Grabbed a Seat (Patreon)

Update: just received this.

Luxon with Willis, Bridges will be ranked #3 and take finance, Bishop at 4.

National is a shitshow. Even after the insansity of last week's vote of no confidence in Collins, the shitshow continued. Yesterday a couple of outlets reported that John Key was making phonecalls to MPs to help support Luxon.

Then a few hours later those same outlets reported that Key had in fact not been proactively calling, he'd returned the call of some MPs. He had made one proactive call but this wasn't to push Luxon's cause. Apparently.

All of this playing out in public is just embarassing. As a huge political nerd even I'm sick of National's laundry airing in everyone's back yard.

So of course I went looking for the more private laundry.

One National MP told me that Luxon had the numbers, "comfortably more than half" they said. When there's 33 MPs, that means somewhere in the realm of 20-24 maybe?

This same MP said that Nicola Willis was looking the odds-on for Deputy. There was speculation that this is Key's wet-dream ticket. Luxon was annointed as a Future Key, as was Willis. Key was likely in Luxon's ear pushing Willis. That said, there still remains some bitterness in caucus towards Willis for the way the Muller coup played out. And the joint Labour/National announcement on housing has seen many National MPs cop it from their base. This is also being sheeted at Willis' doorstep.

Both are also taking a risk taking it on at this point. Regardless of who the leadership is, you'd have to say Labour were fairly strong favourites to lead after the 2023 election and what then? Has Luxon's political aspirations been cut off before he could even get his shiny head properly in the game? And for Willis, being Deputy on a losing ticket after being instrumental in an utterly disastrous coup could spell the end of what was a promising career.

This leaves the unaswered questions of Bridges and Collins. Bridges has apparently not been keen on any kind of deal with Luxon and wants to take the leadership on, but with the chances of him winning rapidly diminishing he'll have to have a long think about his career.

And Collins? The National MP I spoke to said that if the new leader was Luxon, Collins would likely fall back into being a senior MP and wouldn't undermine him. Whereas if it was Bridges she would spend every day trying to hurt his leadership.

Labour under Andrew Little slowly turned it around to become much better disciplined, before he handed it on to Ardern. National hasn't reached their disciplined stage yet. So if that's going to be Luxon, who will be the Ardern? 

That said, we don't necesarily expect National to perfectly match Labour's struggles. I don't think Labour ever got as nasty and vicious as what we saw over the last week.

Luxon has a huge task ahead of him. He's very new at politics. There's some baggage from his time as CEO of Air NZ, and his religious views may put him at odds with that cherished "middle New Zealand". 

But he's more a National leader-clone than we've seen in a while. Corporate high flyer, middle aged, and maybe most importantly of all, a Pākehā male.

Will these be enough to overcome what looks like a complete charisma defiency and the appearance of a roll-on deodorant stick? I guess we'll find out.