Deborah Coddington: Be very afraid when the real Labour coup comes

Phil Goff sits behind Andrew Little at the Labour Party conference. Photo / Jason Dorday

Phil Goff might well insist the Labour caucus is united behind him, as he did when the front bench emerged from their three-hour crisis meeting in Dunedin on Tuesday.

And mark my words: after the November election they will continue to be right behind him. But they'll be helping Andrew Little, new Labour MP and the next leader, thrust the dagger in Goff's back.

Little stepped down as party president yesterday to contest the New Plymouth seat, currently held by National's invisible Jonathan Young by a very slim majority of 105 votes.

Little, a Taranaki boy, will get a high list placing, but to be leader of the party, and ultimately prime minister, he'll need a constituency seat. So if he doesn't win New Plymouth at this election, he'll take it in 2015. What Andrew wants Andrew gets.

Commentators like New Zealand Herald political editor Audrey Young have been picking Little as Labour's next leader for as long as Goff's been in the job.

For the life of me, I can't see why others continue to choose MPs David Cunliffe and Shane Jones as alternatives to Goff. Or David Parker who, though affable and capable, has no profile after nine years, and lacks mongrel.

Put bluntly, Labour has to get back to its roots and reconnect with the working class for whom it was formed nearly 100 years ago. Metaphorically, Labour has to return to Blackball.

That the current front bench had its crisis meeting in the ivory towers of academia speaks volumes of how Labour has betrayed the unemployed, the beneficiaries - all the strugglers. The Labour Party should stop defining itself as "centre left" - what's "centre left" anyway? Sitting on the fence? Holding your finger to the wind?

Centre left is just marginally different from National, with the result that Phil Goff is too like John Key.

But, unlike Key when MPs go bad, Goff totally mishandled the Hughes scandal - didn't tell his president, no strategic plan, forced to back down over how he'd attacked National and the Richard Worth sex scandal.

Then as late as Tuesday he turned around and said he wouldn't have done it differently: "I don't believe that would have served the interests of justice ... I wouldn't have sacrificed the privacy around it for the complainant, the right to justice of the person complained against or the interference with the police process."

And Hughes was a gone-burger. Unnecessarily so, because despite all the tut-tutting and pursing of lips, if Goff had immediately gone public about Hughes and sent him on leave, and if the police investigation resulted in no charges being laid, then Hughes had no reason to resign.

Parliament, in case people have forgotten, is a House of Representatives.

That means its members are like all of us, with our warts and mistakes. It is not a convent or a monastery. Hughes is not married, yet it's been reported - shock, horror - that he made a pass at a staff member at a Christmas party and the party leader asked if that staffer wanted to lay a complaint. Good grief. That's like asking a certain QC if he'd like to complain about an Act MP, the party's deputy justice spokesman, who chatted him up at a drinks party for barristers.

Have we got to the stage where unattached MPs can't initiate relationships? And if age differences are an issue in terms of power abuse, then some MPs need to be careful about casting first stones.

So long as it's legal, I don't care who MPs have sex with. It's none of our business. The Hughes issue - thus far - is not in the same league as the Richard Worth scandal.

As chief whip, responsible for keeping the rest of caucus in line, Hughes made an error of judgment, so he deserved to lose that position and sit on the naughty seat at the back to cool his heels.

Now Labour is in total disarray and Goff won't be the only casualty of this.

His primping colleagues who have fancied themselves as successors will be in for a shock when Little takes over.

Labour's centre-left days may soon be over, along with its MPs. Be very afraid.

The ruthless trade unionist is a totally different animal.