Barry Soper: Brexit, Trump and Key - A political bombshell of a year

An explosive year for John Key, left, and Donald Trump. Photos / Mark Mitchell, AP

Politically, this year has been a bombshell and not just in this country.

The first explosion was detonated in June with Brexit with voters doing what was considered the unthinkable, turning their backs on Europe.

The vote told us more than anything else how divided Britain is and how the political elite misread their constituents.

The 11-year leader of the Conservatives - six as the Prime Minister - David Cameron, who was elected for his second term just a year earlier, fell on his sword.

The vote was widely seen as a kick in the guts for the political establishment by those who felt forgotten by the system.

Across the ditch just a month later, Malcolm Turnbull went to the polls after a double dissolution of his Parliament, to get a better mandate.

He failed miserably and scraped home by the skin of his teeth, a vote again seen as a swipe at the political establishment.

But if that was a swipe, the Presidential election result in the United States last month, was a full, frontal assault.

Hillary Clinton and her hubby Bill were the quintessential establishment, rock solid in Washington for the best part of three decades.

Donald Trump was viewed in the same way that Barak Obama was once seen by Hillary Clinton, an upstart with little to offer.

Middle America, that's become known as the working class rust belt, saw him differently. The media refused to see what with hindsight was obvious, the billionaire businessman was like a rock star in a country obsessed with celebrity.

Clinton needed the pulling power of the pop stars to draw in her crowds, Trump did it on his own and pulling in even bigger crowds.

She may have won the popular vote by almost three million, but he won the vote where it really counted, in the swing states that delivered him a White House that he doesn't even want to live in - New York's golden Trump Tower is more to his liking.

The fact that a man who seems to hold little regard for anyone, particularly women, but himself was able to pull it off was inconceivable to most.

So most of us were left feeling shell-shocked. But just as we were about to hunker down and prepare for Santa's arrival, there was an explosion that concussed us all, John Key, the most popular Prime Minister in recent history, called it a day, and made our days much longer, turning the Christmas wind down to a wind up but leaving Labour's Andrew Little feeling that all his Christmas's had come at once.