Fran O'Sullivan: Politics, not principles the name of the game

Don Brash's downfall has all the hallmarks of an inside job.

Brash should tough it out for now and buy time to either get his momentum back again, or, if he can't, negotiate a graceful exit with his own anointed successor to take place earlier in the New Year.

Because the signs are unmistakable that he will otherwise become the subject of a coup orchestrated by long-time National insiders who have had a gutsful.

Its not Brash's obvious political pratfalls which have riled a significant section of the National Party, but the mounting evidence that their leader has not played straight with them over some fairly fundamental issues which they believe get to the heat of National's own integrity as a political party.

I'm not talking here about Brash's sexual peccadilloes.

His alleged dalliance is at least a red-blooded heterosexual affair, unlike the rather fanciful allegations being pumped about a parliamentary rumour mill now working overdrive against all manner of players connected to the political world accusing them of everything from lurid same-sex affairs (which the critics seem to have forgotten is legal), to offshore pederasty and goat-shagging in the hills of Karori.

The fact that the 65-year-old apparently still has pull will be a point of admiration for some red-blooded National MPs, who hope they can achieve the same when they reach Brash's age.

Whether he is a serial adulterer or not (and there are enough of them currently in political life if two former MPs turned talkshow hosts are to be believed) lust, in or outside marriage, has never been a major problem in Tory circles.

The brutal reality is that Brash may have taken them to within an inch of winning last year's election reversing Bill English's disastrous wipeout in 2002, but he still lost.

Brash may have rocketed National ahead in the political polls on the back of his campaign to smoke-out Labours misappropriation of $800,000 parliamentary funds for its 2005 election campaign.

But the moment Brash's corruption campaign started drawing blood, Prime Minister Helen Clark and her Cabinet Minister hit-squad: Trevor Mallard, Michael Cullen, Pete Hodgson were able to cut the ground from under him by pushing the political nuclear button over his private life.

It's not even that Brash was so politically inept that he is alleged to have detailed his close communications with Business Roundtable vice-chairman Diane Foreman through his parliamentary emails, or, that he only finally agreed to let chief of staff Wayne Eagleson call police in to investigate the criminal lifting of information from the parliamentary server after rumours surfaced that a book detailing his intimate email correspondence was about to be published.

It is not even the fact that Brash was supposedly politically dumb enough expose a chink in his political armour by tabling his personal issues at this week's caucus, giving Rakaia MP Brian Connell the opening to challenge him on his relationship and his suitability to be prime minister.

Brash moved first because he knew others would raise the issue. He had been told about growing caucus concerns while he was in Samoa the previous week.

Even before Brash went into caucus on Tuesday he had cancelled meetings to be with his wife Je Lan in Auckland this week. He had hoped by letting MPs know he was working at ironing out problems in his marriage and intimating that any so-called difficulty was definitely a past issue that they would grant him forbearance.

Some - and Connell swears it was not him - deliberately put the skids under Brash by leaking to media.

What's really at issue here is not Brash's declared principles, but how he plays out his politics.

His opponents now question why Brash - an obvious moral liberal - voted against the Civil Union Bill, and, ask if he changed his vote as part of a drive to get votes (and funds) from the ultra-Christian lobby. They question why he did not disclose to them the full extent of his pre-election discussions with the Exclusive Brethren.

They question Foreman's influence, wondering whether it was proper for the vice-chair of this country's most financially equipped business lobby group to assist him to deal down Bill English. And what she may have promised to anonymous donors on Brash's behalf.

They are concerned his ineptitude has enabled Clark to gain the upper hand by pledging to bring in legislation to force National's donors into the open; which could affect funding at the next election.

It's not that fact that he has pretty much confessed to having an affair.

As the late billionaire Sir Jimmy Goldsmith - no slouch in the bedding stakes himself - cutely observed: When a man marries his mistress it creates a vacancy.

The MPs will applaud Brash's decision not to drag his wife, Diane Foreman or her husband further into the public eye by making public confessions.

They will cheer him on when he lambasts Clark when the Auditor-General's final report on the parliamentary spending is released.

But they will continue to speculate. Then they will plot.