New beginnings

This week the coalition negotiations ended and the new Government began. Jacinda Ardern became the youngest prime minister anyone can remember and posed for a photo with her small nieces on the steps of Parliament. Even cynics and political rivals will allow the new government a brief time in the sun before hostilities begin again.

Winston Churchill, the man after whom our new deputy PM was named, famously said (after the Allied victory at El Alamein in November 1942): ‘‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’’

This much-quoted sentence is mystifying when plucked out of context, but somehow it suits the mood in this particular week 65 years later. It is certainly the end of the beginning of the new government, slightly delayed as was while the coalition talks continued.

It is also the end of the long-lived National Government and the beginning of the new National Opposition, and nobody knows how that will go any more than they know how the Government will go.

But many voters might agree that nine years is an awfully long time in politics and that a new beginning is good for democracies and even for individual parties. It’s spring, and there are new leaves on the trees and a new group of politicians in power. And spring is the season of hope.