No Government would escape blame for a situation in which someone on home detention is able to somehow get a firearm and go around shooting people. Every piece of information that has come out about that has only made it worse.
But what has happened with Allan is a very human tragedy for someone who worked hard to get where she was – only for it to crumble within the period of a month, in what seems to be the result of heartbreak and self-destruction.
The facts of what happened on Sunday night remain unclear – there was a car crash, Allan ended up in police custody and charged with careless driving and refusing to accompany police. She was over the drink-driving limit but not by much. The details will emerge eventually.
What is clear is that both Allan and Hipkins recognised it was untenable to continue as a Justice Minister in such a situation.
She resigned before Hipkins had to tell her to.
Hipkins said he had dealt with her that Sunday morning and she was fine. But something happened in her personal life afterwards that clearly led to her distress that night.
It is difficult to feel anything other than worry and sadness for Allan for those of us who have known her a long time – since she was a young lawyer, and then into Parliament, working her way up into Cabinet, battling cancer and then returning and getting on to the front bench.
She had worked hard to get there - sometimes rubbing people up the wrong way in the process - and was still on her way up.
Hipkins summed that up, when he talked about Allan going from the “top of her game” to whatever transpired on Sunday night.
“Kiri is an incredibly talented person who clearly has been battling some demons and has not won the battle.”
And that is a crying shame.
These days, Parliament is a lot more forgiving when it comes to people dealing with mental health. Todd Muller has helped hugely in that regard, not least by staying in Parliament to talk about it since his own breakdown, instead of leaving quietly.
However, that does not mean Parliament is any easier a place for those who do struggle with mental health. That is not only because of the stress of the place and the workload: It is because one person has an impact on a whole team.
Allan already put a lot of pressure on herself. She will now feel she has let herself down as well as her colleagues.
“Politicians are human too” is heard more and means more than it used to - although politicians’ human lives also play out a lot more publicly than most humans.
Allan is perhaps more human than many: She was never a cookie-cutter politician. When she was good she was very good, but she made mistakes too.
She has a staunch facade and some rough edges but she wears her heart on her sleeve, where it is easily bruised.
It will raise a lot of “what if” questions for both Allan and Hipkins – including whether Allan should have come back to work when she did, after a few weeks away to deal with her mental health following a relationship breakup on top of her high-stress job.
It had coincided with media scrutiny of issues in her ministerial office – which Allan had said was not the reason for the mental health issues, but which surely did not help.
Hipkins said he did all he could: Ministers and staff close to Allan had been in regular contact with her, and proper counselling was put in place.
It is easy for National Party leader Christopher Luxon to send a barb saying Hipkins should have “sorted it out” properly the first time around and promise it would not happen under a National Government. He gave a hypothetical answer to what he would do in the same situation: A solution that was pretty much what Hipkins had done.
It is much harder to deal with it in reality: Allan’s case cannot be compared to the likes of Michael Wood or Stuart Nash.
Some were worried about her return to work, but Allan had convinced herself – and her colleagues – that she was okay to return to her workload. Last week she did a good job of proving it in her competent handling of the announcement around a new ram-raids offence.
The Sunday night events showed it was not so.
Allan is yet to decide whether to call time on her entire political career but that is certainly now far more likely than it was last week. She would be starting again from a very difficult beginning.
Claire Trevett is the Herald’s political editor, based at Parliament in Wellington. She started at the Herald in 2003 and joined the Press Gallery team in 2007. She is a life member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.
