Barry Soper: Winston Peters drove a hard bargain

There must be something in the Auckland electorate of Mt Albert's water.

They've had the first elected woman Prime Minister in Helen Clark, they had a nice bloke in the role of Labour leader David Shearer, who never really got the time to prove himself, and now they've got the second youngest Prime Minister in history, by just 45 days, Jacinda Ardern.

The youngest was a bloke called Edward Stafford in 1856, who became Prime Minister at 37 years and 40 days and will more than likely hold a record that Ardern can never match: 16 years in the top job.

She'll never match it because to keep the lot she's cobbled together will take more than her communications degree to manage.

Even after she was anointed by Winston Peters, who came into Parliament before she was born, there was still a shadow hanging over the formation of the Government with the Greens still having to get the signoff from their delegated members.

And the deal's come at a fairly hefty cost: nine executive positions, including seven ministerial jobs for the two parties who collectively scraped together less than 14 percent of the vote.

Still, there's no point in being in politics if you don't have the power and now the challenge for the Labour-led Government is to keep it.

Peters drove a hard bargain: four of his nine MPs sitting around the Cabinet table along with an undersecretary in a full coalition deal.

The Greens, who ran an appalling election campaign and are lucky to have made it across the five percent threshold, will be kept at arm's length from Peters but have also done extraordinarily well with three Ministers outside of Cabinet - which gives them the same perks as the table dwellers - along with an undersecretary.

The reality is National wasn't prepared to be as generous, and as for Peters, eating so many dead rats from the party that set out to destroy his lot was never really an option.

We've now got one of the biggest single opposition parties, with 56 seats, in modern history and they'll set out to make the Government troika's life hell.

Still don't forget Peters now knows National's weak spots, given they laid them on the table during the negotiations. And the quote of the night came from this firebrand politician to justify leaning to the left: Capitalism must regain its human face.

Putting a brave face on it was Bill English, who picked up the cudgels from John Key, and did almost as well as him on election night. But if you've got no mates in the MMP business then, as he painfully found out, you don't have the power.