kevin Rudd for purportedly appropriating his so-called education revolution from Mark Latham. Amid a swivel of hips and with her trademark steely blue stare, Bishop provocatively waved her finger at Rudd back then and said: "Naughty boy, you stole that didn't you? You'll have to go to the naughty corner."

The place predictably erupted into Neanderthal hoots. Bishop, however, looked inordinately self-satisfied, revelling in the primal reaction. So much so, she did something similar a few days later. It was, another senior (female) Liberal confided in me at the time, a nadir for women in politics. A man could not have behaved towards a woman in Federal Parliament in a similar fashion.

A few months later Bishop launched a curious personal attack on Julia Gillard, then as now Deputy Labor Leader, over her appearance in glossy magazines. "I don't think it's necessary to get dressed up in designer clothing and borrow clothing and make-up to grace the cover of magazines," said Bishop of Gillard. "You're not a celebrity, you're an elected representative, you're a member of Parliament."

Was it, I still wonder, that Gillard posed for a photo shoot in the very designer labels favoured by the expensively turned-out and publicity hungry Bishop that so incensed her? Or was Gillard rendered so unworthy in Bishop's eyes simply because she didn't own the clobber she wore? It is a convenient media cliche, of course, to depict Gillard and Bishop as fierce parliamentary adversaries. The truth is, however, that Gillard inhabits a vastly superior league in terms of political instinct, policy depth and public persona. In a cat fight gesture that was no doubt de rigueur at her Adelaide girls school, Bishop bared a symbolic claw to Gillard in Parliament the other day. It was instructive to watch the faces of those around Bishop as she turned in search of approval.

Joe Hockey, the manager of opposition business, grimaced as much as smiled. While the workman-like Andrew Robb was touted as the man most likely to win the shadow treasury portfolio when Malcolm Turnbull took over as Liberal leader, it was actually the highly capable Hockey who came closest to getting the job.

Hockey has a policy brain, an eye for detail and an engaging public-political persona. Watch him closely. Turnbull, meanwhile, wanted a very high-profile woman in the job. He got his way.