Parliament’s great scrapper

After a tumultuous two years as leader of the Opposition, Simon Bridges has lost the hardest job in politics. He never stopped fighting, as Thomas Coughlan and Henry Cooke report.

Simon Bridges was not shy about wanting to lead the National Party. He didn’t run in the leadership contest sparked when John Key resigned in 2016 but from the moment National lost power – even a little bit before – his name was near the top of the list for new leaders.

Post-election, Bridges was immediately a thorn in the Government’s side. He spotted it might not have the numbers to have Trevor Mallard elected Speaker on the first day of the new session, and leveraged the Government’s obvious oversight into getting additional select committee spots.

It encapsulated a lot of what Bridges would bring to the leadership. He’s a West Auckland street fighter whose desire to win is matched by an attention to detail, and a deep love of politics.

Bridges became National‘s leader on February 27, 2018, after a competitive but relatively bloodless contest following the resignation of former prime minister Bill English. He won, promising a generational refresh.

High-profile front-benchers like Steven Joyce couldn’t get close to the numbers – some, like former health minister Jonathan Coleman knew their support was so weak they didn’t bother putting their hat in the ring.

It came down to Bridges and former justice minister Amy Adams. Bridges had the numbers on the day but several of Adams’ supporters would later go on to back Muller, including Nikki Kaye, Chris Bishop and Maggie Barry.

Bridges began his leadership trying to make that generational change seem real by moving his party closer to the centre on climate change. As transport minister, he tentatively embraced EVs – he even laid the groundwork for what Labour would like to become Auckland’s light rail project, protecting the route along which the tram was likely to run.

Bridges was a social conservative but he could sense the country’s mood was shifting on issues like climate change. Ironically, the man he picked to lead this peaceful venture on climate change was the thenrelatively unknown Todd Muller.

After taking over as leader, Bridges kept National in the mid40s in the polls for the first half of 2018. He sat around 10 in the preferred-PM polls – well behind Jacinda Ardern but not catastrophic. And he ran a fairly solid prosecutorial case against a Government still finding its feet, particularly as his well-chosen housing spokeswoman, Judith Collins, got to work on destroying Phil Twyford. Not all of the picks for his front bench were panning out – Adams didn’t seem to be able to get much traction in finance – but choosing Collins to take on KiwiBuild was inspired.

Things were going OK for Bridges. Not amazingly – the Government parties always outpolled National – but not bad either.

Bridges is burnt

Then in August of 2018 it all started to fall apart. Newshub broke the news Bridges had spent $113,000 of taxpayer cash on

Crown limos in the previous quarter, all part of a ‘‘getting to know Simon Bridges’’ tour. This information was set to be made public a few weeks later and probably would have caused a few bad news days for National before fading. But it hadn’t come out in the normal way: It had been leaked, and this made Bridges mad.

Seemingly sensing political opportunity, he accused Labour of leaking the document to Newshub, first the party in general, then Speaker Trevor Mallard, or Parliamentary Services. He demanded an independent inquiry – and got one. But this proved what he had been saying had not happened: The leak had come from within his party.

Bridges, now months into talking about a story that featured his own people leaking about him spending tens of thousands of taxpayers’ money, commissioned his own inquiry. Then just as he was to announce the results of that inquiry in October, the man he was about to finger stole the spotlight.

Jami-Lee Ross, one of Bridges’ top lieutenants and another lover of bare-knuckle politics, tweeted that he was, in fact, not the leaker but Bridges was about to ‘‘pin’’ the inquiry on him. And it didn’t end there. Ross accused Bridges of breaking electoral law and revealed a rift between them.

This all reached a feverpitch the next day when Ross drove from Auckland to Wellington to hold one of the most intense press conferences Parliament has seen, accusing Bridges of illegally hiding donations from rich Chinese donors, resigning from the party, and being remarkably frank about the kinds of conversations that go on behind closed doors in politics.

How frank? He had actually recorded several of them, and released them over the coming days. While these tapes featured no smoking guns for his claims, which Bridges denied, they did feature plenty to embarrass his leader – most memorably Bridges’ candid rating of his own MPs, including his estimation of Maureen Pugh as ‘‘f ...... useless.’’ (Pugh voted for Muller on Friday.)

