The Mallard Affair
Boy did I pick a bad time to lose my power supply. Even wrose it arrived by courier today, and seems to have been damaged in transit. So my laptop is still dead. Am going to try and get a cord for it tomorrow but not sure chances of an HP laptop power cord is great in Dunedin. It is possible I will be powerless until Monday, so blogging may be near zero, except for cyber cafe visits such as this one (McCafe in George Street).
Anyway onto Trevor. I’m sure everyone has read the headlines. The real question now is what will Helen Clark do. And to answer that, we should ask this question.
What would Helen Clark be saying if a National MP had punched in the face/head a Labour MP?
I think we could all imagine.
What is surprisingly is how fragile Mallard is. It is a classic case of being able to dish it out, but not take it. I don’t know exactly what Tau Henare said but I think everyone understands it was very similar to what Trevor Mallard said when he taunted Don Brash about Diane Foreman. And here’s the moral of the story. If Mallard had never broken the “rules” and said what he said about Brash, I am almost certain he would not have had similar stuff said to him. But if you break the “rules” yourself, you can’t expect to suddenly be protected by them.
The timing with the reshuffle is bad for Mallard. Generally reshuffles get positive news for a Government. Fresh blood etc. But now the focus will partly be on what happens to Trevor. And if she doesn’t demote him (at a minimum) then the media focus will be on her lack of standards, and a good news story becomes a bad news story.
The significance of what has happened is quite profound though. And again by coincidence of timing.
In just one week Phil Goff has gone from being an outside chance of the next Labour Leader, to the near undisputed Leader in Waiting.
Maharey, Mallard and Goff have always been the three heavyweight contenders. Other possibilities like Gosche and Benson-Pope have fallen by the wayside. And others like Jones are far too new. So amazingly in one week Maharey is out, and so effectively is Mallard. Phil Goff can’t believe his luck. And even better for Goff he genuinely had nothing to do with it.