There’s a time to question it and a time to zip it, Mr Bridges

If Bridges were Prime Minister, he would be celebrating that.

There are times when the best thing the Leader of the Opposition can do is just shut up. Yesterday was one of those days.

Jacinda Ardern had barely emerged from her 25 minutes meeting with United States President Donald Trump in New York before Simon Bridges put the boot in.

Her great failure, according to Bridges, was not to have spent more time pressing Trump about climate change.

It was the sort of reaction one would expect from Greenpeace. In fact it was the response of Greenpeace’s Russel Norman, issued in a press statement after the meeting.

But for Bridges, it was a churlish response to an important meeting, the first official meeting Ardern has had with the US President since she became Prime Minister a little over two years ago.

To accuse Ardern of hypocrisy for not raising climate change makes Bridges appear petty, when he knew full well that the issue she prioritised — trade — was the one Bridges would have prioritised had he been PM.

The fact that Trump himself tweeted that it was a “wonderful meeting!” makes Bridges’ grizzling seem even more churlish.

There were two major achievements from Ardern’s meeting with Trump, the first being that Ardern had a meeting at all in such competitive company.

Trump didn’t have that many meetings on the sidelines of the United Nations leaders’ week. Yesterday it was Poland, Pakistan, South Korea, Singapore, Egypt and New Zealand.

And the meeting included Vice-President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the new National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien.

It was a meeting that almost certainly would not have been secured without persistent efforts from Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters to twist the arm of Pence to get free trade talks started.

The other major achievement of the meeting is something Peters gave away in Question Time in Parliament — presumably a snippet from his conversation with Ardern after the meeting finished.

According to Peters, when the discussion turned to free trade talks, Trump turned to one of his staff and said, “Why don’t we get on with it?”

After 25 years of trying to interest the United States in a bilateral free trade agreement, that is the closest New Zealand has got to a green light.

New Zealand trade officials are due to head to Washington next month for preliminary talks. If Bridges were Prime Minister, he would be celebrating that.

Bridges’ response comes on top of his continued condemnation of Ardern’s international efforts to remove violent extremism from the internet in the wake of the March 15 massacre.

The more Bridges criticises progress that would be welcomed by most reasonable people, the greater distance he puts between them and him.