The Deep Dark Mire of the National Party

 

I remember sitting in Jack Elder’s West Auckland home on the 14^thof June 1984, watching Rob Muldoon announce live on television that there would be a general election the following month. Muldoon was visibly drunk and his judgement severely impaired, but everybody from Elder’s campaign team in Elder’s house that night was initially stunned by the announcement and then openly ecstatic. There was no way Muldoon, then in his third term as prime minister and up against the eloquent and popular David Lange, would win a general election.

Nor did he. He and the National Party lost in a landslide. The fourth Labour Government was ushed in. David Lange became Prime Minister, and Jack Elder was appointed Minister of Police.

That night, June 14, Muldoon committed political suicide. Did he know then? I think he did. I have watched footage of the announcement. There is resignation in his eyes and exhaustion about his demeanour that suggests he wanted out, and Marilyn Waring was a convenient scapegoat and diversion. 

Of course, the comparison with last Wednesday is obvious. Did Judith Collins know what she was doing? Or know the likely (some will say inevitable) ramifications of demoting her chief rival over an innocuous issue that occurred five years ago? I think she did. She is too astute and too experienced not to. And unlike Muldoon, she was not, as far as I know, drunk.

So, why did she do it?

I don’t think we will ever know that. Collins’ appalling lack of judgement (if that indeed was what it was) defies logic. And any proffered explanation by others is, to this point, speculation. We may get an answer from the inevitable autobiography, but that I think will be tarnished by varnish. I don’t think Collins then as now will be in any mood to share the true or whole motivation for what she did. Why should she? She owes us nothing.

Why she did what she did will remain a mystery, like so much within the deep dark mire of the current National Party.

Political leaders come and go, but the National Party is haemorrhaging them—five of them since the 2017 election if we count Bill English and Shane Reti.

Why is that?

Because the party lacks vision and back-room leadership.

The National Party has long considered itself the rightful party of power, and that any loss of power is both temporary and an aberration. On the rare occasions they have been out of power, they always assumed there was a way back, and it was just a matter of time and patience.

The party would pull through.

But none of that exists now. And hasn’t since the party lost for a second time and in a landslide in 2020.

Lacking imagination and leadership, the best they have managed to come up with is cycling through a group of parliamentary leaders in the vain hope that one of them will capture the public’s imagination and combat the charismatic Jacinda Ardern. 

None has, despite in my view Ardern leading the most incompetent government in New Zealand history.

Now the party has run out of time and options. Looking at the group of potential front-runners for the leadership, none stands out, and there are two who, in my view, would be worse than Collins (deputy leader is a different story, there are a couple of women there who would be magic but not yet ready to take the helm).

So, how did the party get to this parlous state?

If changing leaders doesn’t work and the party is directionless, we are left only to consider the common elements that have prevailed through this decay in the party’s persona and progress.

Peter Goodfellow.

Peter Goodfellow is the President of the National Party and hugely influential in its management and machinations.

I know him. I have had lunch with him. He seems to be a—well—a good fellow.

But in my view, he is a disaster for the party. He had his day in the sun when he was basking in the supernova of John Key. But since then he has presided over the sharpest decline in the party’s history.

And it is not only him. Much of the management team he leads have struck me, and I have met many of them, as arrogant, authoritarian and deeply out of touch with the electorate and even the party membership.

It is a mystery to me why they have lasted as long as they have.

I have heard that Goodfellow’s saving graces are he is a good fundraiser and well connected in Remuera. But given where the party he leads is now, are those “graces” enough? And as for the rest of them—their time has come and well and truly gone.

They oversee a time when the party nearly destroyed itself and may still do.

The National Party can change all the leaders it wants (at its peril), but nothing will change until it changes its failed back-room.

The country needs that to happen.

 

The Weird and wonderful place names of England

 

Oscar Wilde famously said Britain and America have everything in common except language.

He may well have been right. When I was in England a few years back, I struggled to find anybody, at least in the hospitality sector, who spoke English with anything other than a broad East-European accent. 

When I arrived in America, I found everyone spoke English with clarity and control. There was, however,  a propensity, widely used, to call me “Bud”. I can forgive that, coming as I do, from a nation where everybody is called “Mate”.

Anyway, I love English and the English. A great mate of mine, and a frequent Fryday correspondent, hails from England and the days when we would gladly and derisively call him a Pom died with the unions.

We love them out here.

Inspired by my friend, I decided that this week Fryday would explore the English use of English, particularly when it came to naming their towns and hamlets. I have done this before, but I have found some new ones. The English are wonderfully creative about this.

