Guy’s campaigning on the back of Hassan Kalif Shire’s murder of Sisto Malaspina will go down badly among the people who don't like the Opposition Leader and it won’t bother people who do, so there’s little to lose by running on the issue.

But Matthew's problem isn’t the people who like him or even the people who don’t.

It’s the large number of voters who’ve never heard of him that is hurting the Opposition Leader in this state election contest and he knows it.

So while the eyes of the state and the nation are on Bourke Street and the TV cameras are still rolling, Guy owes it to his colleagues toiling away on the pre-poll booths not to be squeamis and make the most of every opportunity for exposure that this tragedy affords him.

Because the Coalition is losing this state election.

The last statewide poll gave Labor a very handy lead, showing the Opposition going backwards from their performance in 2014. Seat polling, to be approached with caution, shows the Liberals losing in two must-win marginal seats in Melbourne’s south-east.

Liberal Party elders Jeff Kennett and Michael Kroger are in denial, the first stage of political grief, while some of the people around Guy have moved onto anger and even the leader himself has been getting a little tetchy in recent days.

But this is not over.

Kennett has had a lot to say these past couple of days and even managed to be right about one thing; Victorian elections can confound the pollsters.

It happened in 1999 and again in 2010 and sometimes a dramatic, traumatic event like Bourke Street can be the thing that flips the momentum in favour of the challenger.

Right now, it’s not clear how Friday’s events will play out in the election, other than to put the campaign deep into the background for the first 72 hours after the attack.

But apart from that, we’re in uncharted waters.

Some Labor people, many of whom tasted defeat in 2010 at the hands of Ted Baillieu and his "safer streets" campaign, are rattled by Guy’s relentless law-and-order politicking and have lived in fear of a major public safety incident at the business end of this campaign.

But Friday’s outrage is not exactly what was keeping the ALP schemers awake at night.

The Bourke Street attack and the issues it raises are much more complex than, say, a few dozen Sudanese kids running amok in the CBD on a night out gone bad.

Scott Morrison’s hokey man-of-the-people act might have fallen flat recently but his political instincts are sharp.

He was quick to see Friday’s attack as a chance to launch an attack on Australia’s Muslim community that the Prime Minister, himself heading backwards in the polls, reckons won’t hurt him.

Morrison’s comments also sought to divert attention from the role of secret service ASIO, who are in the Prime Minister’s sphere of responsibility and who had Shire on their radar but failed to prevent his rampage.

But despite that sensitive political antenna the Prime Minister is still electoral bad news here in Victoria so his appearance at Pellegrini’s alongside Guy also neatly solves the state Liberals’ what-do-we-do-about-Scott problem.

Morrison showed up - he did his duty by his Victorian brethren, and the visit was appreciated by the staff and co-owner Nino Pangrazio.

Now nobody can say that Guy doesn’t want to be seen with the Prime Minister, even though he doesn’t, and Morrison can be dispatched back to Canberra where he hopefully can’t do any more damage to his party’s chances in Victoria.

Guy has a trickier task than Morrison in turning Bourke Street to his political advantage.

It’s not clear whether people hold state authorities directly responsible for this sort of attack, the way they do for other types of crime.

Sydney’s deadly Lindt Cafe siege in 2014 did not inflict any damage on Mike Baird’s Liberal government.

Matthew Guy has had to tread carefully since Friday and stopped short of directly blaming Premier Daniel Andrews for the Bourke Street attack, so there are clearly limits to what the Liberals believe will be acceptable on this one.

Instead the Opposition’s attack has been crafted around comments Andrews made in 2015 about people having to "accept" that terrorism is a fact of modern life.

The Liberals, Guy has made it clear, will never any accept such thing and have tried to weave Friday’s events into their broader “making Victoria safe again” narrative.

On Wednesday Guy and his anti-terrorism shadow Robert Clark promised boosted powers for Victoria Police to fight terrorism as well as more specialist cops and greater numbers of officers patrolling the city streets.

It was a solid effort at keeping the story rolling along, considering Guy and his colleagues did not have long to cobble together their package

The guilty verdict on three men, revealed yesterday, for planning terrorist attacks in Melbourne won’t hurt either in keeping the issue on the boil.

But is this the issue that flips the election Matthew Guy’s way? We’ll know in 10 days.

Noel Towell is state editor.