The decision whether Auckland was moving out of alert level 2 turned out not to be the focus of this morning's press conference with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
That call was more or less a no-brainer – there hadn't been a community case in two weeks despite tens of thousands of tests.
The focus was on her fiancé, Clarke Gayford, who had stepped in to defend Ardern from criticism around the delay in the announcement of the alert level decision.
The Cabinet made the in-principle decision to move Auckland to level 1 on Thursday night but wanted to wait on the last bit of data to come through before making the final call today.
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This morning, Gayford tweeted in support of Ardern saying that an: "inprinciple [sic] decision was decided but its all pending on final test results today."
Martin an inprinciple decision was decided but its all pending on final test results today.
— Clarke Gayford (@NZClarke) March 11, 2021
This was quick to hit headlines and prompted some accusations that Gayford had been given inside information by Ardern.
Ardern pushed back strongly on this at her press conference: "That is not correct, that he is forewarned of what the decision is."
She said he was simply relaying information that was in the "public domain", specifically referencing comments made by ministers David Parker and Stuart Nash.
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But was it?
When asked before the Cabinet met on Thursday why there was going to be a delay between the decision and the Friday announcement, Ardern said: "In order for us to make any preparations for us to make an announcement [today]".
She did not specifically say the Cabinet was considering making an "in-principle" decision.
Asked the very same question ahead of Thursday's Cabinet meeting, neither Grant Robertson nor Chris Hipkins specifically cited the possibility of an "in principle" decision either.
"Cabinet is meeting tonight and the reason for that was to simply facilitate an announcement on Friday," Robertson said at the time.
"When we make these decisions there are sometimes further pieces of work that are required. We didn't want there to be any delay on Friday so we had the meeting [last night]."
Then, after the Cabinet meeting had finished on Thursday, minister Stuart Nash told RNZ:
"There's a little bit more information we need to make the final decision – that's why you will have to wait until 11.30am for the Prime Minister to make that announcement."
He was even specifically asked if he could "give any assurance around whether whatever decision was made would be effectively immediately at the time of the announcement".
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Advertise with NZME.But he would only say: "We had a very constructive Cabinet meeting – there is some more information that needs to be sought before a final decision is made".
But, again, no specific reference to an "in-principle" decision.
The only time the "in-principle decision" line was publically used by a member of Ardern's Cabinet was this morning on the AM Show by senior minister David Parker.
"We took the in-principle decision but we wait for the latest data which will come out this morning."
But, the trouble is that Parker made the comments in the interview at roughly 7.13am, 11 minutes after Gayford tweeted his comments at 7.02am - not before.
This means the first time the "in-principle" line was used wasn't by a minister, but by Gayford on Twitter, which Parker then repeated.
Gayford's tweet forced Ardern on to the defensive at a press conference where she wanted to clearly outline why ministers met last night but made the decision today.
Questions have quite rightly been asked about whether the tweet was a good idea.
On the question of whether Ardern was correct in her defence of Gayford, the answer is not definitive.
But on the question of whether Ardern will advise him to keep his thoughts to himself next time, the answer will almost certainly be yes.
