Bruce Bisset: Todd Muller and Simon Bridges - National contest

If nothing else, Todd Muller shows the Nats have one man with enough spine to jump on a flagging horse and ride into the teeth of inglorious defeat.

Well, two, lest we forget the incumbent. Though in Simon Bridges' case it's more the horse has had enough of being flogged by him and has bolted in the other direction – downhill to oblivion.

Not that this means Bay of Plenty's Muller – or any other contender – will automatically replace Bridges sometime today.

In fact the signs are pointing to no change, despite the party's political future looking dire as they fall into 20-something per cent support territory.

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Why? Largely as alluded to above: no one wants to lead when defeat seems inevitable; they'd rather leave it to the current muppet and rebuild after the election.

You know that's the case when Judith "Crusher" Collins – looking like she's had some expensive retouching – flatly rules out a challenge. No one's going to watch her go down.

And while there's logic in the premise that even a backbencher would serve as a stopgap because anyone's better than Bridges and there'd be some polling bounce on that alone, keeping Bridges in place and then parading him as a "strong man in a crisis" could possibly serve the same purpose.

If anyone believed it.

Of course all this speculation is predicated on the idea it's the leader that matters, not the policies; how someone looks and acts, not what they've done or who they did it to.

And as much as I abhor that side-effect of the celebrity culture everyone under 50 seems to be enslaved to, when you're up against the nearly-sanctified Jacinda Ardern you'd have to be a cross between Daniel Craig and Leonardo DiCaprio to begin to compete.

The only one who comes close is Crusher, and she's not even that gender.

But regardless of the outcome, the real question is, how much difference is there between a conspiracy theory and the National Party?

Answer: None.

Unlike the Left, where the butchery is all internal when things go wrong, when the wheels fall off the Right they get vicious with everyone else. And there's nothing more vicious than the social media memes that are already popping up.

If you own a computer, you've seen at least one – and will see a whole lot more. The ones referencing the Nazis, or communism, adding a hammer and sickle to Labour's banner and saying things like, "It's time to take away your rights" in mock of last election's slogans.

Mostly these are not from aggrieved nutters; they're from well-heeled right-wing agencies-for-hire capable of churning out a hundred such memes a day.

They work not so much because there's so many of them as because whether it's by the Right for a laugh or by the Left in outrage, people share them. And every hit and comment and share bumps them up the algorithm ladder until we're swamped.

You know the adage that if you repeat a lie enough times it becomes truth? Well, that's how these poisonous memes work; the vile goes viral.

If there's one facet of electoral law that needs cleaning up more than any other, it's this. No party should be able to commission and publish such blatant trash – especially anonymously.

Yet the man behind National's last such campaign which almost saw Bill English win from nowhere also credits this tactic with putting ScoMo in power across the ditch.

That's some very swampy water under National's bridges. It needs to be drained.

• Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.