Ardern breaking silence spoils national’s party

Within an hour of National leader Simon Bridges’ wrapping up his first party conference, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was peeing on his parade.

Ardern broke her five-week-long radio silence and posted a Facebook video of herself talking about her return to work in a week’s time, her foot rocking baby Neve in the background.

This reminder of her existence will have been no coincidence.

Bridges was hoping for clear air at the conference and Ardern wanted to foul it.

Bridges is clearly not a superstitious man or the first policy he pulled out of the bag at a party conference would not be to shrink class sizes.

He had promised new ideas and the one he found was the very same as that Labour’s ill-fated former leader David Cunliffe delivered at his first conference in 2014.

Two months later Cunliffe led Labour to a record low result of 24 per cent at the election.

Smaller class sizes is a winner wherever you sit in the political spectrum, but anything that invites a comparison of Bridges with Cunliffe’s leadership should be a no-go area.

Just as his predecessor John Key distinguished himself early on with talk of the “underclass”, Bridges was attempting to show he had heart on social policy areas, not just the economy.

Bridges’ speech was full of the usual phrases like “do the crime, do the time”, talk about letting hardworking Kiwis keep more of their own money, and criticism of the Government for its “tax and borrow” ways. It could have been delivered by any of his predecessors. Then again, maybe that was the point.

There is another ominous comparison between Bridges and Cunliffe: their polling as preferred Prime Minister.

Bridges has two advantages. One is that the National Party is polling at almost double the support levels Labour was getting when Cunliffe was in charge. The other big difference is that thus far National’s caucus and members have managed to remain a tightly disciplined crew.

English’s best parting gift for Bridges was to terrify that large caucus by painting a dire picture of what infighting and division would mean for them and their immediate futures.

Bridges managed a cute moment, reminding everybody he too had a young family by getting his children Emlyn, Harry and Jemima on stage with him.

There was a punchy and slick video introducing Bridges and the members tittered at photos of young Simon and laughed when he said of wife Natalie “I fell in love with a leftie.”

The loudest cheers came when he spoke of winning Tauranga in 2008: “I beat Winston.”

There were more laughs when an unflattering photo of Ardern flashed up. The test will be how long those laughs last.

For much of the conference, the criticism had focused on Peters. Ardern’s Facebook post was a reminder that Peters was not the biggest obstacle after all.

He may indeed have beaten “Winston” but the biggest question will be whether he can beat Ardern.