Former Finance Minister Mathias Cormann is living in Paris now, where he works as the head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. His art-filled office is in a Louis XIV-style French villa in the 16th arrondissement, right next to the Bois de Boulogne. He also gets a grace-and-favour Parisian apartment.

One hopes such comforts insulate him from insults meted out by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in the ABC’s documentary Nemesis, the second part of which aired this week. Cormann, who publicly abandoned Turnbull during the poisonous spill-upon-spill week of August 2018, was described as “Machiavellian” by one of his former colleagues for his role in Turnbull’s ousting. But it was Turnbull’s offhand remark about Cormann’s figure that must have really hurt.

The prime ministerships of Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull are examined in the ABC program Nemesis.Credit: ABC

“Mathias has put on a lot of weight,” Turnbull remarked as he was filmed viewing footage of Cormann from the coup week. “You know, since 2018. He looks very lean there.”

It was a casual fat-shaming worthy of Married at First Sight, or Mean Girls – both of which have been reprised recently, and both of which depict a world less catty than parliament during the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison years.

Nemesis itself is an iteration of previous politics series including Labor in Power, The Howard Years and The Killing Season – the 2015 ABC show that covered the same circus on the Labor side.

What makes Nemesis especially fascinating/horrifying is knowing that the Coalition politicians of that era watched Labor tear itself apart with the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd ructions, and then fell prey to the same demons.

“Machiavellian” Mathias Cormann, now Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), pictured in Paris.Credit: Nathan Laine

People throw the word “Shakespearean” around a lot when it comes to politics, but the events retraced in Nemesis really were a classic display of human folly, and the fatal role that character can play in a man’s destiny. And it was all about male destiny – Tony Abbott famously had one woman (out of 19 members) in his 2013 cabinet, and although Turnbull and Morrison improved the male-female ratio, it seems no woman was important enough to be included in much of the plotting, and therefore the internal decision-making, on behalf of the three men who served as Liberal prime ministers.

Julie Bishop, who was deputy leader to Abbott and Turnbull (and Brendan Nelson before them), declined to participate in the docuseries. Bishop famously got just 11 votes in the second leadership spill of that August week, a shocking indictment on the prospects of a woman who had loyally served her party as deputy under three male leaders since 2007. Speaking in 2019, not long after she left politics, Bishop described what she called the “gender deafness” of her cabinet colleagues.