Nick Minchin has devoted his heart and soul to the Liberal Party, full-time, since 1977. That’s when he signed on as a 24-year-old staffer in the party’s federal secretariat, rising through the ranks of the South Australian party machine to become a Senator in 1993. He is a fervent protector of Liberal conservative values, the spiritual as well as the actual leader of the party’s right wing.

Last week on Four Corners, Senator Minchin decided, in effect, to put the Liberal Party “into play” by not only publicly challenging his leader’s position on the CPRS but also insisting that a majority in the Coalition do not “believe that human beings are … the main cause of the planet warming”. It was a calculated performance by one of the country’s shrewdest political tacticians who knew precisely how the media and his colleagues would react.

Nick Minchin apparently thinks the state of the Liberal Party under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull is so bad that he seems to have decided to follow the strategy of the American major in Vietnam who ordered the destruction of the Village Ben Tre: “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”

Has Nick Minchin actually reached the point where he believes the Liberal Party must be destroyed to be saved?