Deborah Coddington: Battle begins as Brash's Act moves back to brand

Rodney Hide, left, is chopped liver and Don Brash is party leader. Photo / Brett Phibbs

They say a week in politics is a long time and the past seven days proved it. What began with a question honestly answered ended with a politician's career in tatters.

When Don Brash was asked by the Dominion Post's Tracy Watkins if he had been offered co-leadership of Act, he decided not to fudge the answer and said yes.

Hide said he hadn't, and the battle lines were drawn. By week's end, Brash was Act leader and Hide was looking like chopped liver.

Who would have thought Don Brash, the man I wrote off as the Mr Magoo of politics, would roll the perkbuster?

Brash didn't plan his assault on Hide to co-ordinate with a slow news Easter weekend, but he couldn't have picked a better moment to launch the takeover.

At the week's start, I, among others, predicted Brash would lose - but we were wrong, seriously underestimating his determination.

Will he save Act from oblivion, as he has trumpeted? We'll know that answer on November 26, but at least he'll bum-kick the party back to its core values - property rights, equality before the law, parental choice in education.

Under Hide's leadership, these policies have been forgotten. The brand has been seriously damaged. Brash has his work cut out for him.

If Act was a horse, it would be taken out to the back paddock and shot.

Just to digress. It's not usually my practice to answer online critics - I've had my say, they can have theirs. But Actoids usually react to my columns by labelling me a useless Act MP, dumped after three years.

It's time to set the record straight. I chose not to stand again. I was a bloody effective MP, as Hansard can prove, and consequently ran a collision course with Hide. I wasn't alone - Act's history is littered with good MPs who did the same.

Hide, too, was a great MP but finally has crashed into himself, in the form of his ego. He's his own worst enemy.

Back to Brash, whom Hide accused of being too old for the job. It was a bit rich coming, as it did, almost the same day that Mark Todd became the oldest person to win the Badminton Horse Trials.

Would Hide have levelled the same insult at 55-year-old Todd when he announced his intention to win Badminton for a fourth time?

Brash, to his credit, resisted spinning on his well-shod heel and asking Hide if a man in his mid-to-late 50s was too old to father a child.

So now we have a political party with a leader who's not even a Member of Parliament.

And what will National MPs be feeling, as they contemplate the spectre of dealing with Brash and John Banks, perhaps?

And who knows what other recycled politicians will be parachuted on to the Act list. Ruth Richardson, maybe?

Spare us this hackneyed economic focus - we're not a PIG (Portugal, Ireland, Greece).

And, with his "one law for all" policies, Brash needs to be careful that he isn't led astray by the racists who can easily spin "equality before the law" into the offensive racist billboards plastered around the country by the Coastal Coalition.

That would make for a nasty election, if we have Winston Peters fighting Act fighting Hone Harawira's Mana Party.

Act had it absolutely correct in 2003 when it backed Maori and voted against the government on the Foreshore and Seabed Bill, supporting the principle of property rights.

There's a vast difference between that stance and racism and Brash can articulate it by explaining none of us has anything to fear from the Treaty of Waitangi. Listen to me, sounding like an adviser. I'm not going back. I'd never step into that nest of vipers again.

But like me, there are voters without a home, veering madly from bleeding heart liberals who don't care what consenting adults do to each other in their own homes, to passionately wanting property rights to be sacrosanct, heaving the jackboot of government regulation off our shoulders.

Can Brash remake Act into such a party? Now his battle really begins.