Christopher Pyne is the most popular boy in the Liberal Party. “He is very bright”, says Tony Abbott, and “very good company”.

This will surely come as a surprise to anyone who has been following his career from the cheap seats. For those of us outside the exclusive circles of the political establishment, Pyne is known mostly for his plans to charge us hundreds of thousands of dollars to access university; to make sure that, while we’re in school, we learn that Jesus Christ granted the white race dominion over all the peoples of the Earth and appointed the Liberal Party to carry out this mission; and to rob our graves once we die, to recover the unpaid HECS debt.

When Pyne is confronted with evidence of human passion and conviction, as when the audience of ABC’s Q&A began loudly protesting his plans for university “reform”, he exhibits a glassy-eyed bewilderment, like a dog watching Inception.

He will never give up on his dream of wrecking the lives of the working class. “[I’m] like the trout”, he confessed in 2009, “always swimming indefatigably upstream”. Many who know him will speculate that, also like the trout, he lives under a lake and eats dragonflies.

In May, Pyne had to cancel a visit to Deakin University in Victoria because every time he goes to a university campus, he is immediately met by a crowd of enraged students and staff. If a doctor were unable to enter her hospital because her patients always threw rocks and chased her away, she might be led to question her medical talents. But Pyne retains his troutish self-confidence.

“Some people regard me as a bit enigmatic”, he confided to a Fairfax journalist. His capacity to maintain his sense of boyish glee while trashing the ambitions of millions of working class students certainly does give pause for thought. Who is this trout, and how was he spawned?

Even when he was only a powerless, irritating adolescent, Pyne’s favourite game was pretending to ruin the world. At the age of 12, he intervened in a mock student election, twisting arms and currying favour to ensure the Liberal candidate won.

The experience foreshadows two key themes in Pyne’s life: a hatred of teaching staff (he suspected the teacher at his upmarket private school was trying to fix the election for Labor), and a talent for accruing power. Thirteen years later, he repeated the trick to his own benefit, getting himself elected to Parliament in 1993.

The next 20 years reveal the key to Pyne’s success. He is not just a trouty face, but a powerbroker. “He can get jobs for people, he can get people into seats, he has the numbers”, commented a colleague in 2011.

As opposition education spokesman, Pyne campaigned on two fronts: making public schools more racist, and depriving them of money. Pyne was outraged that the proposed national history curriculum would teach high school students too much about trivial topics like Aboriginal people and Asia, without adequately “tracing the history of Western civilisation” or imparting the apparently crucial lesson that “without Alexander the Great there would not have been a Hellenistic period”.

Pyne’s other great dream was to destroy the MySchool website, which revealed how much government funding was going to elite private high schools. Such information, Pyne complained, was nothing but a “parlour game for class warriors”. Pyne vowed that, once in government, he would prevent the public from knowing that (for example) his own alma mater, the private St Ignatius College, receives $5,338 of government funding per student, compared to $2,333 for the public Footscray City College in Melbourne’s west.

Yet, without Christopher the Trout there might not have been a revival of student activism. Since the Liberals came to power, Pyne’s proposals to introduce a US-style university system have inspired a wave of protests that have made the news worldwide.

Pyne’s position in government rests on his power within the Liberal Party. But his popularity in that sordid world is matched by the revulsion and anger he inspires outside it.