Succession struggle
Nat rivals fire first shots
OPINION: National’s next leader may not even have put his hand up yet. Former police officer and hostage negotiator Mark Mitchell is emerging as the dark horse in what is currently a three-way race, even though he hasn’t yet declared his intentions.
Mitchell is said to be weighing up his options over the weekend – read into that: he is still doing the numbers. But it’s been said he may already have sufficient support to be a serious candidate.
In a knockout contest, he is said to be ahead of former Cabinet minister Judith Collins but still behind former ministers Simon Bridges and Amy Adams.
His backers are believed to include many of the crucial ‘‘rookies’’ – the 10 first-term MPs whose votes are being fiercely lobbied by the contenders.
First elected to Parliament in 2011, Mitchell is a candidate in the mold of former prime minister Sir John Key, though they have very different backgrounds.
Mitchell arrived at Parliament with a successful career behind him and a to-die-for back story; he’s had violent confrontations with gangs and criminals as a police dog handler and member of the armed offenders squad.
He was stabbed in the line of duty but after leaving the police force, he sought out even more danger as a top international hostage negotiator, surviving a five-day siege in Iraq.
But it’s not just Mitchell’s back story that is giving his leadership ambitions some legs.
The political rule book is being thrown out the window not just worldwide but here, at the last election. Changing leaders less than two months out from the election should have been political suicide for Labour but ended up being its salvation.
National’s backbenchers saw the difference that an authentic and charismatic candidate can make. They will be weighing up whether either Amy Adams or Simon Bridges also have the appeal to generate something like the ‘‘Jacinda effect’’ that suddenly catapulted Labour from losers to winners.
Mitchell has other advantages; the class of 2011 is tight knit. He and the team around him are famously known as the ‘‘four amigos’’. They first flexed their muscles during the last leadership round after Key stepped aside and the party hierarchy learned to take them seriously.
Mitchell also ticks some other all-important boxes; he is known to be good mates with NZ First leader Winston Peters, and it was probably a strategic mistake by National not to put him in the postelection negotiating room.
He also has huge cross-party appeal. You would have to search a long time to find an MP from another party who doesn’t like him; that cross-party appeal is useful in MMP.
And while he is not as senior as Bridges or Adams, he has Cabinet experience. He is largely untested on the public stage – Mitchell is media savvy, reminiscent of Key in his early days, but has not had the same media exposure. That can also be an advantage in these days of the anti-politician. He has no political baggage.
The knockout contest to be used by National to select the next leader could work in Mitchell’s favour. If Collins is knocked out in the first round, her votes would probably fall to Mitchell.
But Collins will scrap to the end; she is banking on the twoweek contest giving her campaign legs with the public, if not with her colleagues. Of all the candidates, she has by far the highest profile.
And while she is said to have little backing from her fellow MPs, her strategy appears to involve reaching over the top of caucus and stirring up a grassroots campaign amongst the wider party to generate support using texts, and emails and phone calls.
Mitchell is not a career politician which is why he may be prepared to give it a shot this time around; others with long-term ambitions to be prime minister might take the more calculating approach that it would be better to let Adams or Bridges take the loss in 2020, given the difficulty of rolling a first-term Government.
There is, of course, one other potential contender who has yet to show his hand – finance spokesman and campaign strategist Steven Joyce.
If the next election is fought on the state of New Zealand’s economy, then Joyce would seem a natural fit.
But he has the disadvantage as National’s campaign strategist of having had to play the role of hard man and enforcer with many of the party’s MPs, which is why his popularity is not high amongst its caucus members.
It is also questionable whether he could humble himself enough to work the phones in a round of begging calls for votes after being in a position of power for so long.
But he could use his position to leverage backing from the candidates to stay on as finance spokesman. There will be plenty of that sort of horse-trading going on between now and February 27, when the vote is taken.
No wonder outgoing leader Bill English looked so happy to be on the other end of those phone calls for once.