Ross took his evidence to police, who eventually handed the case over to the Serious Fraud Office, which has pressed charges over the donations – but not against Bridges himself nor any other National official.

Against this torrent of bad news Bridges held firm. And his party did beside him. Ross was the enemy here, not Bridges.

That experience battlehardened Bridges but it also wounded him. His preferred prime ministerial figures in the polls began to slip, and Labour began to overtake National.

Months later, the terror attacks on March 15 changed politics completely. Ardern – struggling to sell a proposed capital gains tax – found a new clarity of purpose as she promised to ban the weapons used in the attack and take on social media.

National voted for the gun changes but had problems elsewhere in its response.

A particular lowlight was the party’s bizarre decision to come out against the benign United Nations migration compact before the attack, which became the subject of a minor scandal after anti-compact messages were found scrawled on the Christchurch gunman’s ammunition.

The ‘botched Budget’

National was in dire straits in May 2019. The aftermath of March 15 showed Ardern polling at stratospheric highs. When National managed to get attention, it was negative. While Labour had given up on its CGT, this was blamed more on Winston Peters than Bridges.

But Bridges fought back brilliantly at a time the Government would usually take all the attention. Labour had been talking up its 2019 Budget for yonks. It was a ‘‘Wellbeing Budget’’ – billed as a new way of doing government finances – shifting the focus away from blunt metrics like GDP to a more rounded view of spending in areas that improved people’s wellbeing.

The Opposition usually disappears around Budget time, left responding to huge announcements. Not so for the vaunted Wellbeing Budget. A staffer spotted that bits of the Budget were easily accessible using a search bar on the Treasury website. National used this vulnerability to glean vast amounts of secret Budget information.

Bridges sent the Budget to the press gallery during the middle of the prime minister’s Tuesday morning caucus media run. The Government was flustered. Reporters read lines of the Budget to Ardern from their phones.

The saga played out until National finally revealed how it had obtained the information. In the maelstrom, Treasury

Secretary Gabriel

Makhlouf embarrassed himself by alleging the breach was a ‘‘hack’’. It played to Bridges’ strengths: he leveraged a simple vulnerability in Treasury’s website into a massive hit on the Government.

National began polling well – very well. It bested Labour in every One News/Colmar Brunton poll between the hack and this week.

The 2019 polls reflected a good year for Bridges. In April, he faced down a challenge from Collins, knowing she didn’t have the numbers.

Bridges was helped by repeated Government mistakes. The year began with the collapse of Labour’s flagship housing policy KiwiBuild – it ended with the news its cornerstone transport policy, light rail in Auckland, was on the rocks as well.

Huge high before crushing fall

2020 began looking even better for Bridges. The hype around Ardern’s Christchurch response had mostly faded. He was making fewer missteps in media appearances. The talk of challenges to his leadership were long gone. In February, he made a bold call his caucus mostly agreed with: ruling out working with NZ First after the election. The public seemed to like this move and in two consecutive polls they finally supported his party and ACT to a degree where it could govern. Then Covid-19 happened. National did not ignore Covid-19. It called repeatedly for the Government to do far more. On issues like testing, borders and the extension of the wage subsidy, National was ahead of the Government.

But Bridges’ own response stopped resonating with the public. His nakedly political attack on the first economic package, which dared to raise benefits, went down badly. This was nothing compared to the overwhelmingly negative response to an overwhelmingly negative Facebook post he made criticising the Government during the lockdown. Bridges’ criticism of the Government – first that it wasn’t fighting Covid-19 hard enough, then that it was fighting it too hard – went against a national spirit of pride. While Ardern and Dr Ashley Bloomfield encouraged Kiwis to stick to a kind of Blitz spirit of patriotism, Bridges kept comparing us to Australia. It was clear Kiwis didn’t like this approach. Bridges had stopped sharing internal polling with his caucus. One corporate poll leaked had National at 29 per cent. This could be dismissed as rogue but the Newshub/Reid Research poll released last Monday could not be. True to his spirit, Bridges fought hard till the end. After Muller secured the National leadership, Bridges held a somewhat jovial press conference to thank his staff and family but not quite to bow out of politics just yet. Bridges is a man who clearly loves politics deeply. It is not inconceivable that he could stay on.