Garth George: Still oblivious to his own oblivion

At no time has David Cunliffe taken full responsibility for the trouncing, yet there can be no doubt that the electorate saw him as an inadequate politician. Photo / Doug Sherring

So David Cunliffe has finally resigned as leader of the Labour Party - 10 days after the party's worst election drubbing in 92 years. And even then he made a hash of it.

You have to wonder, don't you? Mr Cunliffe's political future was decided on election night, yet it seems that for all of the following week he was the only person in New Zealand not to realise it.

And from election night onwards, every move he made, every time he opened his mouth, he gave more and more proof of his absolute unsuitability for being a member of Parliament, let alone a political party leader.

His decision, in his resignation announcement, that he will stand again for the leadership simply provides final confirmation of that.

Instead of doing what any decent party leader would have done under the circumstances on election night, and resigned on the spot, Mr Cunliffe spent his time writing an email to party members saying he intended to seek a new mandate to change the party and lead it into the 2017 election.

At no time has he taken full responsibility for the trouncing, yet there can be no doubt that the electorate saw him as an inadequate politician, let alone leader, a man whose main interest is in himself, not in his party or the nation.

Heaven knows there are enough such people in our Parliament - the glory-grabbers and power-hungry - but we are fortunate that they are kept well at bay by the majority, who are genuinely there for what they can do for the country.

The right thing for the ego-centric Mr Cunliffe to have done is not just to resign from the Labour Party leadership, but to resign from Parliament altogether.

His appointment as leader a year ago was down to the votes of the unions and the party membership, who wanted the party to lurch to the left, and not to the caucus, whose members knew all too well that that was political suicide.

He never enjoyed the support of caucus, the majority of whom are centrists by nature.

Mr Cunliffe's shrinking coterie of left-wingers numbered only about six whereas the centrists numbered 20 or more. Caucus infighting became the norm.

It would be nice to think that the Labour Party and the unions have learned that giving them the power to elect the party leader is not a good idea, but events over the next few weeks will show that they haven't.

They will subject the party to a knock-down, drag-out ideological battle because they cannot believe the obvious - that left-wing, nanny-state politics had its day years ago.

It is significant that political commentators of all stripes concluded that Mr Cunliffe must go, yet they were unanimous last week.

Now that he has, and the party is confronted with having to choose a new leader, it seems the only contender against Mr Cunliffe is Grant Robertson, who has already made a fool of himself by proclaiming on Monday that, if he had been leader before the election, he would have rolled John Key and the National Party and would be leading a left-leaning coalition government.

Who else will stand is yet to be disclosed, but I predict it will be several years before the person who will lead Labour out of the wilderness will be anointed.

Amid all the toing and froing during last week, all the dissembling and circumlocution, one pearl of great wisdom was dropped - by the rejected Hone Harawira, of all people.

Mr Harawira said on TV3 that he wasn't "heartbroken" on election night. "When I got up to the hall and my three mokos jumped all over me, I thought, 'Oh yeah, that's where the real world is'."

How right you are, Hone, oh how right you are.

garth.george@hotmail.com