Described as everything from ‘total craziness’ to ‘pathetically stupid’ to ‘a joke and embarrassment’, Tony Abbott’s knightmare keeps on getting darker

Australia Day is not typically a difficult occasion for the Australian prime minister. And with his austerity budget stalling, and his poll numbers at a record low, Tony Abbott needed a break.

Instead, Australia Day 2015 will be remembered for one reason: the “Sir Prince Philip thing”, the bizarre decision by Abbott to award the nation’s highest honour to an ageing aristocrat most remembered in this country for asking an Indigenous Australian, on a 2002 visit, “Do you still throw spears at each other?”

The night before, Abbott had won plaudits by awarding Rosie Batty, a domestic violence survivor of unimaginable strength, the Australian of the Year award. In pictures that morning, standing between the national seal and a portrait of the Queen at an official ceremony, Abbott looked confident, relaxed.

But Twitter was already roiling with the “Sir Prince Philip” news. Was it a hoax? Journalists gleefully passed around lists of the prince’s most egregious faux pas. Within hours, Abbott was being asked if he had made a serious mistake.

“I’ll leave social media to its own devices,” he said. “Social media is kind of like electronic graffiti, and I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media.

“You wouldn’t report what’s sprayed up on the walls of buildings.”

But even then it was becoming clear the Sir Prince Philip thing had touched something much deeper. Members of the prime minister’s Liberal party barely hid their derision. An unnamed cabinet minister called it “total craziness”.

The chief minister of the Northern Territory, Adam Giles, didn’t even wait for journalists to ask before offering his view. “Happy April Fool’s day, everybody, as I saw in the paper reading Prince Philip is now a knight,” he said.

“It’s Australia Day, we’re not a bunch of tossers, let’s get it right.”

Abbott’s conservative allies in the media, too, were shocked. “This is just such a pathetically stupid ... gosh, I didn’t mean to be that strong because I actually like Tony Abbott very much. But this is just such a very, very, very stupid decision, so damaging that it could be fatal,” the conservative commentator Andrew Bolt told Sydney radio.

Even media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose tabloids had openly championed Abbott during the 2013 election, weighed in. “Abbott knighthood a joke and embarrassment,” he tweeted. “Time to scrap all honours everywhere, including UK.”

Australians had their chance to ditch the monarchy in 1999. But the alternative model put to the people – with a head of state elected by parliament – divided the republican movement and failed to sell a risk-averse public.

Support for a republic fell to a 20-year low in 2014 with the dazzling tour of William, Kate and baby George later that year.

But the decision to knight Prince Philip was a kind of Rorschach test. Everyone saw in it something to despise. For the prime minister’s cabinet colleagues, it was about Abbott’s aversion to consultation, the iron grip exercised by his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. (Calls for her resignation – though the knighthood was Abbott’s choice alone – swiftly followed.)

Abbott’s political opponents saw it as the perfect symbol of the prime minister’s extremism, the same regressive worldview he brought to bear on health, education and the rights of women, minorities and refugees.

For the general public it seemed to confirm a suspicion that the man they had elected prime minister was a strange creature indeed.

Abbott had reintroduced knighthoods in a shock announcement in March 2014. His cabinet colleagues had not been consulted. His staff, it was later reported, had advised that the decision would be “fucking stupid”.

But Abbott, a former trainee priest and leader of the monarchist lobby, had spent the past four years repressing his ideological impulses. Disciplined messaging had repackaged a man once nicknamed “the mad monk” into prime ministerial material. Surely his party could not deny him this one, minor indulgence?

He said the new tier of honours would be an “important grace note” in Australia’s national life, extended at his recommendation, and the Queen’s approval, “to Australians of extraordinary and pre-eminent achievement and merit”.

Buried in the official paperwork, barely noticed, was that the honour could be bestowed on non-Australians, too.

Eyes rolled, satirists made hay, and it seemed that every liberal on Twitter had given themselves the title “sir” or “dame”. But whatever controversy the new honours may have sparked was offset by Abbott’s canny, careful choices for the first recipients.

But after a year of flagging poll numbers and a stalled, unpopular legislative agenda, the Sir Prince Philip thing was too much.

Abbott’s colleagues are now circling, openly discussing the possibility of deposing the prime minister. A Queensland MP, Mal Brough, has refused to deny rumours he is being sounded out as a stalking horse in a potential leadership challenge. “Clearly people are talking to each other because we are all interested in doing what’s best for the nation,” he said.

On Monday, a week after the knightmare began, Abbott fronted the national press club. The speech was billed as a final plea by the prime minister to keep his job.

“I accept that I probably overdid it on awards,” he said. “As of today I make it crystal clear that all awards in the Order of Australia will be wholly and solely the province of the Council of the Order of Australia.

“I have listened, I have learned, I have acted, and those particular captain’s picks which people have found difficult have been reversed.”

It may not be enough. Prince Philip will get his knighthood. But it’s Tony Abbott on his knees.