KEY POINTS:
Today will be Don Brash's first enjoyable Sunday for years. But opposition MPs hoping to take over as leader will be running around like blue-arsed flies, as their bagmen lobby for votes at tomorrow's special caucus.
If National's serious about winning in 2008 it must elect John Key
with Katherine Rich as deputy.
Forget misgivings about Key being inexperienced, and untested. Go back and look at what was said about David Lange when he became Labour leader, then reflect on how he became one of this country's most successful prime ministers.
And to claw back support from women and liberals, they need the vastly under-used, luminously beautiful and savvy Rich.
Sure, Bill English is miles better in the House; more intelligent than Key and a formidable opponent for Labour, but if English is leader again and it doesn't work out, then National will be looking forward to another three years in Opposition.
Make Key leader, English health or finance spokesman, and give Brash education. He'd be brilliant at it.
I hope. For if Oscar Wilde was here he could write a line for Don Brash: "I have nothing to hide but my political stupidity." How such an intelligent and, yes, decent man can behave so clumsily is a mystery. First, Brash wins an injunction banning anyone from publishing or distributing emails leaked from his computer because, his legal argument claims, their release would make it impossible for him to function as Leader of the Opposition. So we now know he's given up on being prime minister.
Incredible as it may seem, Brash was genuinely unaware of Nicky Hager's imminent book, The Hollow Men. Half the capital knew Hager and Steven Price, a Wellington blogger with a law degree, were working on a publication, but no one, apparently, told Brash.
The injunction was a disastrous move and Brendan Brown QC should have advised accordingly. If anyone had published personal emails, Brash would have got the empathy vote. The ho-hum reaction to the latest allegations about Benson-Pope's sex life show the public's sick of personal muckraking.
Another MP, who shall remain anonymous, was once threatened with disclosure of personal correspondence. A lawyer's letter on his behalf to the holders of said correspondence, putting them on notice that private letters are just that, was sufficient - should the need ever arise - to immediately obtain an ex parte injunction, with suppression orders, at the first sign of the letters' publication.
But despite Brash bumbling around - or as Winston Peters put it, "dragging blue herrings across the political landscape" - as late as Wednesday night he seemed safe.
A few back-benchers were grumbling about a need for change, but a senior MP told me: "It's business as usual. That's this month's disaster. We're sort of thinking, oh what will it be in December?"
Will Key be scathed by Hager's book? Probably not, because who, apart from the alarmists and conspiracy theorists, cares if he met with Exclusive Brethren, or even knew they were putting out pamphlets? Labour MPs meet regularly with heads of trade unions - I remember during the committee stage of one employment-related bill, Labour had a trade unionist on call in the lobbies, strictly against Standing Orders. Labour's front benchers get hysterical when anyone in a scarf sits up in the public gallery, but the rest of the country has bigger things to worry about.
There's nothing like an injunction to sell books, but that may backfire on Hager. The media will pick the eyes out and the rest will be old news to anyone with the vaguest knowledge of how politicians behave. They lie, they deceive, they're secretive, they don't disclose their funding - and your point is, exactly?
While you can't judge a book by its introduction, it does seem Hager's over-egged the souffle. His prose contains such gems as, "If anything is clear from this story it is that politics should not be left to the politicians", and he blames the "hard right" for everything from privatisation to "scuttled hopes for an egalitarian society".
The usual suspects from big business and the "hard right" are villains - for instance, Act's Catherine Judd and Roger Kerr from the Business Roundtable. But Hager overestimates the pair's influence. Despite being metaphorically joined at the hip - sharing offices in Lambton Quay, supermarket shopping in Thorndon, flying to Guatemala two weeks ago for the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society meeting - the Roundtable's gone quiet since Judd moved in and brainy Norman La Rocque moved out.
Hager's motivation seems to be Brash's crime of being "a millionaire belonging to a social group that enjoys the most privilege, subtly attacking many of the poorest people in NZ".
Coming from someone who himself appeared in National Business Review's Rich List, that is, ahem, rich.
But at least Hager's democratic - he'll take a swing at any political party or organisation. On Wednesday National behaved despicably by trying to discredit Hager. Tau Henare calling him a "media whore" was a spectacular example of shooting the messenger, but Hager can take comfort from the fact that when foes resort to personal abuse, you know you're on the right track.
