There’s an old saying that goes: “politics is the brutal game of arithmetic”. As Opposition Leader Sussan Ley attempts to hold on to her job, and challenger Angus Taylor tries to take it from her, that arithmetic has likely never felt more important.
Both have been working the phones trying to shore up support, with only a few swinging votes expected to make up the difference between success and failure.
For Ley, numbers have always played a defining role. In a 2015 profile, Ley said she added an extra “s” to her name – going from Susan to Sussan – because she had studied numerology and found “if you add the numbers that match the letters in your name, you can change your personality”.
“I worked out that if you added an ‘s’ I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring,” she said at the time. She has since walked back the statement, saying the additional “s” was the result of a “punk phase”.
In the challenge that put her into the job, she won by 29 votes to Angus Taylors 25. That was before key backers left the party room.
But here’s another number: nine. That is the exact number of months, to the day, Ley will have served as leader if she is deposed.
There’s also a joke that can be written about today being Friday the 13th, but that seems a bit gauche given the circumstances.