The Liberal-National merger is likely to be ratified by the Federal Liberal Party as early as this week, according to Liberal sources. Acceptance of the “Liberal National Party” merger would allow the new party to become a division of the Liberal Party.

Brendan Nelson yesterday also told the joint party room meeting he was eager to push on with a Liberal-National merger at a Federal level.

The Queensland merger is expected to be ratified at a Federal Liberal Executive meeting on Friday.

This would complete a total climbdown from Federal Liberal president Alan Stockdale, who only last week declared “the election of a Liberal as President [of the new party] is a necessary condition for the merger to proceed”.

Stockdale issued that statement at the same time as he was offering a compromise deal to the Queensland Nationals involving sharing the presidency of the Liberal National Party. The Nationals ignored all overtures from the Liberals, and Nationals president Bruce McIver was elected president on the weekend. Stockdale subsequently, and rather redundantly, declared that he had decided “it was impractical to maintain our insistence on the presidency.”

The approval would also complete the abandonment of Mal Brough. Brough tried to delay the merger last week with a last-minute State council meeting, with the full support of Stockdale and Brendan Nelson, both of whom voted for the delay. Once the delay was overturned by legal action the following day and the merger proceeded, Stockdale and Nelson quickly switched to backing the new party. Brough was left to put the case for delay to a hostile membership on Saturday, and left once the new party was formed.

“Where’s Mal?” Lawrence Springborg mocked the following day.

Brough hasn’t left anyone in any doubt about what he thinks about the whole business. He told The Australian yesterday “I am feeling gutted by this experience and am extremely disappointed by the behaviour of certain people throughout it. This experience has been much worse for me than losing the election.” Brough declared the new party an “abomination” and “founded on lies and deceit.” Good thing he’s not president of it, then.

One key Queensland moderate reckons Brough will get over it, but right now he must be feeling, well, betrayed is probably the word we’re searching for.

While Nelson’s enthusiasm for a federal merger is potentially alarming for moderates, at least the Liberals are in the box seat for that one. Moderates are of the view that, by letting Queensland — the one state where the Nats are in charge — go first, the whole process has been backwards from the start. Then again, given Stockdale’s performance in Queensland, it wouldn’t be surprising if they went into merger negotiations and came out with Warren Truss running the show.

From the Nats’ point of view, everything is on hold while they consider John Anderson’s report on the future of the party (about which George Brandis observed “they got the most pessimistic person possible to try to come up with a plan for the future.”)

And there’s no doubt why Nelson backs a merger. Many Nationals can’t stand Malcolm Turnbull. A merged party would shore up support for Anyone But Malcolm considerably.