Key insights
John Key’s resignation has set off a huge quake under his caucus.
Personal views on Prime Minister John Key, and photographs of his time at the top.
So long, JK – and thanks a big, fat bunch. It took less than 24 hours from Monday to realise that rather than farewelling our sublimely popular Prime Minister with a misty hanky-wave, his Government’s supporters should really be pelting him with new season’s bottom-of-the-punnet mushy strawberries.
It’s fine for John Key to cement his place in the great sweep of history by leaving now. But he has made a ghastly mistake if he thought, from his giddy heights of popularity, he could bequeath a safe passage for National through to its fourth term in next year’s election.
Alas, there will be no such bequest. The fine print on the bottom of each opinion poll reads, “Results not transferable.”
Key has set off a massive earthquake under his caucus. The ley lines of patronage – aka who to suck up to to get ahead around here – are utterly disrupted, and it’s impossible for the foreseeable future to predict where they will next settle.
The idea that Key could pass his mantle on to deputy Bill English was great on paper. It’s unarguable that English is the most familiar and widely respected candidate; almost ridiculously intelligent, and likeable in an understated, stoical cow-cocky sort of a way. He is surely the safest pair of hands to see National through the election. But that’s not how leadership succession works in practice. In the wise words of former Prime Minister Mike Moore, at times like this, the first three words on every caucus member’s mind are, “Why not me?” At press time, English had two rivals who, like him, had answered themselves, “Of course, me!”
All the other MPs are now working on the next question: “What’s in this for me?” Who an MP votes for now will affect how they are favoured in future, so there’s an awful lot of second-guessing going on – not to mention utu from those MPs who are retiring, and from those who weren’t going to retire as of last week, but who now realistically realise they might jolly well have to.
TENSION INTENSIFIES
The jockeying reveals a bigger-than-suspected disconnect between the Executive and the backbench. There always is one – newer MPs pining to get ahead, resenting having to wait. With a caucus as big as National’s, the tension intensifies. There are only so many Executive jobs to go around. Those at the top get complacent, especially when the polls are favourable. Ministers forget how many ambitious juniors are rattling around underemployed – and are apt to sit around in cliques, imagining how much better things would be if they got seats at the big table. They critique their elders and not-always-betters with a keen ferocity.
With Key upstairs, one kept one’s resentments entre nous. His popularity and likeability swept all before it. No one would repay him with querulousness. Besides, to make trouble would be to forsake promotion.
But with the golden leader now off to Planet Key, towing his golf trundler, there’s suddenly no time to lose. Second- and even some firstterm MPs see that this could be their only chance of career advancement – and not all of them are self-deluded. Todd Muller, Mark Mitchell, Chris Bishop, Alfred Ngaro, Tim Macindoe and Barbara Kuriger are due promotion on demonstrated merit.
Conversely, ministers Craig Foss, Todd McClay, Sam Lotu-Iiga, Nathan
Guy and Louise Upston have had their chance, but performed patchily. And although experience should never lightly be dispensed with, old-stagers Murray McCully, Nick Smith and Gerry Brownlee would not survive if National used Labour’s method of choosing the Cabinet by caucus ballot. Even Mr Fixit, Steven Joyce, would struggle, given his poor record as anointed by-election campaign supremo.
But the situation is actually worse than the new leader having to make tough decisions about kind and decent colleagues who, in many cases, will also be personal friends.
(And honestly, sacking Guy would be like putting a favourite teddy in the bin.) The backbench, which handily for this situation outnumbers the Executive, is shaping up to positively demand the ousting of certain ministers – not least Brownlee.
For here’s another Moore-ovian adage: be careful how you treat people on your way up, because you’re going to meet them again on your way down. Brownlee’s irascible style, in public and in person, has obviously riled some junior colleagues.
Even the genial English, with his gruff, Southlandic manner, has alienated backbenchers. Caucus consultation is sketchy, dissent or even ideas not encouraged. A troubling symptom of a backbench taken for granted was the humiliation of Nuk Korako, who was among those forced to promote a fatuous bill – his being about lost luggage – just to use up private members’ time.
RISKILY SHORT-SIGHTED
Politics is supposed to be a grown-ups’ pursuit, not Scouts and Guides where everyone plays nicely and gets a turn. But ministers who neglect to cultivate, mentor and generally jolly along their junior potential successors are riskily short-sighted.
This, rather blatantly, is the long game Judith Collins is playing. She has always cultivated a coterie of junior MPs. This is not just some Machiavellian playbook. She is naturally quite a warm, nurturing operator – when she’s not busy deciding which gizzard to rip next.
