It was no accident that Jay Weatherill didn’t personally tap Mike Rann on the shoulder to tell him it was time to pack up his old kit bag and go home.

With years as a factional leader under his belt, the Left-wing Weatherill, then Education Minister in Premier Rann’s Cabinet, was no scaredy-cat.

He simply knew how smart leadership challenges worked. Direct confrontation is to be avoided at all costs and should only be deployed when all other avenues have been exhausted.

A bloodless leadership change works on three levels – it preserves the dignity of the leader being rolled, it keeps the challenger’s hands clean and it minimises damage to the party.

That’s why Weatherill wasn’t knocking on Rann’s office door on the afternoon of July 29, 2011. No way, Jay.

Instead, that unpleasant task fell to two leading players in the party’s dominant Catholic Right faction – Jack Snelling, only recently promoted to the senior portfolio of Treasurer by Rann, and the then secretary of the shop assistants union, now Premier, Peter Malinauskas.

The dynamic duo told him the Right was prepared to do the unthinkable – throw its support behind the Left’s Weatherill, sealing certain defeat for Rann in any caucus vote.

Can you imagine how that went down? Like a fart in a phone box. Having been on the receiving end of a few choice Rann tirades, I’m guessing the paint would have been peeling off the walls.

Or maybe I have a fertile imagination. Whatever the reaction, publicly it was all sweetness and light.

Rann even said his party should be “commended” for coming to a “consensus view” on who was best equipped to lead the party into the future “unlike our opponents, the Liberal Party, who have been in constant turmoil over the question of leadership”.

“I have decided that a seamless transition to a new leader was the most appropriate course in the interests of South Australia,” he said.

For his part, Weatherill said it was important when “dealing with these difficult issues” that Rann should be “treated with respect and ­dignity”. Hold that thought.

Premier Rann bargained for more time, was begrudgingly given it, resigned on October 21, and Weatherill was elected unopposed as leader.

And where is this little history lesson leading us? It’s taking us to the front door of Liberal leader David Speirs.

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve learned that the Opposition Leader has been having “frank” conversations, possibly even “full and frank” conversations, with his Liberal colleagues.

This should ring alarm bells for the Liberals. The word “frank” is one the most dangerous in the political dictionary.

In 2011, then Premier Mike Rann (right) with his annointed successor, Jay Weatherill, discuss an orderly handover of power. Photo: AAP/Sarah Malik

Politics is at its happiest when it operates in the nudge-nudge-wink-wink twilight zone, with the ugly business of dealing with individuals hidden from the public gaze. One doesn’t want to frighten the children.

Over the Christmas-New Year break, Tim Whetstone, the Liberal MP for Chaffey, the seat that covers the sodden Riverland, revealed he had “surrendered” his driver’s licence after racking up too many demerit points due mainly, he said, to having “an over-ambitious diary agenda that eventually caught me out”.

No, Tim, it wasn’t an overly ambitious diary agenda that caught you out, but an overly ambitious right foot.

Turbo Tim, as he’s been dubbed, neglected to tell his leader of the problem until three months had passed because the Riverland MP was “fully consumed” with the flood crisis. Incredibly, David Speirs hadn’t suspected a thing, despite jumping in and out of the car with Whetstone during visits to flood-affected regions of the River Murray, while Whetstone’s friends acted as chauffeurs.

“When it was brought to my attention, I requested that Mr Whetstone attend a meeting in my electorate office in Hallett Cove, quite a drive from Renmark, and he and I had a frank, serious and difficult discussion,” Speirs said.

“I felt that making him come down to Hallett Cove was part of the punishment … I feel for Tim, he’s made a mistake but he’s paid the price with his portfolio and he has suffered a fair bit of embarrassment publicly,” Speirs told The Advertiser.

He told the ABC that “Tim’s paid the price, he’s been publicly humiliated, he’s lost one of his portfolios and we’ll just have to move on”.

A frank, serious and difficult discussion was warranted, no doubt, but why add to Whetstone’s public humiliation by bragging that you punished the lead-foot frontbencher by making him travel three hours from his home to your Hallett Cove office just so you could carpet him?

Sure, he was a doofus for accumulating so many driving demerits while serving as the Opposition’s road safety spokesperson. But in the country, where people spend mind-numbing hours commuting to and from work on neglected, crap “highways”, it’s no hanging offence.

Love the sinner, not the sin. At last year’s March state election, Whetstone was one of the few Liberal MPs to significantly improve his primary vote, lifting it by 7.6 per cent to 54.7 per cent. Even on a two-party preferred basis, after preferences, he holds the seat on a 17.2 per cent margin, barely changed from before the election. The Speirs primary vote went backwards by just under one per cent in his southern suburbs seat of Black.

If the Liberals choose Ben Hood to fill the job, he’ll owe his leader zip. And if he doesn’t, who knows how it will play out.

The MPs’ allowance brouhaha, which saw Whetstone resign as Primary Industries Minister in the Marshall Government in 2020, barely left a trolley ding in his local popularity.

No-one’s suggesting he might quit the party, but let’s imagine he becomes so browned off with his leader he decides to do just that and contests Chaffey as a conservative independent in the next election due in 2026. He’d romp home.

Stranger things have happened. His predecessor in Chaffey, Karlene Maywald, was the National Party MP who controversially served as River Murray Minister in the Rann Cabinet.

Speirs is reportedly stuck in full-and-frank mode in pushing for a woman to fill the Legislative Council vacancy created by former Health Minister Stephen Wade’s unsurprising decision to quit.

The front-runner isn’t a woman but is Ben Hood, a Mount Gambier councillor and, delightfully, the brother of Labor MP for Adelaide, Lucy Hood.

The Advertiser reported that Speirs and Hood had a “frank conversation” last week.

Speirs reportedly told Hood “he did not have his support, would have limited promotion and warned of a strategic blunder” in not contesting a lower house seat for the party.

If the Liberals choose Ben Hood to fill the job, he’ll owe his leader zip. And if he doesn’t, who knows how it will play out. The South-East has long been a disaster zone for the Liberals.

To be perfectly frank, the South Australian Liberal Party is littered with the corpses of leaders who made enemies of friends.

Matthew Abraham’s weekly analysis of local politics is published on Fridays.

Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.