What game is this again?

but primarily at the expense of their only-available ally, Labour, whose leader Andrew Little revealed he raised the prospect of stepping down in light of a two-decade polling low of 24 per cent eight weeks from the election.

Prime Minister Bill English, his party steady on 47 per cent, essentially agrees with Turei’s assessment, though of course he portrays the possibility of a Labour-green-nz First Government in terms of house-of-cards instability.

Inevitably, the view is afoot that Winston Peters, disinclined though he ever is to discuss post-election dealmaking, hasn’t gone into government with Labour and isn’t about to start now.

Memories still burn of the excruciating aftermath to the 1996 result, which led to two months of closed-room negotiation purgatory until he struck a deal with Jim Bolger’s National. The result was a Government that worked itself into a state of paralytical weakness.

History, or inertia anyway, suggests that for Winston to partner with Labour would be to deviate. Doing likewise with the Greens as well would be altogether too deviant.

However, here’s where a contrary scenario has been raised. Peters’ longheld insistence is that what matters in the end is the best deal to advance the party’s policies.

If he can be taken at his word – and here we must pause for a moment or two of spluttering from opposite directions that the answer is crashingly obvious – then there’s a strand of political commentary voiced by Bryce Edwards that the election results might be apportioned in a way that makes a better deal available from Labour and the Greens, who most likely will absolutely need him, than from National and its tiddlers, who mightn’t necessarily.

In other words, albeit out of sore and possibly sour necessity, more concessions may be available from the Labour-greens. All of which depends on cards that have yet to be dealt.

This is the basis upon which the scold comes from parties generally, and Winston reliably, that it’s pretty much meaningless to make preelection predictions about such matters. But it would be good to have a better understanding of exactly what this here card game actually is – and what the rules really are for what trumps what else.