Liberal leader Ted Baillieu's many enemies are coming out of the woodwork. And there's none more inclined to do him in than former leader Robert Doyle, rumoured to have been seen chatting over coffee with reluctant leadership challenger Terry Mulder in the last twenty-four hours.
People friendly with Doyle say he has been greatly displeased with how he's been treated following his departure from politics and looks forward to lending his support and advice to a new leadership team.
SPECIAL PARTY ROOM MEETING NEXT WEEK OVER THE CRISIS?
In that context, calls for a special party room meeting by some Liberal MP's to discuss how the Blog-gate crisis should be handled seem to make a lot of sense.
Baillieu's office is resisting this, instead getting the Leader to individually call worried parliamentarians and asking them to trust him. Not all are convinced from what we hear that Ted knows what he's doing.
NUTTY SURROUNDED BY LOONS
Meanwhile, chief investigator Tony Nutt is wondering what the hell to do. He's investigating a big mess and knows the Liberal party under Ted Baillieu is damned if they expel the anti-Ted dissidents and damned if they don't.
If they move to expel those members whose only offence appears to be privately or anonymously expressing a view that Ted Baillieu is the wrong person to be leader then they'll be caught up in a maelstrom where the expelled share every embarrassing secret they've ever gathered, heard, recorded or seen in writing.
If they don't - or even worse if they try and fail - then many say Baillieu's leadership would be catastrophically weakened, with the party leader defied by a bunch of twenty somethings who called his names and even ambushed him on morning radio demanding the ritual sacrifice of one of his few 104 allies, in the form of Susan Chandler.
Some even question whether Nutt is correctly able to investigate any of these matters. He is factionally independent, to be sure, but he is also obliged to protect the party's image above all else as its incoming state director. That role is necessarily in direct conflict with that of an investigator, whose role is to uncover the truth.
That might be a gentlemanly debating point at the Melbourne Club if there were any active Liberals who were members of it these days but it could arise later if anyone adversely affected by Nutt's findings of fact was expelled on that basis and sought to challenge the whole show-trial on procedural fairness grounds.
WHERE TO FROM HERE
How to backdown from here many Liberals ask the OC. As a known expert in unnecessarily escalating conflicts to Armaggeddon levels, I'm not sure we have much to offer other than Ted Baillieu has to go. You need a Liberal leader who wants to be a true-blue conservative, not a David Cameron lite. You need a Liberal leader who isn't blindly obsessed with the prospect of being done in.
Truly there is no turning back for Ted Baillieu. His staff adamantly say that four or five people will go, with action as early as next week. If it were done, best that it be done quickly, the theatrically minded Simon Troeth is believed to have told his minions.
Which leaves the expelled with nothing but the memories of low-paid jobs they did as a spring-board for public office some day. And a full quota of highly toxic emails, financial information, files, audio recordings, instant messenger chat print-outs, secrets and scandals ready to unleash until Ted skulks off to the backbench.
THE SENATOR ELECT
One rumour which has done the rounds is that Senator-Elect Helen Kroger was identified as someone who had committed the new crime of electronically disparaging the Leader.
Baillieu supporters are convinced this is true and believe that it might be a factor in what they probably wishfully hope for, her early retirement. The fact she hasn't been sworn-in yet hasn't stopped them planning her demise. They say that the whole point of her being there was to support Peter Costello. Without Australia's Hamlet to support many wonder why she'd bother.
J-RAT SHEEZEL WALKS A LONELY ROAD
Meanwhile, there's an increasing chorus of Liberal patriots on both sides of the factional divide who say outgoing state director Julian "J-Rat" Sheezel appears to have betrayed his faction and two of his most loyal advisers by releasing their emails to Ted Baillieu's office who then leaked them to Paul Austin at The Age.
Sheezel is clearly playing a double game here. He wants to maintain good relations with Baillieu who he worked hard on sucking up to as state director despite being mortal enemies with the Baillieu faction at the time of his initial appointment. He also wants to keep trading on the support of the Kroger faction who gave him the job and were prospectively going to give him a safe seat until Jason Aldworth came along.
Sheezel's supporters say it was Kemp who handed over the emails and entirely Kemp's decisions.
Baillieu came out on the Sunday after we'd broken the story and said he accepted Sheezel's assurances of non-involvement in the dissident anonymous blog and even went so far as to say he'd be a good candidate for Higgins.
And yet there are very few left in Sheezel's own Kroger faction who thinks he's worthy of anything other than a kick in the groin.
Even his bestest buddies Tony Smith and Mitch Fifield are understood to have shaken their heads in disgust at the monstrous outrage of burning two of your own in full public view in circumstances where they didn't need to be named and it could have been kept very tight.
It was Sheezel's desperate fawning to be in Baillieu's best blue-blood good books that led him to hand over thousands of private emails of two of his closest advisers, who would have taken a bullet for him previously.
Now it's Sheezel's political ambitions that have taken the bullet.
In the Stupid Stakes, it's Red Ted just a short half-nose ahead of J-Rat at the minute although the race is far from over.
Game on.
since failed candidate 
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