It's early days, but the National Party's new deputy leader, Nicola Willis, is already being tipped as a potential future prime minister. By Michele Hewitson
In one of the first images of the National Party's new leader and deputy leader, they were photographed striding confidently through the corridors at Parliament. They both have good, upright postures, bright, determined smiles and strong jaws. They seem as fresh as a couple who have just stepped out of a band box. If they were married, you might look at them and think: "Power couple." He wore a blue suit; she wore a blue suit. Nice optics.
Presenting as a true-blue united duo matters. If Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis can co-ordinate their outfits, perhaps they have a chance of co-ordinating their hitherto chaotic caucus.
A week or so later, Willis has come into her office on a Sunday. She is on a FaceTime call that sometimes freezes. Usually when FaceTime freezes, people's faces are captured in unflattering images. It is difficult to imagine that Willis will ever be found in an unflattering image. Her face remains ever bright and determined. She is very good at smiling. She is frustratingly good at staying on message. I am fairly certain she will regard this as a compliment. She is wearing blue. I later asked her, via text, whether she had worn blue to have her photograph taken for the Listener. She replied: "Ha, ha. I did wear my blue suit." She likes clothes. She buys New Zealand designers, but also "cheap and cheerful stuff from Zara, which I realise is not very patriotic of me".
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This sounds like frivolous girly chit-chat, and it is, but it is also rather pointed girly chit-chat. She was a backer of, and "numbers man" for, Todd Muller's blink-and-you'd-have-missed-it time as leader of the party. This did not, according to media reports, but not to her, universally endear her to her colleagues. She was nicknamed The Devil Wears Prada. This, she says, "was hurtful". She says it was like being back at school and learning that the mean girls were saying nasty things behind her back. "I just couldn't understand what it was based on. I have never and don't ever intend to wear Prada." Which is not a bad riposte to the nasty girls.
The National Party is, by anyone's assessment, a bloody mess. Or, in hers, "a very rough few years … more than 400,000 people departed us between 2017 and 2020".
Well, yes. So you don't know whether to say, about her elevation up the shaky National Party ladder, "congratulations" or "blimey, you're brave".
"Ha. Congratulations is just fine. I'm excited about the opportunity and it is fair to say I didn't start 2021 thinking: 'By the end of the year, I'll be the deputy leader of the National Party.'"
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Advertise with NZME.Blimey, she really must be brave, because who hasn't been deputy leader of the National Party? It is a much-tarnished chalice, with sticky fingerprints all over it, but somebody has to do it. Besides, this time things will be different. And the difference is, she says, in having a "new broom".
Luxon has had a scant year's experience as an MP; she is in her fourth year. Luxon's newbie status is a good thing, she says, because being an outsider is a good thing.
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"It's a strength because he's not mired in the ways of parliamentary thinking." Her strength lies in 20 years of being mired in the ways of parliamentary thinking. She went from university – she has a first-class honours degree in English from Victoria University of Wellington and a postgraduate diploma in journalism – straight to Parliament. Her first job was as a researcher in Bill English's office "right after he lost the election"; she later became a senior adviser to John Key. She also worked for Fonterra, which is probably as political as Parliament: all of which is by way of saying that she is a political geek.
At university, she was in the debating society, which is where she met her husband, Duncan Small. They were both geeks, she says, which, in addition to his bright-red hair, added up to an instant attraction.
She is only 40 and she and Small have four children. Four children seems like a lot, but she says "any number of kids is a lot of kids". In a different life, and if she were a different person, she would have been perfectly content to stay at home raising eight kids: "A baby in my arms and a toddler at my feet." She says this almost wistfully. She is really quite dotty about babies, and if she spots yours, you should run like the blazes before she grabs it.
There is no formal job description for being the deputy leader of the National Party. It would be glib to say that it involves looking good in blue, and not being averse to kissing babies, but it can't hurt. It would also be glib to say that it involves being good at nodding and smiling while your leader speaks. However, she is, I say, extremely good at nodding and smiling, just to see whether she can take a tease. Online news site Newsroom noted that during the pair's first joint press conference, Willis "smiled approvingly and nodded along with Luxon until just one question was directed her way".
Did she get training in the art of nodding and smiling? She says, "Oh, come on! Come on! All I had to do was smile. I think it's as simple as this: if you're going to be in the lens on camera, do you want people looking at you frowning, with your arms crossed? It gave me no problem to be able to stand there and smile." Well, she is extremely good at it. "Well, no woman wants to be accused of having resting-bitch face, does she?"
