John Armstrong: Head girl and boy sent out

Understand this: prime ministers are never booted out of Parliament. Then again, never say never.

Speaker Margaret Wilson completed a punishing afternoon's work in the House yesterday with a unique double which had her giving both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition their marching orders.

With question-time becoming even more raucous than usual in anticipation of the coming election campaign, the Speaker has become the veritable disciplinarian unwilling to make exceptions because of rank.

So out went Helen Clark for interjecting while a National MP was asking a question - a no-no under Parliament's rules.

While everyone was struggling to remember the last time a prime minister was ejected from the chamber - no-one can recollect it happening before - the Leader of the Opposition was similarly red-carded for interjecting on a point of order.

That must have set some kind of record.

It was certainly the surest sign yet of the so-called pre-election "phoney war".

This war is so phoney, the major participants yesterday found themselves removed from the battlefield.

It was the schoolroom equivalent of making the Head Girl and Head Boy stand in the corner. It simply does not happen. It is just too demeaning.

Helen Clark departed looking somewhat sheepish. Don Brash walked out beaming a Cheshire Cat kind of smile.

But then it was a Cheshire Cat kind of afternoon on the National benches.

Dr Brash and his colleagues wore the look of a contented tabby curled up in front of the heater on a winter's day. Such is the warming quality of recent opinion polls.

Labour could have hauled vats of boiling oil into the public galleries and poured it over Opposition rivals below. lt could have invoked plagues of locusts. It would have made no difference. Nothing was going to disturb National's composure.

It is a long time since National has looked so relaxed. No longer can it be accused of being Tweedledum to Labour's Tweedledee. Such are the restorative qualities of tax cuts.

Labour, of course, is fighting back, the PM having declared real, not phoney war at her post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.

Yesterday's initial skirmish in Parliament had Labour setting down questions to its Cabinet ministers to undermine National on tax cuts and school zoning, and to remind voters that Dr Brash had favoured sending New Zealand troops to fight in Iraq alongside the Americans.

Trevor Mallard and Phil Goff led the charge, filling the chamber with cries of "flip-flop"and that old favourite, "gone by lunchtime".

National retaliated by embarrassing Labour with last week's revelation that taxpayers collectively will be at least $1 billion worse off following revised estimates of the costs of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

This was variously described as "the billion dollar bungle", "the billion dollar fiasco" and "the billion dollar stuff-up".

Yesterday, however, the Kyoto Protocol had to give precedence to the Wilson Protocol. And though Helen Clark and Dr Brash made it to lunch-time, they were both gone by afternoon tea-time.