Audrey Young: English ought to show more contrition

Prime Minister Bill English at Parliament yesteday. Photo/ Mark Mitchell

The resignation of Todd Barclay has taken the immediate pressure off Prime Minister Bill English.

But the episode will forever be a stain on his leadership and career.

The disturbing part about the events of this week at Parliament is the lack of contrition from English.

Of course he is terribly sorry that it has come to this - Barclay's premature retirement from politics.

He and Barclay seem terribly sorry for themselves and their party.

But English has failed to admit any wrongdoing or apologise for the way he handled things.

Barclay bowed to the inevitable by resigning. It was either jump or be pushed by the party after two revelations yesterday.

First was English's text to Barclay's electorate chairman obtained by Newsroom telling him the MP had left a dictaphone running on his electorate secretary's phone conversation.

Barclay's subsequent denials that he spoken to English about the matter forced English to produce his police interview on April 27, 2016, which contradicted Barclay.

It said Barclay had not only recorded his electorate secretary's conversations but that he knew that because Barclay had told him.

There was no grand motive in releasing the police statement. It was a pre-emptive move. English proactively published it because after OIA requests, its explosive contents may have been released by police in the midst of an election campaign.

Until then, he had explicitly objected to its release by the police in a fuller OIA release on the dictaphone investigation.

English is now attributing higher motives to his other actions than they deserve. When he fronted the media yesterday after Barclay's resignation had been extracted, he said he had done the proper thing by informing the electorate chairman and by telling the police last year.

The fact is that the electorate chairman, Stuart Davie, extracted the admission from English in a text conversation after telling English that Barclay had denied rumours about recordings.

And he talked to the police a full two months later as part of a police investigation. He did not inform the police in order that the matter be investigated. He talked to police because they had come across his text to Stuart Davie in the course of its investigation.

He then sat on the information and watched while Barclay deflected questions from media and more importantly Southland electors on an issue they had a right to know about, and did nothing to encourage Barclay to cooperate with the police investigation, which was dropped.

Barclay's comments have sounded very legalistic and designed to avoid any liability or responsibility for their actions and stave off any further action.

English too, has said far less about the recordings than he did in his police statement. He began his press conference today by saying "the business about the recordings has been never quite established."

English's failures are largely failures of omission but failure to do the right thing can be as big a failure as anything.

He failed to exercise standards he would expect of others and he has handed his political opponents a weapon to use against him for the next three months to election day.