Spare a thought for the prime minister who had to apologise for his comments to Rotorua business leaders, answer endless questions about Winston Peters and is now being called prime minister “in name only” by The Post, writes Henry Oliver in today’s excerpt from The Bulletin.

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Prime minister and National leader Christopher Luxon must be glad that yesterday is over. By the afternoon, he’d apologised for remarks made at a Rotorua Business Chamber breakfast the previous Friday, conceding he “got that wrong” after telling the chamber’s chief executive her question about business survival amounted to “a negative view,” as reported by 1News’s Justin Hu.

Luxon had initially defended the exchange, telling RNZ’s John Campbell that his point was about government and business needing to work together, and argued a separate line – “who cares what the Government thinks or does” – had been taken out of context. By his afternoon press conference, though, his tone had changed. He said he was sorry for not properly acknowledging the pressures small businesses are under, and denied anyone had pushed him to change course, saying simply that he felt he could have expressed himself better.

Ask Claude

Buried in the transcript of that same exchange (released by his office in a failed attempt to calm the waters by providing context) was a smaller, stranger footnote: mid-answer, Luxon paused to ask the room how many businesspeople were using Claude or Claude Code, calling AI adoption “a huge opportunity” they should be prioritising.

Today on The Spinoff, Toby Manhire tested that advice on the transcript itself, giving it to Claude and asking for “an assessment of the politician’s communication style and its effectiveness” without looking at any news reports. The verdict wasn’t kind: Claude called the AI pivot “a topic change dressed as an answer,” and summed up the whole talk as confident and ideologically coherent but “empathetically thin”.

Not the only fire to put out

Luxon’s apology landed the same day Luxon was fielding questions about a separate controversy. In case you missed it, last week foreign affairs minister Winston Peters had told Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan (who was born in China) to “go back to your own country” during a Parliament exchange the previous week, prompting Luxon to tell Morning Report that the comments were “racist”.

At Monday’s post-Cabinet conference, Luxon confirmed he’d finally spoken to Peters but refused to say what was discussed, telling RNZ that it would “stay between Winston and me”. He said it was his view Peters should apologise, while declining to say whether Peters would keep the foreign affairs role if National won re-election, calling it “hypothetical”.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins argued that hedging wasn’t good enough, as reported by The Post’s Henry Cooke. Hipkins said Peters’ position as foreign minister was “untenable” given the comments had already been branded racist by his own prime minister, and called on Luxon to remove him from the portfolio at minimum. Hipkins framed it as a matter of basic accountability: If a minister in my government behaved in that way I would sack them.”

‘Prime minister in name only’

By this morning, The Post’s “Editorial Leadership Team” had escalated that argument considerably. In an editorial titled “Luxon’s impotence makes him prime minister in name only” – and in language reminiscent of its new editor Matthew Hooton – the paper argued Luxon’s failure to recommend Peters’ sacking to the governor-general exposes him as prime minister in a legal sense only, with Peters holding the real power to lead the coalition and the country.

The editorial pointed to the section of the Cabinet Manual, which holds ministers accountable to the prime minister for their conduct at all times, in all roles, and argued Luxon’s attempt to separate Peters’ comments as those of a party leader rather than a minister “will not wash”. Having already called the remarks racist, the Post argued, the prime minister either had to act on that judgment or concede that his cabinet believes racist comments about a fellow MP and the country’s largest trading partner are compatible with serving at the highest levels of government – a question the editorial suggested National’s caucus would need to ask Luxon directly at its morning meeting today.