I think there is enough evidence now to say pretty unequivocally that the world is a better place with Donald Trump having won in 2024 than it would have been had he won the 2020 election. So put aside all questions of the jiggery-pokery of that 2020 result – the third-party ballot harvesting, the state judges who used Covid to rewrite the voting rules making them laughably loose and unenforceable, the statistically bizarre and incredible differences between voter turnout of blacks in cities Mr Biden needed to win as opposed to those he didn’t, the 51 intelligence officers who flat out lied and said the Hunter Biden laptop had ‘all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation’ when they knew (and we know they knew) it was real and could derail Biden’s chances. Put all that and more aside. My point here is that Mr Trump and his team came back in what is one of the greatest political comebacks in US history, matched only and only maybe by Andrew Jackson’s. And they came back with a detailed plan of what they would do to close the border, deport the tens of millions of illegal aliens, look into government waste and NGO corruption, withdraw from worthless treaties, take on the DEI and transgender lobbies in the universities and big business, kill off net zero idiocies in all sorts of ways including supercharging oil and gas production, make Nato allies pay a lot more for their own defence, lower taxes, the list goes on.  And on.

But here’s my point. A Trump win in 2020 would have achieved but a fraction of these outcomes. Nor would it have seen the incredible move of black men, Hispanic men, young white men, non-college credentialled voters, and others into the Republican camp – leaving rich white inner-city voters with one or more degrees and single women as the core voter base for the Democrats. I’m not even sure a Trump win in 2020 would have broken the brains of so many Democrats (and a fair few establishment Republicans) as last year’s win has. Nor would it have given the America First side of the Republican party a clear successor to Mr Trump in J.D. Vance (who is the bookies’ clear favourite right now to win in 2028).  Put bluntly, when you are looking medium term or longer, there are times when losing can be better than winning in politics. We in the West are all better off that Mr Trump is the 47th President of the US, rather than having been the now retired 46th. And here’s a little-known fact I found out this week – Hungary’s President Orban visited then out-of-office Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago twice during the Biden years and said that he thought only Donald Trump could save Western civilisation. Based on what we’re seeing Mr Trump is certainly giving it a good try, far better than any other politician.

A few longer-term readers of this fine publication might recall that back when the so-called ‘moderate’ wing of the Liberal party defenestrated Tony Abbott in 2015 I made a similar argument as regards voting for Malcolm Turnbull in 2016. I argued it was better actually to preference Labor and see the Libs lose – so not just refuse to put the Libs first, a tokenistic gesture, but to bite the bullet and put the Greens last, the Libs second last and Labor third last (i.e. to cast a vote for Labor in our virtually world unique Ranked Choice voting system that works as a protection racket for the two main parties to ensure new UK Reform-like parties simply cannot surge up and overtake one of the Big Two). Short-term pain for long-term gain.  Well, the last decade has shown that argument of mine to be pretty powerful hasn’t it?  Right now the Liberal party has never been in worse shape in its entire history. They are a disaster and not fit for purpose. There is no chance that Sussan Ley will ever become PM.

This is almost entirely due to the so-called ‘moderate’ wing of the party, the faction I think more accurately labelled as ‘New Labor’. They are a sort of Tony Blair incarnation of wokery, love of supranationalism and constitutional ‘innovation’ and quotas and DEI, a desire to get in bed with the big end of town, and a sort of visceral dislike of actual conservatives.  Well, Mr Blair more or less ruined the British constitutional arrangements, till then the most successful in the democratic world’s history. He also oversaw deliberate mass immigration from the third world. And when the Tories came in in 2010 David Cameron basically just carried on the entire Blairite project, even adding to it. Those Tories were nothing more nor less than a New Labour party. Its ultimate end point was last year’s general election when the Tories were obliterated and now look as though there is a real chance that the world’s oldest continually operating party will be effectively finished off next election by Nigel Farage’s Reform party.   All thanks to the Tories’ New Labour prime ministers of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson (blink and miss Liz Truss) and Rishi Sunak.

That is precisely what the Black Hand Gang or ‘Moderates’ or best label of all ‘New Labor’ MPs of the Liberal party are re-enacting in Australia. And it started with Malcolm’s knifing of Tony in 2015. Those MPs who supported Turnbull in removing Abbott began the process. Core Liberal voters had a chance to stop the rot in the 2016 election. Vote the Libs out. Make it plain to all and sundry that the Turnbull coup was a disaster by putting in Bill Shorten – and who doesn’t think Shorten miles preferable to Albanese? Had that happened the coupsters in the Liberal party would have come under huge pressure. The conservatives would have fully controlled the moral high ground and picked the next leader (not Scott ‘I helped Malcolm but pretended I didn’t’ Morrison of thuggish lockdown fame). Instead, and because of the National party’s success really, Turnbull barely snuck back in. The New Labor advisors around all Liberal leaders have kept their places and influence, though God knows why. Conservatives like Dutton lost their spines. And right now the once great Liberal party is a total and unmitigated disaster.

Now before readers balk I am not saying that political parties should ever try to lose an election. No. What I am saying is that voters, and especially a party’s core voters, should sometimes send a message and not vote for their own party when it has become unfit for purpose. You know, the way Tory voters in the UK abandoned it last year. And the way more of us should have in 2016.

Given today’s dire state of affairs what can be done? First off, we need to put the choice of party leader solely in the hands of fully paid-up party members as in Canada.  The Conservative party there has 750,000 members. Because they have influence. The Liberal party here has about 25,000 and falling fast. Or, the National party has to leave the Coalition and the conservative MPs in the Libs need to switch over to them. Right now the ‘L’ in Liberal and in Ley stands for – to adopt a bit of numerology – ‘Lossers’.