Todd Muller started OK with his winners speech. It was loaded with corporate jargon and mumbo-jumbo but it seemed to hit the right tone.
Then he handled the silly hat issue like a wet dish rag.
And on Monday night he had a train wreck of an interview with lightweight luvvie Jack Tame. I have no doubt Muller’s media team will have thought it was brilliant and that Jack Tame was a bit mean. But Tame was always going to be mean, Muller should have been able to bat him away easily.
What moron in Muller’s team thought it was a good idea to do an interview in a massive echoing room? He should’ve used the beehive theaterette and made himself look like the PM in waiting with the same backdrop that Jacinda Ardern has been using for nearly three months.
Muller should give Matthew Hooton and Tim Hurdle a swift kick in the balls for that train wreck. At the very least stop his damn arms flapping like a seagull and get him some media training, fast…oh, and get him to stop talking in corporate riddles.
But the real gut punch for dyed in the wool National party supporters would have been reading in yesterday’s NZ Herald that the politician that Todd Muller admires the most is two-time loser Bill English.
He had also been contacted by former leaders of the National Party, including Sir Bill English whom Muller has said he most admired as a politician. It is English he sees the most similarities with in terms of leadership style.
“The thing that struck me was how he rebuilt his career after a challenging period [in 2002], and just the way he could bring a whole-of-Government approach to his thinking and drive the public service to deliver to that outcome.
“I’ve always been impressed with his work ethic, his demeanour and his relatability to people at a personal level.”
He recalled going on “walkabouts” to meet people with English on the last campaign.
“They took so long because he was genuinely interested in people and their stories. And I am quite similar to that. I am genuinely interested in people’s views, even if different from mine, and why they hold those views.”
So, let’s recap on this coup. Todd Muller was endorsed by Jim Bolger, a man who turned his back on the party and his own achievements whilst Prime Minister. I have to wonder if Muller likewise has resiled from the reforms of the early 1990s.
Then he is closely aligned to Michelle Boag and Murray McCully who have been promised oodles of cash for getting Muller elected to leader.
And he admires Bill English the most of any politician. What most people don’t know unless they are political tragics like me is that he’d loaded his office up with loads of Bill English acolytes to do the policy grunt work. The same people who developed 47,983 policy statements for the losing 2002 election.
Can anyone else see the same problems I can see?
Woop, woop, Pull up!
The low terrain alarm is going off.
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