Jane Clifton
Candidates for National’s top job are starting to line up.
There can’t be many job vacancies that are advertised as seeking a CEO but regarded by everyone except the applicants as being for a caretaker.
Whoever takes over from Bill English as National Party leader will, despite a terrific executive salary package, spend much of his or her time on janitorial duties – plugging leaks, trying to anticipate bursting boilers and sweeping up other people’s messes – while others mutter about how much better they could do the job.
The first leader of a new Opposition is rarely the last one. Nor, history tells us, is the second or even the third. The last Labour and National Oppositions went through four leadership changes each before finding the Mr/Ms Right who could stash the pinny and mop and bring the party’s polling up from the basement.
Yet, in making this choice, the Nats face an exquisitely perverse extra problem: they are popular, and so is their outgoing leader. Although it’s usually sensible to change leaders after electoral failure, there’s no modern precedent for what to do when you’ve lost despite still being popular. English leaves the party at the top of the main polls. One pollster, in data for a private client, found English is still growing in popularity. There’s neither public nor caucus consensus around anyone else to do his job.
But he was never risk-free. He might not have been able to maintain National’s strong standing long-term, and after 27 years in Parliament, he risked sandbagging the generational change National needs to demonstrate to best compete with a refreshed Labour.
And there’s a case that National needs potential MMP mates, and the party’s rather patronising approach to both New Zealand First and the Greens over the years is due a rethink, which can happen only under new management.
The “new” bit’s easy; the “management” component will be Sisyphean. At press time, several MPs were still assessing their chances for either the leader’s or the deputy’s job, and none had a decisive lead. Whoever wins may have only a shaky command over those they defeated by a whisker and future rivals biding their time.
It helps to see the leadership process as a self-stocking pie-warmer. The alpha pies – Judith Collins, Simon Bridges, Steven Joyce and deputy leader Paula Bennett – have been warming on the top shelf for a few years. Nikki Kaye, Amy Adams and Jonathan Coleman joined them more recently. Second-termers Mark Mitchell and Todd Muller snuck in over Christmas, and if you press your nose up to the pie-warmer, you can make out Chris Bishop, and Nicola Willis who will eventually be in Parliament, basking in the newly baked zone.
Not all will run, or need run, this time. Just having one’s name bandied about, hopefully without accompanying snorts, can set one up for future contests and promotion.
The frontrunners are ABC: Adams, Bridges and Collins. None would likely be devastated to lose, as it will only be to lose this time.
The most tepid of the pies could do
The sweet spot between someone the caucus likes and rates and someone the public will even get is hard to locate.
an okay caretaker job. But the sweet spot between someone the caucus likes and rates and someone the public will even get, let alone warm to, is hard to locate.
GALLOWS CONSENSUS
Bridges, who could be our first Māori prime minister if he gets his timing right, might later reflect on the merits of delayed gratification. He could have rascal-ish appeal, combining the battle-readiness of a police dog with mischievous John Key-esque charm. He’s bright and, on policy, near-fearless. But he can’t command a convincing caucus lead and he has
some heavyweight detractors. Who wants to get what is already a pig of a job on those still-uncertain terms?
Whereas to “Crusher” Collins, the fact of having many collegial opponents is all the more tank fuel. She’s the “never blow on the pie” option. There’s long been a gallows consensus that she’d be the Opposition Leader from hell. Distrusted and even feared by some colleagues, she’s Sir Robert Muldoon in his Young Turk era, the Genghis Khan whom a cowed caucus might turn to in tough times. She is conspicuously not awed or tamed by the phenomenon of a luminously positive, warm and pregnant Jacinda Ardern. Collins, perhaps alone, has the chops to do business-as-usual rebarbative politics. She’s also the only contender who’s a household name.
But the caucus is nowhere near frightened enough to push crush. Collins probably can’t beat Adams. Though only waftingly familiar to most voters and verging on being media-averse, the Canterbury lawyer/farmer has the respect and trust of the caucus. Her air of brisk, calm competence would probably impress the electorate. But as Labour’s leaders rued during those years up against the eternal sunshine of John Key, voters now have an appetite for conspicuously warm, engaging leaders. Having an Opposition Leader who is quite liked and respected will not be enough to dent Ardern.
PUBLIC DARLINGS
Meanwhile, back in the pie-warmer, Mitchell at a later stage could be a more successful version of Labour’s David Shearer. Like the United Nations aid leader, Mitch- ell is extraordinarily well liked and respected across party lines and has at least as much steel with his police and security/humanitarian experience in the Middle East. The only question is whether, like Shearer, he lacks the rhetorical fluency to be an effective communicator. He has plenty of time from here.
Joyce and Bennett had easier calls to make in exiting the piewarmer, being these days neither caucus nor public darlings any more. Coleman seems to be shooting for the Gareth Morgan zone, advocating sweeping party reform and revelling in rather than trying to overcome his lack of cuddliness.
Having ruled herself out, Kaye, who would surely have impressed the public, has obviously decided she still has work to do to impress the caucus, by building her people and communications skills for a later run.
But in all piety – and, frankly, all futility – the most important choice National’s caucus can make is to support the new boss, even if it’s through gritted fangs. Nothing kills poll points faster than squabbling.
As importantly, the new leader needs to be ready to hand over the janitor’s bucket and mop before there’s spilt blood, rather than afterwards, recognising that in politics, “do it once and do it right” is seldom possible.
The most important choice National’s caucus can make is to support the new boss, even if it’s through gritted fangs.