Four years ago Bill English was crushed on the anvil of defeat and humiliation. Today he is a darling of his party again — and the most convincing definer of the modern conservatism that will position his party in the John Key era.
English rose effortlessly to the top of the National party, pre-ordained from youth and armed with a good degree and a stint in the Treasury to add to farm life as a child. He also was armed with a strong Catholic faith.
A great strength of Helen Clark’s cabinet has been its friendships. Ministers argue a lot, particularly recently and particularly over energy and climate change. But they are, most of them, not only political friends but also personal friends.
You can’t say that of the present National shadow cabinet. John Key, Bill English and Co have work to do.
Of course, John Key is business-friendly. But he brings to National’s leadership an agenda that already goes far beyond business and will widen as he heads to the top Beehive job. He is pro-business but not a business lapdog.
Key comes from business. But he also left business. Business made him rich. But he wants more than money. It is that “more” that business will have to come to grips with. He is no Roundtable clone, even though the business was in is one of the most open-market of all business sectors.
Phase one of the reconstruction and recovery is over. Now for phase two. The John Key National party will have more of the characteristics that made it the dominant party in decades past.
Don Brash will go down in the party’s folklore as having brought it back from the brink — members, money and, for a time, momentum. He re-aggregated the right’s vote and laid the platform for the 2008 drive for power.
Helen Clark and Don Brash have been abroad, Clark plying her foreign affairs trade, Brash the apprentice. Is he learning quickly and deeply enough?
Last year Brash personally inserted into National’s policy a line that the anti-nuclear law would not be changed without consulting the public. Labour was easily able to twist that into code for his wanting a change and subservience to the United States — and thereby got back in the election race.
Can Auckland be made into a “world city”? Would a stadium flip that switch? On the track record, “no” and “no”.
The track record tells us there is no “Auckland” — just a scattering of feuding villages, occasionally corralled but not durably one entity as multi-borough New York is nevertheless singular New York.
The easy joke about Helen Clark’s government is that it has promised us global warming for seven years and hasn’t delivered. The hard judgment is that it hasn’t delivered policy either.
Why? Labour has been convinced by the science since way back in the 1990s when Simon Upton signed the country up to it. Why suddenly go “aspirational” now?
The government has no vision, business CEOs commonly complain. Nor does the National party, they often add. Politicians shrug their shoulders. What can be done?
There are lashings of government “strategies”, laced with multi-syllabic abstract nouns and fine adjectives. But few CEOs see “vision” in them. They are either unaware of these documents or are unimpressed or bamboozled by the language or think the strategies don’t in any case amount to vision or amount to the wrong vision.
Two balloons have popped on the right side of American politics: neoconservatism and religious superconservativism. Core conservatism can breathe again.
The United States media are full of Republican candidates in next week’s election struggling for a saleable position on the Iraq war or just plain calling for an end.
The Labour party bothers about its brand. So what brand does it want you to see at its ninetieth anniversary conference this coming weekend?
Claire Robinson, an academic specialist in political marketing, highlights two elements in a successful brand: consistency plus refreshment.
Consistency builds familiarity. People more easily trust a leaning they have toward a party (or leader — or soft drink or car) if they feel they know the party (leader, soft drink, car). Refreshment adds allure, enhances the brand.