Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and now Tony Abbott have all faced heat from within their own party over their leadership and, in particular, the performance of their personal staff.

The current government’s growing problems took another turn for the worse over the past few days when internal criticism of Mr Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, became very public.

First, Mr Abbott played the same gender card he abhorred as an opposition leader when he accused his own colleagues of criticising Ms Credlin more because her name was spelled 

“P-E-T-A” than would have been the case if she was “P-E-T-E-R”, and then senior Liberal MP Warren Entsch yesterday threw fuel on the fire by revealing he lodged a formal complaint against Ms Credlin.

The public has been left with the clear impression that the Coalition is now at war with itself – the sort of civil war we previously thought only the Labor Party could manage.

But perhaps we should not be surprised.

The daily pressure on all MPs has grown enormously over the past 10 or 15 years as the introduction of the internet and 24-hour news channels has created a voracious appetite for stories coming out of Canberra.

A senior MP’s day now starts before dawn as they try to get across the stories in the nation’s major newspapers and ends well after dark when they wind up late-night television commitments.

It’s no coincidence that over the same period we have seen an increase in decision-making on the run, and an increase in junior MPs complaining they are being “left out of the loop”.

Rather than seeking a consensus from the party room, senior MPs increasingly rely on the advice of their staff – with disastrous results.

Mr Abbott is the latest prime minister to fall foul of the new trend, and the opposition must be taking as much joy from watching the government implode as he took from taking a front-row seat to his predecessors’ pain.

Is this really the way we want our democracy to run?