There could only be one eventual outcome, and if David Cunliffe couldn't see it coming he must be blind.
Mind you, the reports of shock at Mr Jones' decision to quit probably had more to do with feeble efforts to maintain a facade of unity within the Labour Party than the strength of David Cunliffe's vision.
It has been reported that he met Mr Jones at Waipu to discuss the latter's plans to abandon ship, and that at no point in that discussion did Mr Cunliffe attempt to dissuade him. Perhaps he knew he was a lost cause.
More likely, despite all the platitudes that followed, he knew that there was no place within his party for a man of Mr Jones' principles and beliefs.
The only commentator this writer has heard who got it right was former Labour MP Dover Samuels.
He said Mr Jones had not left Labour. Rather Labour had left Mr Jones. Precisely.
Twenty years ago Shane Jones would have been very much at home with Labour.
By the time he was elected to the House in 2005 the party had begun to drift away from where he stood, and now he is virtually a minority of one. It must have been lonely, talking common sense about real issues while the rest of his colleagues walked away and began spawning lunatic ideas about banning trucks from motorway fast lanes.
For all his obvious qualities - his intelligence, his wit, his self-deprecating sense of humour, his intolerance of idiots - Shane Jones is a pragmatist.
Unlike so many of his fellow Labour MPs he sees issues that are important to the people who used to vote Labour but no longer do, and he can talk about them on a level that people understand and respond to.
He doesn't lie awake at night worrying about how the party can achieve the perfect gender balance or if there's a sexual persuasion that has been overlooked on the list.
He thinks about things that will make life better for New Zealanders.
He believes that, with some exceptions, we are often the authors of our own misfortune.
And that has made him a Labour outcast.
He has now been described as a rat that has deserted a sinking ship, although the person who offered that analogy made it clear that he did not regard Mr Jones as a rat. The common theory is that he cannot see Labour winning the September election, so is getting out while the going was good. Perhaps he was afraid that Labour might win the election, and that, grim as the prospect of another three years in opposition might have been, the vision of three years as a Green Party lackey was even less palatable.
More likely he simply lost heart as part of a political organisation where he never really belonged, and which was only going to further marginalise him whatever happens in September.
The consensus seems to be that a Labour win would not see him returned to Cabinet, give that the Green Party's demand for ministerial roles would inevitably reduce his chances, and that enemies within Labour, always more abundant than outside the party, would do the rest.
The prospect of three more years of not even being in the same church as his supposed colleagues, let alone singing from the same hymn sheet, would have been more than enough to make the offer of another job all but irresistible.
It's been said too that he resigned at the worst possible time. Really?
He announced his decision days before Labour was due to release its candidate list. Should he have stayed, knowing that his name would be on that list, then pulled the pin?
Should he have waited until after the election?
And even if his timing was off, what exactly does he owe the party that abandoned him?
This is the party, remember, that humiliated him in the 2008 election campaign, when he became known as the Minister for Shower Heads, and has now taken to castigating him for having the temerity to leap to his feet and say something sensible.
This is the party that did nothing at all to tempt him to withdraw his resignation, but now, in a galling display of insincerity, is describing him as one of its greatest assets.
Not such an asset that he warranted any effort to keep him, unfortunately, although that might say less about Labour's electoral aspirations than it does about David Cunliffe's desire to see the back of someone who can outshine him as party leader without even trying.
Many factors no doubt contributed to Mr Jones' decision to leave, some of them personal, but the government's offer of a job as an economic ambassador, reportedly created specifically with Mr Jones in mind, may not have been the most significant. It is a job that will suit Mr Jones' strengths and experience, but it's hard to see the offer as a master stroke by Foreign Minister Murray McCully as a means of undermining the Labour Party. Mr Jones had been thoroughly emasculated by his own party long before Mr McCully entered stage right, and if the government was displaying slightly Machiavellian qualities in offering the job it did so only after Mr Jones was lost to Labour.
Mr Jones won't only be missed by those whose party votes he might have earned for Labour, however.
He will also be missed by friends and observers, for the qualities he brought to a political environment that, not to put too fine a point on it, has begun to resemble a mad house inhabited by individuals whose first duty is to themselves, their second to the parties that plucked them from obscurity, and a distant third to the people they supposedly serve. He was beacon of witty, profound, sensible light in what has become a desert, with the occasional oasis, and we will all be the poorer for his absence.
The Far North's consolation is that he will be succeeded by Kelvin Davis, whose solitary term so far introduced him to the same party machinations that finally did for Mr Jones.
Mr Davis is intelligent, sensible, and committed to achieving the achievable in fundamentally important fields such as education and economic development.
He will make a fine addition to the Labour caucus, if he is allowed to, although the means by which that has become possible are deeply regrettable.
As for Mr Jones, the writer wishes him well, and trusts that should he find something within Pacific fisheries that will make us smile, and think, he will share it with us.
