Who said the election is a yawn-fest?

OPINION: About two years ago, I was attending a function in Queenstown after a play I had written was performed there. The wine flowed and the local MP was in attendance. I didn’t know much about Todd Barclay except that he’d just tweeted that he preferred Mike Hosking to the recently axed Campbell Live.

After jokingly thanking him for missing Seven Sharp to attend my play, I found him charming and supportive. The genial young man also seemed very popular with the Queenstown chattering classes.

Yet last week, in a disastrous seven days for National, Barclay resigned after the Newsroom website showed that not only had he secretly taped one of his staff, but he had informed Bill English, who had admitted as much to the police. Yet the police decided not to investigate further because Barclay would not co-operate.

If I get drunk this Christmas and do wheelies on my neighbours’ lawn, I really hope that if I refuse to answer questions, then the police will drop the investigation.

We also learned during National’s septimana horribilis that taxpayers’ money from a prime minister’s fund (referred to by Trevor Mallard as ‘‘Barclay’s bank’’) had been used to pay off Glenys Dickson, the staff member taped by Barclay.

Barclay furiously denied he had taped anyone but, when his boss, after fluffing about for a few hours, admitted that it was Barclay himself who had informed him of the taping, it was obvious that the former tobacco lobbyist would have his career in one of the safest seats in the country brutally stubbed out before it reached the filter tip.

But it was English’s role in the fiasco that caused the greatest collateral damage. He knew about the taping, and that Barclay had admitted it, and told police as much. Yet when the information, which later led to Barclay resigning, didn’t become public, English knowingly sat on it, no doubt hoping the issue would quietly disappear. He also kept quiet about the payout to Dickson.

Apart from the Dipton DoubleDipping scandal of 2009, where Mr English legally received a $900-a-week subsidy for his family home, he has been relatively free of controversy.

However, the prime minister seems donkey-deep in the Dastardly Dickson Dictaphone Double-Cross.

With disability minister and multimillionaire Nicky Wagner tweeting that she’d prefer to be out on the harbour than having disability meetings, the Education Ministry forced to apologise about the way it handled the merging and closing of Christchurch schools after the 2011 quake, and the Health Ministry admitting it botched the Budget figures for DHB funding, it was looking like a pretty disastrous week for the Government.

But never underestimate the ability of the Labour Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Team New Zealand at San Francisco had nothing on Labour. Just as people were opining about National’s ‘‘worst week ever’’ we learnt that ‘‘campaign fellows’’ who had flown from around the world to help the Labour campaign were housed in substandard marae accommodation.

It was a terrible look for a party that just a fortnight ago used the plight of ripped-off migrant students to justify cutting immigration numbers.

However, to Andrew Little’s credit, he acknowledged the problem and apologised for the mistake.

Will the events of last week affect the polls? They haven’t in the past, but whatever your politics, I think we can agree that those predicting an election-year yawn-fest during the next few months might have been just a tiny bit premature.