Democracy Briefing: Prime Minister Stanford?

In a few minutes time National MPs will gather at Parliament for an extraordinary caucus meeting that could end Christopher Luxon’s time as Prime Minister. Luxon may still survive. MPs who complain privately about a leader do not necessarily vote against them when they finally get into the caucus room, especially when the leader is also the sitting Prime Minister.

But things look significantly worse for Luxon than they did yesterday. The bigger change is that his opponents may finally have worked out what comes next. Until now, plenty of National MPs seem to have wanted Luxon gone, but they haven’t been able to agree on a replacement. This morning Erica Stanford increasingly looks like the person around whom enough of them might coalesce.

The tide has turned

NZ Herald political editor Thomas Coughlan is normally fairly careful about predicting leadership contests, but his assessment last night was unusually strong. Asking whether Luxon could survive this second round of caucus discontent, Coughlan wrote: “That looks incredibly unlikely.”

He reports that Luxon may effectively have been forced to call this morning’s meeting because he knew the party whips were getting close to presenting him with evidence that he was losing the support of caucus anyway. “If that’s the case,” Coughlan writes, “the question may not be whether Luxon’s leadership can be saved – it may actually be how long has it been over for?”

That fits with what Richard Harman is hearing at Politik. His newsletter this morning says: “It seems that numbers yesterday firmed against him.” Harman reports that one minister told an MP from another governing party that Luxon’s opponents believed they had enough votes to defeat him.

Stuff political editor Jenna Lynch is even more pessimistic about Luxon’s position. She argues that those trying to remove him have already “mortally wounded an already bruised and limping prime minister”. Having to call another emergency caucus meeting to settle questions about his leadership, just four months after the last confidence vote, is, she says, “beyond damaging”.

Lynch’s conclusion is blunt: “There is only one path forward from here. And that is a caucus consensus on leadership, which probably means the leader cannot be Christopher Luxon.”

National MPs could still get into the room this morning, look around at the alternatives and decide once again that Luxon is the least bad option. That essentially happened in April, when Luxon surprised his detractors by calling a confidence vote before they were properly organised. He won, came out afterwards, declared the issue closed and refused to take questions. But it plainly wasn’t closed.

Newsroom’s Marc Daalder writes that “for MPs to once again come to the brink of change before backing away would strain credulity”. Even another narrow survival would leave Luxon badly damaged, because voters would know his own MPs had seriously contemplated removing him twice in four months.

And then there is John Key. Reported to be hitting the phones for Luxon, Key told the Herald the reports were “untrue”, and refused to say anything further. Coughlan’s conclusion is the quote of the day: “If Luxon has lost Key, one of his biggest backers, and something of a living saint to the modern National Party, then the game is truly up.” Last night the world’s largest prediction market was indicating an 80 percent-plus probability that Luxon is rolled (trading on it is illegal in New Zealand).

The circumstances are therefore quite different this morning. Luxon’s opponents have had more time to organise, and there now appears to be much more serious discussion about an alternative leadership.

Why Stanford?

The problem for Luxon’s opponents has always been that unhappiness with the leader isn’t enough. They need somebody else who can get a majority.

The April confidence vote, widely believed inside National to have been around 27–22, suggested that Luxon already had a large number of colleagues prepared to vote against him even without an actual challenger. But there was no agreed replacement. Bishop had supporters. So did Stanford. Willis, Mitchell and others were also talked about. As long as no alternative could attract enough support, Luxon had a reasonable chance of staying where he was.

Andrea Vance reports in The Post that senior MPs have been discussing a possible arrangement involving Stanford as leader and Prime Minister, Mark Mitchell as deputy, and Chris Bishop taking over finance. Vance is careful to stress that none of this is settled and no challenger has formally declared. She reports that Stanford initially lacked sufficient backing but that her position strengthened substantially yesterday.

Later in the evening, a senior minister texted The Post describing the proposed Stanford–Mitchell–Bishop ticket as “nonsense”, while declining to explain which part of the report was wrong. The Post says it stands by its reporting.

Heather du Plessis-Allan, who has good sources within National, is also hearing that MPs have moved. Yesterday she said: “I have counted by myself three loyal Luxon MPs who have left him. Two of them have joined Erica Stanford’s camp. One of them has joined Chris Bishop’s camp.”

“I don’t think this is looking good for him at all,” she said.

The Herald is also reporting this morning, citing an outside source linked to National, that Defence Minister Chris Penk has been engaging MPs on Stanford’s behalf to test whether she has the numbers. Penk has publicly expressed confidence in Luxon and has not confirmed that account, so it should not yet be treated as established fact. But if it is correct, it matters.

Stanford is on the more socially liberal side of National and cannot win the leadership simply with support from that part of caucus. She needs conservatives to be comfortable with her too, and Penk could be important in making that happen.

There are electoral reasons why MPs might decide Stanford is now worth the gamble. Harman points out that National is struggling particularly with women and in Auckland. Stanford is the MP for East Coast Bays and, he writes, “would be likely to attract more female and Auckland votes than Bishop. That may make her the favourite.”

Her ministerial record also helps. Education is one of the areas in which the Government has been able to point to a reasonably coherent programme of change, and Harman notes that Stanford consistently performs strongly in the Herald’s Mood of the Boardroom assessments of Cabinet ministers.

Stanford also looks more like a genuine change from Luxon than the other obvious contenders. Willis is tightly associated with the Government’s economic performance. Bishop has been linked to leadership manoeuvring for so long that any move by him would immediately look like the culmination of a coup. Stanford, by comparison, has managed to keep herself relatively separate from the destabilisation.

Stanford ruled herself out at the weekend; her people were counting numbers by Monday. She has refused to express confidence in Luxon when directly asked. At Wellington Airport yesterday she simply did not answer. And The Post reports that Murray McCully, the former East Coast Bays MP she worked for for four years and is reported to have called her political mentor, has been seen in Wellington and is believed to be advising her. The apprentice of National’s most storied backroom operator appears to have learned the first lesson: never be seen holding the knife. Stanford has said nothing all week.

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