Collins hasn’t a bolter’s chance – now or probably ever. But in some future crash-pilot scenario, if the party’s fortunes eddy dangerously, there she’ll be, ready to welcome colleagues in with gently smiling jaws. She would be a fire-breathing Opposition leader, but her getting that turn would depend on voterdom here turning Trumpish and reprising the old days of Rob’s Mob Muldoon populism – and on Winston not getting there first.
For now, though, we’re seeing exposed a caucus with practically no experience of leadership ructions – let alone of managing disunity in public. Only a handful have any experience of leadership transition – and the last couple, from English to Don Brash to Key, were abnormally orderly. This one is more a transit of Mars, despite the ex-leader going in peace. Events have sprawled way beyond the Executive’s hitherto tight control with terrifying speed.
It’s salutary to see how quickly the water closes over when you get out of the sea of politics. Key’s opinion is now worth zilch. English, an object of caucus veneration yesterday, is just one of 59 votes.
At press time, it seemed certain English would prevail, with either Jonathan Coleman or Paula Bennett as deputy. Alternatively, Coleman’s aggressive pitch to backbenchers might result in his joining them if English detects a loyalty vacuum in the current Health Minister.
It’s possible, too, he could appease Coleman with a plum job such as
Key’s opinion is now worth zilch. English, an object of caucus veneration yesterday, is just one of 59 votes.
foreign affairs. But neither would diminish Coleman’s ambitions – or anyone else’s. He and other contenders will be biding their time to see how English’s reign goes. Besides Bennett and Collins, there’s Simon Bridges, youngest in the leadership waiting room. It’s even possible for Coleman to win, but although a competent minister, he’s hardly a household name like English and he lacks immediately obvious voter appeal. These things can develop, but not in a week.
A VESUVIUS OF AMBITIONS
But the most important issue here is that, whoever wins this contest, the matter will not be settled. Key’s departure has uncorked a Vesuvius of ambitions, which will be all the keener, since this upheaval could imperil National’s hopes for a fourth term.
Bitter reflections will blight the holiday mood for National supporters. Had Key remained, National’s historic re-election seemed inevitable – albeit with heavier coalition sandbags.
Continued progress to those sunny uplands will depend on whether Brand National is at least nearly as strong as was Brand Key. We simply don’t know yet. What is tried and tested is that caucus disunity corrodes a party’s popularity. And boy, have we seen resentment this week.
It’s not just pure rivalry in store, it’s panic. National cannot help but come off the boil with the public from here on. It would be a miracle if there is no post-Key poll dip.
This brings compounding risks. Only a handful of MPs will be left who have experience of caucus life in times of falling popularity. This caucus may be insufficiently seasoned to avoid overreacting to poll fluctuations. So it is that leadership side-eyeing is here to stay in the meantime.
We need only recall the petulant antics of Labour’s Chris Carter trying to roll leader Phil Goff. Thoroughly spoilt by his dream run in the Clark administration, Carter could not accept he wasn’t shortly going to get his old life back. He wasn’t the only one. After Goff, Labour spooked itself into three more leadership changes, none of which has improved its standing to date.
It’s safe to predict similar jitters for National, given how few in its caucus have known anything but the peace of basking in Key’s reassuring glow. Most probably don’t realise it simply isn’t normal politics to get away with the pratfalls and mini scandals this Government has weathered under Key’s Teflon stewardship.
Those assuming that hitting the refresh button will shore up National’s poll standing, or even insulate the next PM from unflattering comparisons with the Key era, have no guarantee. Too severe a dung out may simply further detach Brand National from the magic of Brand Key. English’s rivals may fancy themselves as intrepid change agents dumping the grumpy old coots and reinventing the party. But how smart is it to reinvent something that has, to date, been a towering popular success? Present the public with a slew of new faces and it might well say, as in the old TV ad, “This ain’t Jim Beam.”
NO ILLUSIONS
For National, the usually deathly third-termitis of sheer tedious predictability has become a plus.
The new leadership should be under no illusions; National’s popularity, as distinct from Key’s, has never been of the “We love you!” sort. It’s more the “You’ll do – and the other lot are a shambles” variety.
Voters know broadly what National is about, and are, on balance, not sufficiently alarmed by it to seriously consider an alternative. A radically changed, even a re-energised, National might actually scare people.
Key’s successors should also realise that his legacy will be as much appreciated for what the guy could have done to us but didn’t as for what he actually did. People warmed to him because he was not adamantine and upheavalling. Despite his “ambition” rhetoric, he seldom pushed the populace past its comfort zone.
You never know, maybe the public will embrace the new administration, and English will hang onto power – or “pear”, as he calls it – and Keyish popularity. We may not, after all, be subject to more Billing and couping after next week.
But it also pays to remember that English is in a similar position to Key. He, too, has contemplated leaving politics in recent years, and if the caucus pushes him too hard now, he will. At that point, like Key, he’ll be all right, mate. He has plenty of next options in life. But National will have one fewer, and counting down.