Call it a cluster, call it a shitshow: the result is a pair of grim sequels.
Give Christopher Luxon this at least: he just keeps winning. In April he faced the threat of a caucus revolt, brought the insubordinates to heel and emerged with proclamations of 100% support. Yesterday, facing the threat of a caucus revolt, well, same again: he brought them to heel and emerged with proclamations of 100% support.
At least, this time around, the near-facsimile sequence – from Herald report of disquiet in the ranks, through fevered media speculation, into emergency caucus meeting, confidence vote in the leader and clipped statement from the Beehive banquet hall – took around half the time.
Call it Zeno’s dichotomy paradox or the chapters of The Luminaries, but it does have the feel of a cruel existential test. A bleak practical joke in the simulation. As if someone is trying to see how many times they can fold us in half.
In the end, the August rerun of the National Party’s April indignity was best narrated by Mike Hosking, award-winning broadcaster and spiritual mentor to Christopher Luxon. It was “a cluster”, he said on the radio yesterday. “Today is about introspection, self-absorption, selfishness.”
Fair point. No matter how shit you might think Luxon is at his job, the plotters, insofar as there were plotters, have proved demonstrably shitter. It’s clear enough now that the Herald story of Monday night didn’t help them. It was a hindrance to any move against Luxon, presumably fed by irrelevant malcontents, rather than any half-smart tacticians.
Had the attentions of the prime minister and his allies not been sparked, had the plotters’ path been plotted carefully, who knows whether they might have done it the way it had to be done: presenting Luxon with a fait accompli. You do wonder whether this lot could organise a piss-up in a brewery, not to mention a bypass in Te Puke.
Still, a number of National MPs, the ones who might have tipped the scales, flinched yesterday for the simple reason that it all looked too hard, too risky, too complicated.
Rolling a leader is a heck of a thing to do. Rolling a prime minister is much, much harder. There are portfolios to rearrange and conversations with the governor general to be had. The proximity to the election adds further complications. There is legislation to get across the line; you can’t go swapping out ministers for the hell of it.
And this is MMP. There are coalition partners to keep at least abreast, if not onside. The only other time this has been done since the dawn of proportional representation in New Zealand, it was two years out from an election, schemed out long in advance and via Jenny Shipley’s Te Puke diversion. Even then it ended in tears.
It seems that Chris Penk, one of the brightest, best liked and most capable young ministers of the current National crop, just thought, to hell with it, I’ll do the thing. The thing (a stalking horse, call it) went badly, and a few minutes later Erica Stanford and Chris Bishop stood awkwardly around Luxon as he incanted the slogan in the Beehive banquet hall. Everything is fine!
Penk got sacked from cabinet. A few hours later he announced, via the prime minister’s office, he would not seek re-election in the safe seat of Kaipara ki Mahurangi. Let the shame for that fall where it falls, but not on him.
Chris Hipkins – probably the biggest winner of yesterday’s debacle – said of the National insurrection that these were not serious people, and rightly enough. There’s another line from Succession that might equally be applied to the whole messy enterprise. Shitshow at the fuck factory.
Where does it leave Luxon? Mark Mitchell freely acknowledged polling could take a bruising, at least in the short term. It’s already looking grim. Last night’s poll by Verian for 1News had National unable to form a government, certainly not without the Opportunity Party. That has a symmetry of its own: Luxon ruling them out on the fly was the first in a procession of small and medium cock-ups across the last few weeks that led up to yesterday’s – what’s the word – cluster.
Another poll makes equally sobering viewing. Completed by Talbot Mills in July and viewed by The Spinoff, it puts Luxon’s net favourability on -12, well south of Chris Bishop (+2) and Erica Stanford (-1). There’s a good bir of air there, even if many are yet to form a view on the latter two.
For the prime minister, as he remains, the tough reality is that he stands surrounded by demons in ever decreasing circles.
There’s Trump, the Strait of Hormuz, and the daily cataclysms that delivers. There are the parties of the opposition, which is fairly small beer, if we’re honest, certainly compared with, say, pissed off small business owners or Chinese New Zealanders.
There are your own coalition partners, who, one more than the other, cannot contain their contempt. And now, again, we learn that people in your own caucus think so poorly of you they’d want you out without any obvious alternative. What next? The Sigourney Weaver scene from Alien?
And yet, Luxon gets at least one intake of energy, some smidge of authority out of winning yesterday – even if it’s just half of what he got last time. That must be enough, surely, to win some sort of immunity shield up to November.
We won’t know for some time, maybe years, how close it really was. If Stanford or Bishop had been doing rounds of interviews this morning, presenting a new and energised, articulate version of National, it might just have shifted the plates the way Metiria Turei’s revelations about historic benefit fraud did in 2017. That sent the Greens up (briefly) and Labour down, tipping Little out and Ardern in.
It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility yesterday might have similarly tilted the axis. Who knows: we could have ended up with a 2026 contest of, say, Stanford versus McAnulty.
Instead, the sequel to the Luxon coup that wasn’t of April yields the sequel to the election that was of 2023. Chris versus Chris it is, round two.
