The Key difference
Tracy Watkins reckons John Key has exhibited signs of being a class act, despite fumbling the ball a couple of times in the past week in the context of the Worth Saga.
Dominion Post - June 13
She writes somewhat admiringly and one suspects possibly surprised:-
John Key has managed that rarest of feats.
He has succeeded in strong-arming out of Parliament an MP who had become a headache and liability. Many of his predecessors will watch and weep. Disgraced MPs are notoriously difficult to dislodge. Most will fight tooth-and-nail to retain the comfort of a seat in Parliament, even when it means a life of notoriety and shame.
The last MP to heap embarrassment on National, Brian Connell, lingered on for a year or more after he was booted unceremoniously out of caucus. Labour’s constant headache, Taito Philip Field, never let embarrassment over fraud charges overwhelm his grim determination to remain in Parliament till the bitter end.
Yet Mr Key manoeuvred Richard Worth out in record time. It’s a further demonstration, if any was needed, that there is steel beneath the boy-next-door charm.
Watkins covers off the fumbles by Key in letting Goff lead him on, but concludes that in the end Key followed his instincts.
Watkins wrote:-
This is where Mr Key differs from his predecessor, Helen Clark. She would probably have stood her minister down till the outcome of the police inquiry. She would have refused to engage with her opponent. And she would have avoided backing herself into a corner by all but demanding her MP’s resignation from Parliament and risking looking impotent if he refused.
But where Miss Clark was risk-averse, Mr Key is a risk taker. It could have cost him dearly in his first ministerial crisis. It hasn’t so far. If anything the opposite as the final act in the Worth saga proved yesterday.
It is here that we are seeing the crucial and critical differences between Helen Clark and John Key. It is how those differences and approaches play out over time that is likely to determine the nature and impact of the Key era.
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As I said to one of my commenters earlier, I reckon that political journo’s on the Dom-Post have to flow with the tide, given their proximity to the seat of power. I have a feeling that Watkins et al have accepted, perhaps grudgingly, that a John Key-led government is not going to be a flash-in-the-pan, and that Phil Goff is now largely irrelevant.