We’re going to need to travel back nearly three decades.

They love a spill in Australia. Four prime ministers have been rolled by their own MPs since 2010. The UK is even hungrier for its own, with four PMs victim of an internal coup in just the last seven years.

New Zealand is a bit different. You have to wind back to the last millennium to find a prime minister removed against their will. It was the last breath of 1997 and the unfortunate victim was Jim Bolger. 

That is a long way back, but not distant enough to defy the great constant of MMP in New Zealand. Winston Peters. He was there in 1997, and furious at Jenny Shipley’s intricately plotted removal of the man with whom he had formed New Zealand’s first coalition under the new electoral system. And he is there in 2026, though you wouldn’t expect him to go into bat for Christopher Luxon, a man for whom Peters has open contempt. We’ll come back to all that in a bit.

Bolger embattled

It’s easy to forget when you consider the waves of affection across his final years and upon his death, but Jim Bolger was not a popular prime minister. Barely had he arrived on the ninth floor of the Beehive in 1990 before he was in the single figures as preferred prime minister, well below Luxon’s ratings.

Bolger battled through, however, and won re-election by a whisker in 1993. In 1996, he negotiated an MMP government with Winston Peters, leader of what Bolger had called “the racist party”, New Zealand First. 

In short order the first MMP government was weighed down by boxer short scandals and economic malaise. The newly installed treasurer, Winston Peters, was scrapping in the house and turning off voters. Bolger, gamely, pronounced it “springtime for New Zealand”, but it didn’t help much. The mood at home was grim as he headed for Europe and a Commonwealth heads of government meeting. 

Jenny Shipley, a formidable senior minister in Bolger governments, was the name most mentioned as a potential replacement for the prime minister. A newspaper profile in 1997 called her the “lady in waiting”. Bolger had asked her to make a public statement that she wouldn’t challenge before the end of the term. 

“I remember saying to him, Jim, you know, neither you or I can predetermine what the caucus will wish to do,” Shipley told The Spinoff in an interview for the Juggernaut podcast. At that point she hadn’t decided to take him on, she said, and she pledged simply to work hard for the government. “It was a real conversation that Jim and I had, and it wasn’t acrimonious. He was probably disappointed that I didn’t say yes, but he couldn’t fault me. I worked hard for that man and our team absolutely every day.”

The Te Puke Bypass 

Before long, though, she had agreed with colleagues that they needed to act. They ran their planning meetings as “the Te Puke Bypass Committee”, a name settled on by her senior private secretary as perfect for exciting precisely zero interest. 

Bolger departed for Europe in late 1997 without any inkling of the plotting under way. His chief of staff, Rob Eaddy, was similarly unaware back at parliament, until he bumped into Roger Sowry, a National cabinet minister, at Bellamy’s restaurant. 

He harmlessly jostled his old friend. “I said, ‘What are you up to, Sowry? You’re bloody plotting again, you little bastard!’ And he gave me a really strange response. He said: ‘You know, Rob, I’ve always told you that I support Jim, but when the time comes to change, I will support that change.’ Then he walked off.”

Shipley had determined that “the kindest way and the most effective way and the least disruptive way was to simply send a pledge letter to my colleagues who I knew supported change… And by using that process over several days, I had a group of pledge letters signed in my possession that had… a comfortable majority of the caucus”.

The task of sharing the news with Bolger was given to Doug Graham, one of Bolger’s great allies, someone, he later told me, who was not “party to all this skullduggery and the backstabbing and number counting”. 

He welcomed Bolger off the plane at Auckland airport. “And I said, look, I think the numbers are against you.”

“And I recall going to my office,” said Bolger, “and I rang up Jenny Shipley’s office and we had a chat, and she was absolutely confident she had the numbers”.

Shipley: “I said to him, look, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way, but here’s the numbers. And they did test it, they rang a few people, and the rest is history.”

Bolger: “I thought, if that’s what they do when I’m out of the country, then to hell with it, is about time I resigned.”

He was gracious in public. “I leave the office not bitter,” said Bolger. “Bitterness is an extraordinarily destructive emotion, and I refuse to entertain it. I leave it with a sense of great satisfaction for what we’ve been able to achieve together in the seven years I’ve been prime minister. I leave it with enormous hope for the future of the country.”

Shipley became New Zealand’s first female prime minister, but there was little time to celebrate. Among the challenges she confronted was an inflamed Winston Peters. Within a year, she had sacked him from cabinet after an acrimonious spat over the sale of Wellington airport shares. The public judged both poorly, but it did send a message decades into the future. I’ve been told by a well-placed source that as part of preparation for a previous, aborted move against Luxon, a challenger from within cabinet asked of Winston Peters how he would like to be informed about any imminent caucus coup.  

Look back in fondness

At the end of last year, at an event to mark the launch of the second season of Juggernaut at the Embassy in Wellington, National minister Chris Bishop agreed with the proposition that politicians – Jim Bolger as exemplar – tend to grow in popularity after they leave office.

“Look, people finish up their time in politics, and what tends to happen is people remember the good times and they forget the bad times. The country does. And that’s true of most leaders,” he said. 

It’s true, even for those who fell well short of a term – Geoffrey Palmer, say, or Mike Moore. “I think that people have a bit of an optimism bias,” said Bishop. “They do tend to look back more fondly than they did at the time.” That might not be the worst message to mutter into Christopher Luxon’s ear today.