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I just smiled and nodded. You can see why she was a champion debater. She's hard to score a point off.
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Advertise with NZME.She can take a tease, to a point. She was asked, in a telly interview, whether she had ever smoked dope. She said she had. So I begin a question with: "When you were a stoner …" I was laughing like a stoner as I said it, but she wasn't. I got a ticking off that could well have come straight from the Judith Collins textbook on "How To Tick Off Journalists".
"Come on! I would not say that I was a stoner. I'll leave that there. Look, I am someone who, like many people, has tried and experimented with marijuana." And, she says, "I'm also someone who has four kids, one of whom is 11 and will be in their teens very soon and who will be reading this Listener article. My message to him will be: 'Look, the younger your brain is, the more harmful cannabis actually is and you really don't need it to have a good time … and it's not particularly cool to do it.'"
Presumably, he already knows the story about the dinner party the then-teenaged Willis was given permission to have for her friends, to celebrate the end of School Certificate exams. It turned into a right rave, with what appeared to be "just about every teenager in Wellington seemingly finding out there was a party at Nicola's house". Her parents, driving home, followed a trail of beer cans and bottles all the way up the street and "it sort of dawned on them that the party had been at our house".
That isn't the most telling part of this Naughty Nicola story. The telling part is that "to my friends' credit, we got the house tidied and sorted by then". Naughty to a point, then, but also the sort of dutiful middle-class daughter who would tidy and sort before the parents got home.
Her mother, Shona, was a journalist in the press gallery and, before that, a radio DJ, during which time she caused a minor scandal by not wearing a bra on air. Her father, James, now semi-retired, was a lawyer and is still a surfer. Willis used to surf, but now doubts she could stand up on a board; she will pull on a wetsuit to body surf. She was raised a Presbyterian. It is important to her to be thought to be a good person. "What I want to be able to convey to people is that you can disagree with the method or policy that I'm promoting. That's fine. Let's have a debate about that. But please don't question my motives. I have good intent."
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Team Luxon/Willis. Their pairing appears to be a particularly unlikely arranged marriage. He's a pro-life, fundamentalist Christian who comes from the private corporate sector. She does believe in some "higher being", and in Christian values, but she's a vocally pro-choice agnostic feminist who has spent pretty much her entire career at Parliament.
I ask how, as a pro-choice feminist, she can stomach Luxon's stance on abortion because, to state the obvious: he's a bloke; he's never going to have to make the choice. In other words, it's none of his business. Should he become prime minister, he's made it clear, she says, that he has no intention of revisiting the country's abortion laws so "that, to me, draws a line under it". Differing views are a feature of democracy, she says.
As in any arranged marriage, they are still in the early days of getting to know each other. Are they friends? "We're becoming friends. I would say that there's a potential for us to have a strong friendship."
Again from Newsroom: "You cannot discount the risk of Willis 'doing an Ardern' and outshining her leader." She pooh-poohs that, of course. Luxon shines brightly enough in his own regard, she says, which is the verbal equivalent of nodding and smiling.
None of which is unexpected, and portraying absolute loyalty and unity is core to the success of their partnership. But you do have to wonder why she wanted this job, and why now. She likes a challenge. She believes in the National Party.
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"Our membership have been incredibly frustrated and let down by what they've seen as division and a lack of discipline. So I think with Chris we've got a real opportunity to draw a line under all of that and to come together and be much stronger and much more united."
We have, I say, heard all of this before – let's count the mouthpieces – from Simon Bridges who was rolled by Todd Muller who bailed and was replaced by Judith Collins who was given the heave-ho by the caucus.
"Yeah, I mean, I get it. But I think the early signs, if you were to be fair, are pretty good in that we've got top talent in the form of Simon Bridges there at No 3 in Finance … New talent has been promoted on the front bench. It feels fresher and better. And I can only tell you honestly that within the caucus there is a real sense of excitement."
Fresher and better is the party line, which would be a not half bad slogan for a new brand of washing powder. That Luxon was elected unopposed is oft-cited as a demonstration of a newfound unity. The cynical among us might say, as I do, "Yeah, well, he was only unopposed because Bridges was promised the No 3 slot."
Such cynicism gets short shrift. "No. Look, Chris has been really clear about that; that he wasn't horse-trading." This new team is instead all about best feet forward and new brooms and broad churches. Did I happen to mention that she is frustratingly good at staying on message? Which, come to think of it, might be right near the top of the list of that non-existent job description for a deputy leader.
