Barry Soper: Jami-Lee Ross has sealed his fate

COMMENT:

Politics is a treacherous business, essentially because it's full of egos who think they can do the job better than someone further up the rung of the ladder.

It's when frustration spills into the public arena, usually in a nefarious way that one of two things is likely to happen.

If the person being sniped and bitched about is the leader, and if the plotter has stirred up enough dissent, then a spill's always a possibility.

If you're a Jami-Lee Ross, where conceit and ambition outweighs ability, chances are your bitching is likely to fall on deaf ears, and you become a lone voice.

To effectively undermine leadership, with change as the objective, it's a longer game than Ross was prepared to play.

He showed his naivety by sneaking the good oil to the media but in this case the oil was coagulated and unrefined.

By leaking information that was due to be released anyway in an attempt to undermine his leader, showed the plot had well and truly been lost and he was on his own, and that's not to say there isn't some dissatisfaction in National's very large caucus.

But Jami-Lee Ross just doesn't have the smarts to pull it off and if you think that's harsh, reflect on the tweets he released as Simon Bridges was fingering him as the leaker - they sealed this 32-year-old's fate, his days as a National Party MP are over.

He told the Twitterati he'd recorded Bridges discussing with him unlawful activity that he was involved in.

The leader wanted him to do things, he claimed, with election donations that broke the law.

We await the recordings with relish.

Bridges' skin, it would seem, is growing thicker by the day, rejecting the claims saying Ross is bound to retaliate by lashing out.

And that he most certainly has, painting himself as the caucus voice of reason, questioning Bridges' leadership decisions, his poll ratings and saying he's becoming more and more unlikeable with the public.

And what's more the leader, he claims, pushed him out on medical leave rather than him asking for it, to shut him up.

Well his leave's up, he's been invited to his caucus today to face the music that he alone wrote the lyrics to, which will inevitably see him having no choice but to take permanent leave from the party that he joined as a teenager.