Barry Soper: Willie Jackson ranking latest headache for Andrew Little

This has not been a good year for Andrew Little so far, surely things can only get better.

He'd just finished a High Court battle over his inability to say he was sorry soon enough which will have cost him a packet, with more litigation on the cards.

Now it's the way Labour's dealing the cards that's providing him with his latest headache with firebrand Willie Jackson throwing his toys out of the cot over what he clearly sees, at number 21, is an unwinnable position on the list which doesn't say much for his confidence in Labour pulling it off in September.

It's true at 21, Labour would have to do better than the 27 percent of the vote it got at its last outing for Jackson to make it into Parliament. Raymond Huo held the same list position last time and has just made it into Parliament with Jacinda Ardern's Mt Albert win.

But again on this one Little's the author of his own misfortune, assuring Jackson he'd have a high place on the list, only to pull back after a caucus revolt. After reconsidering his first public statement on the matter, Little acknowledged people like Te Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis deserved to be higher ranked.

Yeah well that didn't last long because all his Maori MPs aren't on the list at all and are standing in their electorates in their own right.

But Jackson, a former one term MP for a crumbling Alliance Party, is apparently miffed that no names Willow-Jean Prime from Northland and the East Coast's Kiri Allan are higher up the list than him. Short of gender re-balancing, they're more attractive to the party than he is given its drive to have 50 percent of its candidates female.

The first public fallout from the current Labour list preparation was the paid parental leave campaigner, 12 year veteran MP Sue Moroney who was a Cunliffe supporter, who said she'd lost the support of the party's ruling council who'd given her an unelectable position so she's quitting.

One would have thought before Labour made public when it'd be announcing its list, it would have ironed out those who could have been disgruntled with it. Yet again they're spilling their guts in public, being forced to delay their announcement until this morning to give them time to either placate Jackson or to send him up the political creek without his waka.

Little knows they'll be damned if they do, by those already upset at the Jackson leapfrog factor, and damned if they don't now the dirty linen's once again being aired in public.