Mps Grudging Respect

Well, blow me down with the had a leadership vote in caucus which was called by Chris Luxon himself and he survived. Good on him for doing that. That is exactly what I said yesterday he had to do if he wanted to shut the stuff down for the next week in a bit that Parliament has left to sit. And even if you think that sticking with Chris Luxon was the wrong call by the National Party, which by the way, I do, I still think he needs to go before the election, you have got to respect the fact that he had the courage to do this. But leadership votes are always a big risk. They're always a guess. It doesn't matter what the MPs say to you. It doesn't matter if they say they're going to support you. When it comes down to it and it's a secret ballot, it's always a roll of the dice and it takes real steel to do that. And he had it. Now, question of course is, is that it, right? Is it going to be quiet all the way through to November's election? He's going to be the leader, nothing more to say. Not necessarily. I think this increases his chances of staying the leader because it has to have killed off. killed off any of the spill momentum that his detractors might have had, at least for now. And it has to have lifted his confidence. And that in turn has to lift his media performance, surely to God. But ultimately, none of that actually really matters because it's the polls that determine his future. And if National keeps on this downward trend that they've been on for two years, and if it goes down another 2%, let's say, and you're sitting on 27 point something in the next few weeks, all this is just going to start up again. Because more MPs will stand to lose their jobs and they will get freaked out and they'll start the chatter again. But what this does is, number one, it buys them a significant amount of time to lift those polls. And two, it has to earn him a grudging respect from his MPs who now have to look at this and say that he is more of a formidable opponent than they may have thought he was. And even if it's just a grudging respect for calling the bluff of the leakers, that is what he has done. It turns out they never had the numbers that they pretended they had.