A recent column making mild mention of my doubts about Liberal leader Alistair Coe had only just been published when, only days later, The Canberra Times began to report and continues to report Liberal discontent with the boyish Coe. Even today (it is a Thursday as I handcraft this column) ABC radio news has just run another Liberals-in-turmoil item.

Now it is widely reported that the agonising Liberals doubt that they can win the next ACT election with Coe as leader. There are said to be moves to replace him, as leader, with someone less chronically conservative, with someone more charismatic and electable.

I will never vote Liberal and would not normally care any more about who leads a Liberal team than I care about which alpha brute leads a troop of baboons.

But in this case, as well as being alarmed that my shy writings have the power to shake the tectonic plates of ACT public life and perhaps to decide who our Chief Minister will be after we have voted on October 17 next year, I am unusually intrigued by Alistair Coe's eerie anonymity.

Here he is, potentially the chief minister of this territory, but somehow quite unknown to me. I am out and about and generally at large in this territory, but I have never seen him in the flesh. I don't know anyone who knows him.

Nor, eerily, have I ever learned a single thing about him (other than that he is opposed to same-sex marriage) for all that I always do lend my ears, pricked, to coverage of ACT current affairs.

Who is he, this stranger? What does he believe in? What are his tastes in music, in reading, in theatre? Which is his favourite Shakespeare play? What is his star sign? Does he have any consuming hobbies? Appearing on Hard Quiz, might his special subject turn out to be the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, the flora of Saskatchewan or, say, the career of Dolly Parton? Does he have a dog? What are his hopes, fears, regrets? Does he believe in poltergeists? I think we should be told.

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And yet thus far he and his party have never seemed to take any pains to make him well-known to us, let alone to flaunt and display him as a Liberal political asset and treasure irresistibly worth voting for.

I am not criticising this, but am only intrigued by it. It may be that Alistair Coe is shy and is a recluse, in which case good on him. And knowing nothing about who and what Alistair Coe is lends him a kind of mystique (as it did Greta Garbo), and perhaps that is what the ACT Liberals have sought in choosing him as their leader and hardly ever displaying him in public.

In all this, what a contrast he makes with Kate Carnell, the last ACT Liberal to be popularly elected as our chief minister.

I closely followed and reported politics during the Carnell era (she was chief minister from 1995 to 2000) and bewildered myself by somehow finding her so engaging even though she was a Liberal.

This contradicted my anti-Liberal vows and during the Carnell years I was often in therapy as my vows and my usual ideological emotions (most Liberals, and earnest Liberal voters too, make my flesh crawl) were in turmoil over my inability to dislike Carnell. Confused and troubled I was always on therapists' couches.

That said, Carnell was not one of those dry, savage, moralising Liberals (like today's Peter Dutton and Zed Seselja, and, it is rumoured, for we don't really know, Alistair Coe). She scarcely seemed ideological at all and, unlike today's Liberals, didn't despise asylum-seekers, homosexuals and the unemployed. She had a heart and often wore it on her sleeve.

She was disarmingly flawed, too, but as I used to confide to my therapists (paying them $35 an hour, a lot of money in the 1990s) even her flaws seemed to me really rather humanising and character-defining.

Then, too, while shy and reclusive Alistair Coe is never anywhere to be seen, Kate Carnell was always somehow everywhere.

We used to suspect (but were never able to prove it) that there were six or seven Kate Carnells, one real one plus several others, actors playing her or perhaps cunningly contrived holograms of her, somehow enabling a Kate Carnell to seem to be at every function and occasion there ever was.

She was a sport, too. There was almost nothing she wouldn't do to oblige the media's photographers and filmers. There were memorable images galore of her. Was she really once fired into the lake as a human cannonball, or does my memory play tricks with me?

Quite where this spasm of fond thoughts of Kate Carnell and the Carnell Years has come from, I'm not sure.

But my therapist Mystic Brittney (I have just been to see her) diagnoses that it may be that the balance of my mind has been disturbed by the apocalyptic weather, by shock at the realisation of the awesome power I find I wield as an opinion-former and all this in the context of the TAD (Trump Anxiety Disorder) that she is seeing today in so many of her wild-eyed clients.