Was keeping Christopher Pyne in Parliament and Malcolm Turnbull in The Lodge really worth spending billions on a fleet of French Barracuda submarines, minus their nuclear-powered engines, we asked here days after the 2016 deal was announced.

But after that outrageous financial commitment, neither was to stay for long. Turnbull resigned to bring on a punitive by-election when an exasperated party sacked him as PM in 2018, with Pyne moving onto platinum-plated politicians’ superannuation, supplemented by those extraordinarily well-paid consultancies which politicians seem to attract, after he naively swallowed the media groupthink that Labor was a shoo-in for the 2019 election.

Apart...