The PM showed backbone where the moaners did not. But if you think it’s all over, just ask his coalition partner.
We may never know precisely how yesterday’s white-knuckle National caucus meeting played out. But Christopher Luxon would have been within his rights to break the silence by flicking on a projector. They’d have expected a PowerPoint presentation, all KPIs and quarterly targeting. Instead, in my imagined version, it would be video. A horror film: news tracks from 2020.
Everyone who was around back then still wears the scars. The ousting of Simon Bridges set off a festival of disembowelment that ended only when a certain MP from Botany and former airline CEO did maketh a covenant of peace. A peace, indeed, that continued into government, when the peace was kept, against any number of doubters, between the warring parties of yellow and black.
And as for the five recalcitrant MPs, the disgruntled and moany ones who seemingly had gone to the media, he might have lined them up and said, like Logan Roy to his children: I love you, but you are not serious people. These five, these Moany Five, anonymous and envious, turned out to lack the spine or wit.
The last time a prime minister was rolled in New Zealand, Jenny Shipley and her supporters ran a precise operation camouflaged in the least thrilling name imaginable as the Te Puke Bypass Committee. It was 1997 and the numbers were punctiliously assembled and bow-tied on the coup while Jim Bolger was abroad. This lot? Couldn’t organise a spill in a Wellington pipe.
Instead, Luxon came at last to the conclusion he needed to force the issue. To tell this group of insubordinates, 200 days out from a general election: piss or get off the pot. The longer the speculation drew on the more it corroded Luxon’s authority. Every time he was obliged to say, “I just know,” when asked how he could be so confident he had their full support, it lost a little force. So he stared them down, he put a confidence vote, and he won it.
“Caucus has answered clearly and decisively,” Luxon said of the vote – a secret ballot, with results that are not shared with anyone, including most MPs. “It has backed my leadership and that matter is now closed and I won’t be commenting further on it.”
At a two-minute appearance following the caucus meeting – after which he refused to take any questions – Luxon launched both barrels at the media. Inspired, perhaps, by the mode beloved by both his former deputy prime minister, Winston Peters, and his current, David Seymour, he sought to paint it all as a deranged press beat-up.
It was a “media soap opera”, he said, and he’d put the confidence motion to “put that media speculation to rest”. But the origin of the latest woeful episode, the protagonists of that soap opera, were his own MPs, who decided to speak to the media. On which, there are plenty of loose ends. Not least, was Stuart Smith, the chief whip whose frustration was reported to have sparked things, briefing against his leader? He was absent yesterday, owing to “a longstanding personal appointment”, said the prime minister’s office; a perplexing claim, given that he’d told the Post on Monday night he expected to be there, saying, “we’ll have a good conversation in caucus”. If Luxon believes Smith has been briefing an iota against him, his position is untenable.
In many ways Luxon is stronger now than he was at breakfast-time yesterday. He has called a bluff. After a private airing of grievances and a public display of collective confidence, he can reasonably expect to staunch the leaking, at least in the short term. But the polls will keep coming. If the trend is stubborn, the speculation will follow. And then what?
Commentators, meanwhile, will keep on commenting – and by commentators I mean, of course, Winston Peters. “It doesn’t look good, does it? It just doesn’t look good,” was his assessment of the events of yesterday morning. Asked by parliamentary reporters if he would have advised Luxon to hold that confidence vote, Peters said, “No. Because there’s always an inevitable consequence.” Luxon had let a genie out of the bottle – “this is not [last] time it happens”. He said: “All I’m saying is this is a very bad move. There are going to be consequences for that.”
The Post’s Henry Cooke put it to Peters that more than 35 years ago, as a National Party MP, he’d routinely outperform his then leader, Jim Bolger, as preferred prime minister. On that same measure in Sunday’s Verian poll for 1News, Luxon was down by four points to 16%. Peters? Up two to 12%.“Do you think you might start out-polling the prime minister again?” asked Cooke. Peters seemed lost for a second in a reverie, before launching an attack on the media and their polls. The mainstream just kept on underestimating New Zealand First, he said. “Stand back and watch. You’re watching history be made.”
A moment later, the 81-year-old added, before skipping away with a Cheshire grin, “if you want me to lead the National Party, why don’t you have a poll on that.”
