Collins has said she is innocent and will fight to clear her name.
She also played the victim card by saying she had been the subject of a two-year smear campaign.
I used to have a lot of time for Collins, seeing her as a no-nonsense politician who would get the job done.
The Oravida scandal, her absolute refusal to apologise for anything and then the Dirty Politics revelations that showed her close links with Slater, has turned me right off her.
Her plea for victim status filled me with annoyance and contempt.
If you are a headkicker then go down fighting, not with some wimpy plea for sympathy.
Residents of this country deserve to know exactly what has been going on with Collins and her contacts and a Royal Commission into politicians and their links with business and bloggers is in order.
It was well past time for Collins to go and clearly John Key finally recognised she needed to be taken out of the spotlight.
Was it her lightning rod attraction for bad headlines? Winston Peters' claim she was being disloyal to the National Party leader?
Or was it last week's opinion poll that said 63 per cent of voters wanted her gone?
On Saturday, Key said it was the revelation of the campaign against a senior public servant, but why then had he not acted on a similar attack mentioned in Dirty Politics by Nicky Hager?
Did he need to find something other than an accusation by Hager so he could act against Collins without giving credence to the claims made in Dirty Politics?
And why did it take him so long to see what seemingly everyone else in the country saw - that she was derailing National's election campaign.
There has been a lot of conjecture in the media that it was the Nats themselves who dealt with Collins - a view that is pretty hard to go against for all of the above reasons.
Now Key has a major fight on his hands to get National back on track and try to clean Dirty Politics from voters' minds.
It is going to be a big job as what has come out in the past few weeks is a despicable side of politics rarely seen in this country.
And what the Prime Minister will need to do, and has failed to so far, is explain why so much has been buzzing around the Beehive without his knowledge.
Surely a PM needs to know what is going on at all times, otherwise how can he lead?
In this campaign, Key has shown us a big weakness in his leadership style.
Speaking of the election ...
I've been speaking a lot with young people and have been genuinely surprised at just how many are going to be voting for the Mana Internet party.
They could well have a sizeable presence in the next Parliament.
With Winston's NZ First storming back in the ratings and the Conservatives vote rising, it could be a really exciting election night. And then comes the wheeling and dealing ...
Six months ago, I thought a Labour-led, left-wing alliance had a slim chance of winning this time around.
Three months ago, I thought the Nats had turned it around and would romp home to possibly a govern-alone tidal wave of victory.
Now I believe it is going to be a very, very close result.
Key and Co have their backs to the big drop off the cliff and their ability to stay on top depends entirely upon the Prime Minister's performance over the next few weeks.
I have no doubt he has the ability to do it, providing there are no more unpleasant surprises uncovered by the person known as Whaledump, who seemingly has a huge trove of political emails to release.
I think Whaledump - the email source of much of Dirty Politics - is possibly the PM's biggest worry at the moment.
Only Whaledump knows what he has and that makes the PM's job even more difficult.
• Richard Moore is an award-winning Western Bay journalist and photographer. Richard@richardmoore.com
