Henry Cooke

It’s hard to describe, but there is an energy that surrounds prime ministers, and people on their way to becoming prime ministers. Even as you shake their hand and chat, you feel the weight and power of something much greater than their physical form.

John Key had it. Bill English did too. And Jacinda Ardern seemed to command it the moment she took on the party leadership.

Simon Bridges does not have it . . . yet. But he’s working on it.

The National Party leader has put his annus horribilis behind him, and is very much in a ‘‘new year new me’’ phase.

There is a palpable sense that National is attempting to move on from rowdy opposition to Government-in-waiting.

The most obvious example is National’s plans to release eight big policy documents over this year, with the line being that they ‘‘don’t want to wait for the Government’’. The first of these on tax thresholds will contrast nicely with whatever the Government’s Tax Working Group suggest. Indeed, National would be pleased if it could just talk about tax all year.

Bridges himself is attempting to shift his image from blustery former crown prosecutor to prime-minister-in-waiting.

The hell of 2018 has made him more confident with the rough and tumble of a rambunctious press conference. He can still get led down awkward garden paths by political reporters a little too easily – like when he told me last week he both supported and opposed Don Brash’s Orewa speech – but he’s not letting those minor missteps rattle him.

Another route available to him is faking it till he finds himself making it. And that’s what he was trying to do at Waitangi this week, speaking about his desire to settle all Treaty of Waitangi claims by 2024 without mentioning the pesky detail that he would have to be elected to actually do that.

This strategy of pretending to be in Government wouldn’t have worked last year, as it would have looked like National was simply running for a fourth term of a Key Government, but it has merit now there’s more water under the bridge.

But the problem of having so many National MPs off the leash is that there’s a tendency for them to chase every passing car.

National MP Barbara Kuriger put out a ridiculous press release attacking a ‘‘red-meat tax’’ last month, something the Government had very clearly not proposed. And late last year the party engaged in a bad-faith populist campaign against a United Nations migration pact it would have happily signed up to in Government.

Then Bridges put Paula Bennett into the drug reform role ahead of the cannabis referendum, replacing the reasonable and extremely knowledgeable Shane Reti with someone much more likely to stoke simplistic scaremongering.

These are the urges opposition parties resort to when they’re overly thirsty, not necessarily when they’re ready for Government.

They’re the sort of distractions that might pander to his party base or gain traction on the hard Right, but they do little to cast Bridges as an electable leader for the whole country. And if he’s going to completely bury his annus horibilis, that’s precisely the ‘‘new me’’ he needs to become.

Bridges is attempting to shift his image from blustery former crown prosecutor to primeminister-inwaiting.