Surely this is the end, the rock bottom drunks talk about at their first meeting. For more than 20 years, the Liberal Party has staggered further and further from the political centre, stopping occasionally to bicker with gays or yell at the weather that it isn’t real.

The wives left first, apparently. Then it was the ones with a social conscience, then the ones with money. Eventually all that was left were the desperate and the raving.

On Wednesday, Peter Dutton arrived back in Canberra. He had the look of a man who had failed at everything he had ever tried in his life, and that’s because he had. It was the haunted look of a man who had woken up and realised he was still Peter Dutton.

Having been comprehensively rejected by his own electorate, becoming the first opposition leader ever to lose his seat, having failed in new and once unimaginable ways, he told reporters he intended to make “a graceful exit from politics”.

Even in defeat Dutton has a way of pretending he is in charge. His relationship to truth is the same as his relationship to decency, which is the same as his relationship to competence. He was the country’s cruellest immigration minister and its least capable. He was a disaster in health. Everywhere behind him is a scene of ruin. Where once it was departments and people’s lives, now it is the Liberal Party.

When Dutton was a minister, departmental heads struggled to hold his attention. He was never interested in details. His focus would sharpen when they talked about crime or paedophiles, but then it would wander off again. He spent his entire career waiting for a radio dispatch.

The party Dutton shaped over all these years is twisted and strange. Some of its members maintain that many moderates lost their seats and this is proof the party should be more right wing. It is a special kind of idiocy: moderates lost their seats strictly because the party is too right wing, and there are no more right-wing seats to win.

There are those still clinging to support for nuclear power. This is also idiocy. The climate wars are over. There is no appetite to spend billions of dollars pretending they are not. There is no desire to ignore what the vast majority of people accept is real and urgent.

It is wrong to say Dutton appealed to the country’s worst impulses. What he did is more wicked: he attempted to create them. He invented new fears and passed them off as the public’s. He intimated that this was a sombre duty but in fact it was an ugly pleasure. This election, those foul parts of debate have been properly repudiated.

Senior Liberals despair at what the party has become. It was debased by Tony Abbott’s reactionary Catholicism and Scott Morrison’s Pentecostal opportunism. Under Dutton, it added a perverse fecklessness.

Dutton is a man whose malice was mistaken for intelligence. His stubbornness was mistaken for discipline. In the end, he had neither. He was what he always seemed to be: a thug who damaged his own party in unprecedented ways and who would have done the same to the country had he been given the chance.

The Liberal Party has dealt before with existential crises. It is there again. It desperately needs reformation or else its only future is irrelevance. Dutton is proof that you cannot win a campaign on fear alone. You cannot win on the fringe because this is a country of the centre. If he has made a single contribution to public life, this is it. 

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