Former opposition leader Matthew Guy has called on the party president to resign, launching a savage attack on senior Liberals and accusing them of leaking against the Coalition during the fraught state election campaign.

Guy went on the offensive after The Age published leaked excerpts of Greg Mirabella’s post-election report, which partly blamed the former leader’s poor image among voters and the party’s negative campaign for the Coalition’s heavy loss at the 2022 state election.

Matthew Guy addressing Liberal members at the party’s campaign launch last year. The former leader has called on party president Greg Mirabella to resign. Credit:Chris Hopkins

“Greg Mirabella has prepared a report into the state election based off no research, no feedback – just personal vibe. It’s embarrassing,” Guy told The Age.

“The party faces many challenges, one of which is the chronic leaking from senior members of the administrative committee. The Liberal Party cannot move on with someone as factional and juvenile as its state president, so for the sake of the party, he needs to resign.”

The Liberal Party was mired in internal controversy last year, which continued to dog Guy during the final days of the campaign, including a Liberal donor scandal, growing tensions between Guy and party headquarters, and the resignation of the senior in-house lawyer a month before polling day.

But in an unusual move that has drawn the ire of senior Victorian Liberal MPs, Mirabella refused to hold a comprehensive formal post-mortem of the election because he believed reviews were often ignored, and the federal election review had just been handed down.

Liberal MP James Newbury lambasted Greg Mirabella’s report into the state election. Credit:Joe Armao

His report, which was presented to the federal executive at a meeting on Thursday night, said that while Andrews was highly polarising, Guy was more disliked. Mirabella described the election strategy as “relentlessly negative” and “wrong and counterproductive”, and said the media strategy in the final weeks of the campaign gave voters nothing to vote for and “no reason or moral permission to vote Liberal”.

Liberal MP James Newbury lambasted the Victorian president’s approach to not conduct a formal review and accused the party of burying its head in the sand in a strongly worded email to Mirabella, Guy, Opposition Leader John Pesutto and parliamentary colleagues.

At an administrative committee meeting in December, Newbury opposed Mirabella’s motion to not conduct a formal review, saying he believed private reviews “would not be founded in truth, and feared it could be hijacked by self-serving politics and factionalism”.

In his email to colleagues, the Brighton MP said Mirabella did not speak to senior campaign officials or state MPs before arriving at his conclusion.

“Our party room and the party are deeply disturbed by the trend of the Liberal Party vote and the recent state and federal election results, which I have publicly described as an existential crisis,” Newbury stated in his email, seen by The Age.

“Our party room is working on learning from the state election result in a constructive way. The federal team are working constructively too – especially in light of the imminent byelection, which has now been unnecessarily overshadowed by reports of internal party issues. Put simply, the reports today will have a destructive effect on the Liberal Party.”

The reports in The Age, Newbury said, perpetuated the view that the Liberal Party was internally divided. He said Mirabella’s “so-called report lacked depth” and did not address the deeper problems facing the centre-right party.

He said the party had failed to appeal to the growing cohort of young voters, and ensure moderate Liberals voting for the teals were preferencing the Liberal Party ahead of Labor. Newbury said the party should learn from Labor’s success at holding onto a “de-facto coalition through militant preferencing” when progressive Labor voters shifted to the Greens.

Former senator and Victorian Liberal Party president Greg Mirabella.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Although the Liberals were unable to capitalise on the 6 per cent slump in Labor’s primary vote, it successfully fended off teal independents in the seats of Kew, Hawthorn, Sandringham, Brighton, Mornington, Benambra and South-West Coast.

Labor was able to cushion the blow of the huge swings it suffered in Melbourne’s outer-northern and western suburbs that it held by large margins, winning 56 seats in November – one more than the 2018 Danslide, which was seen by political analysts as a high watermark that could not be replicated.

The Liberal Party lost further support in eastern Melbourne seats such as Glen Waverley, Bayswater and Box Hill, bringing into question how the party expects to win back once-traditional blue-ribbon Liberal seats. Party insiders familiar with internal Labor and Liberal research believed up until election morning that Labor was likely to win between about 42 and 48 seats.

Mirabella was approached for comment.

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