By Michael Laws
If there is one skill that I lack, it is the capacity to hate.
I don't know if this is a genetic failing, a conditioned response or that having three young kids simply saps you of the energy required. But I can't loathe.
Fortunately others have succeeded where I have failed. The Act Party seems a mess of mutual loathing – utterly irrational from the outside – until you consider one analogy: that leaders and deputy leaders are politically married.
The fallout from any fallout is exactly the same as when a couple separate: toxic. And the Act caucus is their family, each member being forced to choose sides, mummy or daddy.
There has been a great deal of press gallery gloating at this bust-up and the leak of an 82-page cry sheet constructed by MP Heather Roy has certainly added to the drama. But whatever one's feelings as to the principles involved, or one's perspective of the politics they embrace, it is impossible to derive satisfaction.
This is a story, after all, about people who once liked each other – loved each other politically – simply falling out of love. Too late, they realised the repercussions would immolate them all. But that is the nature of human relationships: everyone goes slightly mad when love goes bad.
Because politics is not about philosophy, it is not about principle, it is not about policies. It is always about relationships.
Which is why John Key works. Viewed through a parliamentary prism, there is nothing overtly brilliant about the man. He lacks the personal charisma of a Rob Muldoon or a David Lange. He does not have the after-hours bonhomie of a Winston Peters nor the intellectual menace of a Helen Clark.
Indeed there is a touch of the Chauncey Gardiner about him – the Peter Sellers gardener that charmed everyone in the classic 1979 movie satire Being There.
Others graft their aims and aspiration on to the benign countenance of the prime minister and see themselves reflected back.
This is the first prime minister who is actually liked. Not respected nor admired nor feared. Liked. You would have to go back to Labour's Walter Nash to find another prime minister so routinely inoffensive.
But now the Nats have a massive problem: Act is disintegrating. No, Act has disintegrated. You cannot say the things that have been said, nor do the things that have been done, and emotionally survive. Not when there are only five of you. And the three-two caucus split is as emotional as emotional gets.
Plus the media have it in for their leader Hide. When the press gallery pursues you as a pack – and the best and most experienced journos publicly write you off as a dead man walking – then such momentum is publicly irresistible. It is unfair, but that is the way that it is. Suddenly Act's bolthole of Epsom seems a bolthole no more.
The overseas travel scandal fatally damaged Hide's reputation. It did not destroy it – nothing short of prison does that – but it stops him spreading his party's appeal. Act is not perceived by anyone as an answer to anything.
And there is still the hate. Virtually everyone in parliament appreciates the venom that emanated from the Hide and Roy supporters in both the lead up and aftermath of the John Boscawen elevation. Such raw emotion does not dissipate overnight.
Which is where the marriage analogy might fragment. Two people who profess to hate or loathe each other can actually reconnect. In fact, often do. Especially if elements of the original attraction remain. Ah, good old lust.
That never happens in politics. There may be future accommodations, but there is never friendship.
Key knows this. Which is why he has the headache from hell this morning.
If Act is going down the toilet, who are National's allies post-election? The idea of being dependent upon a Maori Party for their MMP majority must surely cause government's strategists to wake in the early hours of the morning and scream.
And so the vacuum has been created to the conservative right of National. With not one party currently in the House possessing the public ability to exploit it.
Nevertheless, I find it impossible to gloat at Act's misfortune. They represented a particular viewpoint that was important to political debate; that did challenge the shibboleths of accepted practice and did require the status quo to justify itself. Their demise now is near complete. Their only hope is to survive as Rodney's rump.
Ultimately the Act caucus was consumed by hate, personal and visceral; by a mutual loathing that no lust may repair. There is no commonality, no real organisation, and soon there will be no finances. All that will be left, will be regret.
Sunday Star Times, 22nd August 2010