This past weekend has seen an unusual sight, a haggard and worn looking Prime Minister no longer in command of the narrative with nothing to hang her hat on for demonstrable achievements, lying to various media about how grand her vaccine rollout has been.

In her keynote speech to the virtual Labour party conference she claimed:

“Over the coming weeks, we will see the level of protection in our communities increase as more people are vaccinated. In fact we’re on track to have amongst the highest vaccination rates in the world, already having overtaken the likes of Australia the US, the UK, France, Germany and Ireland.”

None of that was true. Australia has 66.3% vaccinated, the UK has 68.1% vaccinated, France has 68.3% vaccinated, Germany has 66.0% vaccinated and Ireland has 75.2% vaccinated.

New Zealand lags behind all of those with 63.8%. What the Prime Minister is claiming is that our one shot rate is higher than those countries two shot rate. She is comparing apples with oranges. Once again she is proving that her claim that it is possible to exist in politics without telling a lie, was in fact a lie.

Then she went on the two weekend current affairs programmes, The Nation and Q+A. In both shows she got pasted. Jack Tame in particular was savage and showed up a nasty, evasive and out of touch Prime Minister in all her unedifying glory.

On housing she was gutted like a trout by Jack Tame:

Tame tried valiantly to elicit an answer from an increasingly evasive Prime Minister:

She was also slammed for the disconnect in messaging about travel out of the Auckland Gulag:

Things weren’t much better for her with the rather cosy and friendly chat she had with one of her cheer leaders, Tova O’Brien:

On MIQ:

And she was very evasive when confronted about taxpayer funding of popularity testing on her social media profiles:

For someone who gave a passable impression of Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes, she sure did know quite a lot about that which she says she knows nothing.

Tova O’Brien also called her out on her lies over vaccine mandates and passports:

The Prime Minister cannot be pleased with those train crash interviews. She and her Government are all over the place, inconsistent, incoherent and disorganised.

To add to that misery is the her Hail Mary hand out of paltry sums to bludgers that won’t even cover a small amount of the pain being inflicted by rampant inflation caused by her Government’s appalling fiscal management. The $20 a week won’t even cover the rise in fuel prices she is inflicting on us right now.

This past week has not been a good one for Jacinda Ardern. The media appearances certainly didn’t provide any solace for her after her royal progress around the country saw her cut and run in the face of very vocal and persistent protests. John Key was roundly mocked when he cut and ran from media, and Ardern should similarly be excoriated for her show of abject cowardice in the face of hostile questioning:

The trip to Northland, then Whanganui and Hunterville ended in negative headlines, with the Prime Minister running to the safety of a Police Station as her agoraphobia took hold. She has never had such push back, and never up close and personal. The pressure is starting to take its tool and it is showing.

The self-assured, on top of her game, confident Prime Minister is now shown as a crotchety, out of sorts liar who is being exposed daily, and it shows she doesn’t like it. A perfect example is her reaction to this perfectly acceptable question from Jack Tame:

Jacinda Ardern loves to get great headlines from international media, has been used to sycophantic coverage from media in New Zealand, and takes all the credit for what she sees as wins. She wants to be the best at everything, and better than all the rest of the world, even if it means lying to take that credit.

But when things go wrong she is nowhere to be seen. She never takes responsibility for anything unless there are good headlines in it for her. She has quietly stopped attending 1 pm news conferences and delegated most of them to others like Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson. Even those press conferences are now being severely curtailed because the news is invariably bad now.

What we are seeing now are increasing signs of a Prime Minister who has been lucky, but whose luck has run out, exposing her for the flake she always was. It is becoming clearer and clearer that neither she nor her Government have any idea how to manage or control anything other than announcements of coming announcements and massaging public relations ahead of actually doing anything.

She has set this country on a damaging path to destruction, and she’s pleased about it all. Sadly, for her the chickens are coming home to roost. Their lack of foresight and planning coupled with profligate waste is being exposed daily and it isn’t pretty.

No wonder she is looking frazzled, worn, out of sorts. Perhaps it is time for her to go…anywhere. Now’s good.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...