Angus Taylor quits frontbench, declaring Sussan Ley can’t lead Liberal Party ‘as it needs to be led’

Leadership aspirant Angus Taylor resigned from the shadow cabinet on Wednesday night, but when the Liberal Party will vote on the leadership remained up in the air.

After a day of high tension in the party, Taylor went to Ley’s office to quit at about 7:15pm. But in the meeting he did not actually call for a spill or explicitly declare he was challenging.

Taylor, 59, from the right of the party, told the media later: “I don’t believe Sussan Ley is in a position to be able to lead the party as it needs to be led from here.

"The situation right now is devastating for Australians and for that reason we need to urgently restore confidence in the Liberal Party. That means we need strong leadership, clear direction and a relentless and courageous focus on our values.”

The party’s position under Ley had deteriorated to a point where it was weaker than at any time since it was formed in 1944, Taylor said.

He said he would “continue to serve the Liberal Party and to work towards getting it to where it needs to be if it is to have the strength to make a contribution to this great nation, the kind of contribution that it has traditionally made”.

Asked how he would be different from Ley, Taylor said: “You’ll hear more from me and others, I’m sure, in the coming days about that.”

A party meeting and vote on the leadership is expected in the next two days, although exactly how things will unfold is uncertain, with the power to determine the meeting’s timing in Ley’s hands.

Senior Taylor supporters will come out publicly, with more resignations from the frontbench expected.

On Wednesday the numbers were considered close.

Over recent days, Ley has played a cat and mouse tactical game with her opponents, to make their challenge as difficult to launch as possible.

Taylor on Wednesday delayed the timing of his resignation, attempting to ensure the party meeting would be Friday, rather than earlier, giving him maximum time to canvass for votes and to guarantee all his supporters were in place. This is a week of Senate estimates, which has meant not all Liberal senators have been in Canberra.

As Taylor starts his formal canvassing for support, Ley and her backers were considering her next moves.

Taylor will need a motion to “spill” the leadership carried before there is a vote on the leadership. There are 51 members of the Liberal parliamentary party - 28 members of the House of Representatives and 23 senators.

Taylor has brought to a head weeks of intense – and remarkably open – manoeuvring by Ley’s party critics. But the undermining of her has been going on since she became leader in a vote after the election, when she beat Taylor by 29 to 25.

Ley’s position has been progressively weakened by dreadful polls.

Lukas Coch/AAP The latest is a YouGov poll^[1] for Sky News that asked who was the best person to lead the Liberals to have the best chance at the next election. The poll showed starkly that people are not impressed by any of the senior Liberals, with a huge “don’t know” figure of 60%. Ley was on 10%, Taylor 8%, Andrew Hastie 15%, Tim Wilson 3%, Ted O'Brien 2%, and Melissa McIntosh 2%. Newspoll^[2], published Sunday, had the Liberals on 15%, and the Nationals on 3%, with Ley’s net satisfaction at minus 39%. While Hastie is leading in the YouGov poll he is not running in the leadership contest. He announced he would not be a leadership candidate after a recent meeting of key right faction power brokers made it clear he would not have the numbers and should step back. Ley’s critics argue she has not projected what she or the Liberal party stand for, as well as criticising some specific missteps she has made. Ley has the support of the moderates, who have smaller numbers than the right. More fundamentally, the rifts over leadership reflect the wider battle over the party’s identity and future direction. Many Liberals are spooked by the surging One Nation vote, which was 27% in the latest Newspoll. Taylor was energy minister in the Morrison government, and shadow treasurer last term, a role in which he struggled to mount successful attacks on the treasurer, Jim Chalmers.