Here are the weirdly wonderful names the English have given their towns and places:

Towards Newcastle in the North, we find “Pity me” and “Wide Open”. Heading down through Teeside to Yorkshire, we have “Crackpot”, “Giggleswick”, and “Wetwang”.

Not too far from Southport, we have ”Blubberhouses”, “Jump”, “Bunny” and “Barton in the Beans”. Near Norwich is a particular favourite of mine, “Great snoring”, which is almost level with “Wig wig” and Chemistry” near the border of Wales. Near Gloucester, there is “Catbrain” and who could forget “Matching Tie” near Cambridge?

The far south of England, though, is the easy winner as far as odd names are concerned. “Curry Mallet” isn’t too far from Bath, “Donkey Town” is south of London, and in the far south, aptly at the bottom of England, we have the delights of “Brown Willy”, “Droop”, “Loose Bottom” and “Crapstone”.

Elsewhere we find ourselves in:

Badgers Cross, Balls Cross, Bell End, Bitchfield, Bishop Spit. Boggy Bottom, Cockermouth, Cockfosters, Crudwell,  Greedy Gut, Greensplat, Ha-Ha Road, Moofield, Mudchute, Mudford Sock, No Place,  Once Brewed/Twice Brewed, Penistone, Pratt’s Bottom, Pucklechurch, Queen Camel, Rotten End, Sandy Balls, Scratchy Bottom, Spanker Lane,  Tiddlywink, Upperthong, Ugley, Westward Ho!, Windy Nook and the one I get really high on…

Tokers Green.

Presumably the last of those hosts a music festival…or should.

 

It's not Cricket

 

I once heard an American question how a game of test cricket could last five days and not necessarily produce a winner.

Of course, the nuances of cricket are incomprehensible to someone not steeped in the game, but the question is rich coming from America, the country that inflicted on the world the most complex and unfathomable of all games—American Football.

The American has a point, however. There are many aspects of cricket lore that defy explanation and whose origins we lost to antiquity. Take player positions on the field, for example. What sense can we make of silly mid-on and silly point, slips, gully, backward short leg, square leg and, surely the loneliest position on the field, third man?

What appears to be even more incomprehensive to Americans is the phraseology used to describe the juxtaposition and status of the two teams playing the game. 
To simplify that aspect of the game, someone went onto the World of Cricket Forum and came up with:

 

The Rules of Cricket:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. 

Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. 

When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. 

There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. 

When both sides have been in and all the men have been out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game! 

 

There is a juxtaposition here with our prime minister that is not immediately apparent. Let’s unlock that:

We have a prime minister who is in, but an increasing number wants out.

We have a prime minister who, when she got in, most people voted to keep out.

We have a prime minister who is in, but many consider out of her mind when it comes running the country.

We have a prime minister who was in Auckland this week, but not out and about.

We have a prime minister who is in with the media, but out of touch with everybody else.

 

What Ardern is doing to this country is not cricket, but it is just as confusing. Let’s call “over.”

Cushion...a blow

 

What is it about women and cushions?

Cushions are about as useful to humanity as eyebrows are to the body—something I learnt lately when I “lost” an eyebrow and gained the character of a more macho and sensible scar.

Yet women seem to throw cushions around with gay abandon. They litter couches, clutter chairs and are useless impediments in bed. And the cushions are even worse!

Cushions on the bed are particularly galling. What purpose are they serving? Most beds in my experience have pillows, sometimes quite a few of them. To bury them beneath cushions is surely a redundancy.
If you are a woman, you will undoubtedly counter that by saying cushions are decorative. The far more pragmatic male of the species will bring some common sense to the argument: yes, decorative, and dangerous.

What happens to all those cushions when you get into bed? You immediately discard them on to the floor where they lay in wait, an unseen hazard on your stumbling route to the toilet.
Cushions in the bedroom are insidious and gender specific. You don’t see them in a man’s bedroom. It is only when said male enters a partnership with a woman that those cushions magically appear. There should be a standard clause in pre-nuptial agreements banning cushions from bedrooms and, indeed, anywhere in the house.

Men have rights too.

The only practical use I can see for a cushion is to provide a level of comfort for the woman who kneels at the feet of her man, ready to fetch him a beer, while he watches Supercars. Even then, a pillow would suffice.

I have researched this issue. The question I raise—what use are cushions---is common on the internet. The only answer given is that they are decorative. There is a nod to posture. But again, that is gender specific. Blokes don’t care about posture. That’s something that went out the door with Polaroid photos and taking nude photos of your wife.

So, as much as I would like to fashion an argument for cushions, the only argument I can fashion is fashion.

And that is simply not good enough for me.

The only good news is that fashion, by its nature, goes out of fashion and becomes nothing more than a useless object.

It’s happened to the Prime Minister; I hope it happens to cushions.