In this mess of his own creation, Barnaby Joyce's self-pity was repulsive

Barnaby Joyce was clear on Friday about the tipping point that had finally triggered his resignation as deputy prime minister and leader of the National party after a fortnight under siege.

It was a sexual harassment claim made to the National party by a Western Australian woman, believed to be a prominent person in the state’s regional affairs. “I just thought that has to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” Joyce told reporters in Armidale on Friday.

He has denied that claim pointblank, just as he has denied behaving inappropriately at a rural women’s dinner in 2011, where an accuser – who has thus far declined to speak to any journalists on the record – claims that he pinched her on the backside.

Given that various rumours have circulated ceaselessly for months, and given that the constant drip of information showed no signs of letting up, and given that Malcolm Turnbull had gone to war with his deputy PM in an effort to blast him out, and given that people inside the government were obviously leaking against Joyce in an effort to push him closer to the cliff face – it has been clear for at least a week that the government would be torn asunder if he stayed.

Yet Joyce hung on, partly because he’d been backed into a corner and humiliated, and partly because of the lack of an obvious alternative leadership prospect in the National party apart from Darren Chester, who has a public profile but couldn’t be given the job because he was too progressive for the family values crew from Queensland. While Michael McCormack is now considered the man most likely, he’s a someone people outside the Riverina would struggle to recognise.

Joyce’s hanging on was a strange, grim, Sisyphean spectacle.

A few months back, when I sat across a table from him during the New England byelection, I gained the distinct impression that if he didn’t have to dig in and hold the seat for the government, he wouldn’t have been campaigning. My impression was that he was considering getting out.

When we sat and had that face-to-face conversation in Tamworth, Joyce was pensive, hyper-vigilant and weighted with all the information his operation was intent on locking down.

Back then he was talking about “succession planning”. “I’m never so proud to think I’m going to be the boss forever. You always need to work out who is coming through and how you can help them, because true success is handing the job over, not holding on to the job forever.”

But after Turnbull dropped him in a vat of hydrochloric acid, the basic instincts kicked in.

This was hanging on with a capital H – whatever the costs, whatever the consequences – a bit of rough bush justice: you burn my barn, I will come and burn yours down too.

Joyce has had trouble controlling his impulses as long as I’ve known him, which is a while. But somehow, in the middle of this epic mess that is 100% of his own creation, he became in his own mind a victim.

Voters could probably cop the infidelity but the overweening self-pity was repulsive to the public and to many colleagues, who couldn’t fathom his aptitude for pouring petrol on the story the moment it was running out of fuel. MPs have told me that the voting public have been so furious about the Barnaby circus they are crossing the street to collar them about it.

While the reaction seems to have been a bit less visceral in the bush, Joyce’s lapses in judgment and the persistent suggestions of inappropriate behaviour have shaken the faith of colleagues about his currency as leader, which was always his biggest drawcard, given that Joyce is something of a loner in Canberra.

To put it bluntly, they were no longer sure he could weather the storm without harming the National party brand. As his the National John “Wacka” Williams noted on Friday in typical no-bullshit fashion: “Mud sticks.”

As this saga staggers to its sorry end, perhaps we can now spare a moment’s thought for the real people in this story – Joyce’s estranged wife and children, and his new partner, objectified on the front page of the Daily Telegraph as The Pregnant Mistress.

The strain on all those people really doesn’t bear thinking about.