Still waiting for the words ‘I stuffed up’

Even as she announced her resignation as Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei failed to make the tiniest concession to her having screwed up.

Not back in the 1990s when she rorted the welfare system, not on July 16 when she decided to make it a strategic campaigning point, not in the interviews that followed when she said she would pay it back — if they asked, not in the weeks following when she provided moral justification to similar offenders today, not last week when she declared she would not take a ministerial job that she was never going to get anyway, and not yesterday when she caused two of her caucus colleagues to walk away.

At no point has she conceded she did the wrong thing, not even politically, not for a second. At no point did she think about the damage she would be doing to Labour or the Greens’ relationship with Labour.

And that lack of self-doubt has led to a slow-motion kamikaze mission of a politician, destroying herself and wounding her party.

Turei’s supporters had no sense of how their adulation of her attitude served to divide the country as much as her party. It was a shocking display of being unable to see what damage they were doing.

It should perhaps not have been surprising she failed to cite two really bad polls yesterday in her decision, which was a total u-turn on Tuesday’s assurance she would tough it out.

The Greens have plunged from 15 per cent to 8 per cent in a private UMR poll leaked to the Herald and from 13 to 8.3 in the Reid Research poll on Newshub.

That leaves a slew of others to blame, but chiefly it will be the media.

It was continuing to ask intrusive questions about her living arrangements at the time she was making false declarations to social welfare about the make-up of her household and apparently to the Electoral Office on her address.

But it is unedifying of individual media outlets to try to claim “credit” for a political scalp as Newshub did last night. Turei can take all the credit for herself. Beside the way she handled her confession, she caused the leadership change in Labour, and Jacinda Ardern’s popularity has seen the Greens heading south.

Turei has finally done the right thing in the interests of her party.