Sorry Nats: You Winston, you lose some

Campaign manager Steven Joyce is on message too that his policy of concentrating on Auckland and Christchurch alone, and the rest of the country can go to blazes, isn’t going down well in those parts crying out for infrastructure, jobs and attention.

National’s candidate, Mark Osborne, was gracious and philosophical in defeat. When he stood alone and conceded to Peters, manning up and taking the blame for the loss putting it on himself and himself alone, for the first time in his four weeks we finally got the measure of the man, and who he might be if he stands again.

If National had let him run without the restraint of toddler reins, voters may have warmed to a green and naive candidate with only a slim chance against a veteran MP possessed with a lethal grin who knows that the tongue is mightier than the sword.

Key’s swaggering boast at the beginning of the by-election (that Peters was on a hiding to nothing) only made an overlooked electorate more determined to back a man who was born and bred in Northland, knew them in their bones, and had bones in their land.

Osborne’s inexperience may have actually worked for him but with so many minders looking out for – and after – him, and with every photograph and piece of television footage showing him shadowed by a National Party carpetbagging Cabinet minister, it created the impression that the party didn’t trust the merits of their choice, making him look like the proverbial patsy.

The seasoned old campaigner regarded the by-election as a battle in a long and bitter war against Key who vowed during his first campaign that he wouldn’t form a coalition with the NZ First leader. This consigned Peters to the political wilderness but the comeback kid saddled up and when Key went to the polls a second time, once again he was squaring up to his role as the dreaded kingmaker.

That didn’t happen in the strange adventure of the 2014 election. But NZ First swelled its ranks and now, with the landslide of this by-election where Peters is mythologised as the hero of the heartland, watch this space for 2017.

The Greens, having decided to concentrate their brand on sustainability and ridding themselves of the battered wife syndrome of partnering with Labour, and with a grand three-way Left coalition a distant reality, NZ First is looking quite the viable alternative.

Peters will never go with the Greens but even if he will never be pinned down to say he won’t go with National, the long-standing feud between himself and Key means that an alliance with the Nats while Key’s in the running is out of the question.