Gone By Lunchtime: David Seymour and his Prince Hal epoch

What’s up with the man from Epsom?

The leader of the Act Party has been in plenty of headlines in the last two weeks, ranging from a controversial letter to police on behalf of constituent Philip Polkinghorne (written before David Seymour was a minister) to an attempt to drive a Land Rover up the steps of parliament. Remarkably, he had a pop at an “ill-advised” Christopher Luxon.

And that’s just scraping the surface; there are the questions around the response to Tim Jago, the teacher-only days, the school lunches. Across the board, he is steadfast in insisting he’s erred not even a skerrick. Is it an obduracy born of being a one-man band for so long, or is he going through a Prince Hal phase, getting some stuff out of his system before he becomes the king (or deputy prime minister, at least)?

In a new episode of Spinoff politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime, Annabelle Lee-Mather, Ben Thomas and Toby Manhire thrash all that out. Plus: how much alarm are the latest cluster of opinion polls causing for National and Luxon? Does a cavalcade of health issues represent a serious political headache for the government? What should we make of the findings in the much-delayed Manurewa Marae data inquiry and are John Tamihere’s protests fair? And a word on the Cook Islands, Mark Brown and China.

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