Andrew Hastie’s colleagues had been trying to reach him for days.

The former SAS captain has always been a lone wolf in a Liberal party room full of former staffers, apparatchiks and business people. But he has become particularly dislocated from the party’s centre of gravity in recent months as he’s spent time with his family in Perth post-election.

This week it went to a new level. Calls, texts – nothing. Something was up.

“It was just radio silence for days,” one of his close colleagues said.

That was until late Friday afternoon when Hastie posted on Instagram, the favoured platform for his recent outbreak of policy freewheeling , to reveal he was quitting Sussan Ley’s frontbench.

The trigger for his drastic action is a point of disagreement between Ley and Hastie. It will be fur

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