KEY POINTS:
The demise of Don Brash as leader of the National Party is a tragedy without victims. He and his party will be better off after his decision yesterday to step aside. The fresh air the celebrated Reserve Bank governor brought to the Opposition caucus has become stale. Almost everyone except Dr Brash knew his time as leader was up and yesterday he, too, realised change was essential.
The last gasp of his leadership was to obtain a controversial High Court injunction preventing publication of his office emails, an order which stopped the release of a book on National in the Brash years. As it happens, the book contains nothing by which to hang Dr Brash. But the cumulative effect of airing many months of his office email traffic would have been spectacularly negative for National. Scores of MPs, party officials, political advisers, donors and hangers-on are shown in the raw, doing what politicians and vested interests do - pushing their own interests with frequent disregard for principle or the public interest. Perhaps surprisingly, Dr Brash seems indecisive and impressionable, willing to heed the often flattering views of the last person to whom he has spoken. He took advice from too many people and was too willing to withhold information from the public rather than be straight when it was needed. And, through his own words, he is shown routinely to have allowed political expediency to supplant his better judgment.
As we have said here before, Dr Brash has had his one chance to defeat Labour - last year, with an enormous tailwind in the form of tax cuts and the one-law-for-all race policy. He failed, and there was no possibility of his leading National to the Treasury benches in 2008, aged 67.
When he took the National leadership three years ago, we predicted he would be unconventional. As a thoroughly experienced public servant and chief executive, and bold Reserve Bank governor, he was certainly that. He stirred the small National caucus from its torpor, gave it direction and attracted considerable funding from business interests. He rattled Labour, almost in spite of himself, over race-based funding and election overspending. But for the odd meeting or two with the Exclusive Brethren and a shortage of televisual agility, Dr Brash might have been Prime Minister. Yet too often, poor judgment, poor public relations and memory lapses on policy or his diaried meetings eroded his reputation as the anti-politician.
Through several leadership crises, Dr Brash stood firm when others might have, as it were, walked the plank. Now, he leaves not on his own terms but driven from office by a book no one has read. Unconventional to the end.
