Leaders safe for now but young Nats wait in wings
You’ve got to feel sorry for Opposition leader Bill English when the media tom toms put it out there that there was trouble in camp and he was about to be rolled.
English will go, but not just yet when the polls for National are so good. It was with rude haste that the leadership issue was raised when English was barely out of his starting blocks in the political year. A politician’s buttocks had hardly graced a debating chamber pew when the question of his successor, and his deputy leader’s role, made the top two look like they were close to losing their front row seats.
English, through no real fault of his own this time, had missed out once again on becoming elected prime minister.
Cursed with never being able to breast that tape, English is like the Dean Barker of politics, not a choker but someone who looked like he was going to sail in, till Winston Peter’s Rocky Horror-ed negotiations took ‘‘a jump to the left’’.
What English failed to see was that his party had become Nigel No-Friends.
Like British public school boys and girls, the National government had come to believe it was the ruling class, and that the practice of bullying by its most aggressive prefect, Steven Joyce, could continue without repercussion.
It’s amazing what a bit of reverse therapy, in the shape of Jacinda Ardern’s ‘‘relentless positivity’’, can do to a toxic institution. If Joyce thought he could get away with caning Peters over the superannuation debacle without it coming back on the Nats, then maybe the Great Strategist wasn’t so great after all.
MMP post-election negotiations had taken place pre-election when wounding acts of skulduggery didn’t have time to be forgotten and forgiven. Peters went with someone who gives every appearance of refusing to believe that politics has to be a dirty game. She might not worship at the Mormon Church any more, but Ardern has a strong faith in those in whom she puts her trust, as witnessed by Green Party leader James Shaw during the coalition talks.
Instead of pointing the finger at English, surely the person to be expelled from the camp is Joyce, whose masterminding of the election campaign and reckless disregard for taking seriously the rules of MMP engagement, led to National being spurned.
It didn’t occur to the Nats that Peters wouldn’t wish to do business with those who had plotted against him and tried to slur his name with alleged pension fraud.
To now stem the talk of English’s leadership, an adjustment has to be seen to be made and someone has to be sacrificed, and that person will probably be the deputy leader. Paula Bennett has increasingly, of late, been referred to as ‘‘Mrs Bennett’’, which to those steeped in the novels of Jane Austen conjures up one of her silliest characters, the peabrained matriarch of the Bennetfamily in Pride and Prejudice.
During the election campaign Mrs Bennett became highly jocular and seemed to be afflicted by a nervous tick of giggling, any small amusement setting her off in gales of mysterious laughter.
Timing is everything and before the prime minister’s baby news broke, Mrs Bennett revealed she had taken steps to decrease her stomach, while, shortly afterwards, Ms Ardern announced she would be increasing hers. Who wins in the discipline stakes – a giggling deputy leader having trouble controlling their appetite, or a grinning leader who didn’t bother practising birth control?
All judgments aside, as the nation becomes absorbed in Waist Watch, National MP Simon Bridges will begin stepping up his play for leader of the Opposition.
If only Bridges could be understood and stop speaking as if he’s got a hot potato rolling round his mouth trying to cool it before swallowing.
The party faithful should whip round to hire the expertise of the equivalent of Lionel Logue, King George VI’s speech and language therapist, so what Simon Says can be heard.
As for the notion that Crusher Collins will lurch forward from the back benches to take the lead, she has way too much baggage, her haters suspecting that she was not only linked to the damaged Auckland fuel pipeline, but she was probably at the wheel of the digger that did it.
Collins is too long in the tooth and it will be Bridges, Nikki Kaye or Amy Adams vying, as the Opposition tries to young itself up to compete with the prime of Ms Jacinda Ardern. And younging it up is hard for a party where even the Young Nats come across as having zimmer frames of the soul.
Meanwhile, the Opposition are making all the right noises and saying they’re right behind their leader, even if he can’t seem to win a chook raffle.
At least English can count on one genuine vote from that most protected of species, his old friend Nick Smith.
Judith Collins is too long in the tooth and it will be Simon Bridges, Nikki Kaye or Amy Adams vying, as the Opposition tries to young itself up to compete with the prime of Ms Jacinda Ardern.