Remarkable rise of Don Brash

Don Brash says vote for National on issues such as improved education, welfare reform, the treaty, and law and order. Picture / Mark Mitchell

Don Brash leans back on the sofa in the lounge off his office and thinks about the question he has just been asked - and thinks and thinks.
It's evidently a curly one: What mistakes would he own up to since becoming National Party leader less than two years ago? Twenty long seconds pass.

"Actually I have difficulty answering that question," he tells the Weekend Herald. Another 10 seconds.

It's not clear whether there are too many mistakes to choose from, or he can't think of a single one. Then the light in his head suddenly switches on. He has found an answer that avoids appearing arrogantly faultless and yet does not make him sound like an idiot.

"I should probably had have accepted Katherine Rich's resignation from the social welfare portfolio when she first asked to be relieved of the portfolio, which was months before Orewa."

It is classic Don Brash: unplugged, devoid of guile, with a hint of blunder lurking behind a political fragility and, often as not, startlingly frank. It is both his virtue and his Achilles heel.

It has given Labour a rich vein of material to tap for its Brash-attack campaign, which was fired up this week, initially over his varying responses to whether National would have sent troops to Iraq. The only common feature of the answers was his diffidence.

Labour then heaped on allegations that Brash had sold his soul to Washington, which may yet turn an otherwise legitimate line of attack into toast.

National's strategy next week will be to step up the roll-out of policy in the hope it will make Labour's Brash attack appear desperate.

There has been no parallel to Labour's attack on the National Party leader since the days of Sir Robert Muldoon. But there has been no parallel to the Brash story. Even if he fails, it has been a remarkable story: Reserve Bank Governor to potential Prime Minister in three years.

Labour's decision to divert its campaign to a Brash attack shows what a danger he is to that party.

It has failed to significantly dent National over the spectre of lower taxes and is expanding its artillery. Brash has Labour deeply worried.

National MPs have forgiven him his managerial inadequacies, and parked their own resentments - not least over Katherine Rich's sacking - because he has put them back in the game and given them a sense that he has a game plan.

In his first speech after becoming leader, he set out the five key areas of differentiation with Labour - education, welfare, treaty, law and order, and tax - and he has stuck to them. They will form the core of the party's campaign.

The early appearance of the blue and red billboards was evidence that the party was better planned. That they coincided with Michael Cullen's Budget veering off the rails was an unexpected confidence boost.

The party is in better shape than it has been in for 15 years.

Brash operates a tight team around him in Parliament: MP Murray McCully, chief of staff and former Dominion editor Richard Long; adviser and speech writer Peter Keenan; deputy leader Gerry Brownlee; and National Party general manager Steven Joyce.

They are the ones, for example, who conference-called on Thursday when Trevor Mallard made his US conspiracy allegations, to sort out who would respond and how.

Joyce is the campaign manager as well and is responsible for a transition in the party's organisational capability. He has been closely involved with the party for only three years but got to know it and members intimately when he was commissioned to review the disastrous results of 2002.

A millionaire after selling the radio networks he built up over 14 years, he has skills in brand development, strategic development, media and management. In National he is regarded as the best person on the party-wing since the heyday of Sir George Chapman's presidency.

Membership is back over 30,000 and it is said that usually parochial electorates are sending money to head office.

If the party is not being bankrolled by Washington, it does have some Australian help with the use of the Lynton Textor firm in polling - though apparently not the services of controversial principal Lynton Crosby, who advised the Australian Liberals and the British Conservatives.

But no amount of planning by the experts will prepare Brash for the intensity of the election campaign.

Helping him each day on the campaign trail will be a senior colleague.

Brash will be expected to sound sensible about a lot of things he knows little about. He will be yelled at, challenged and provoked.

A man who does not relish confrontation in the way his tough opponents do, it would test the temperament of any person.

But as Brash has demonstrated, he is not just any person.