Two-faced: who will really lead the right after the election?
The leaders on the hoardings this election are not the leaders who will emerge from it. Watch who is waiting.
After more than 35 years in politics, I have learned that the greatest threat to a leader is rarely in another party. It is the ambition standing behind them.
A few other lessons stuck. Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. Always have something over those around you. And at any political event, don’t watch the person speaking. Watch those watching.
I would sit at the back, in the middle, to take it all in, or stand backstage and face the audience front-on. You see how the message lands. You also see who is positioning themselves, and how.
On 7 November, voters will choose between parties led by Christopher Luxon, David Seymour and Winston Peters. Luxon has already survived two confidence votes in four months.
My prediction is that the people who replace them are already in the campaign photos. They are standing in the back row.
Contents
The long game
In politics, the person who wants the crown rarely stands next to the throne.
They wait. They observe. They get someone else to do the numbers and position others to take the risks. When the leader is at their weakest, they step forward as the reluctant hero.
That model came with a written record. In 2014, Nicky Hager published Dirty Politics, built on messages hacked from blogger Cameron Slater: conversations their authors never intended anyone else to read. Among them was strategist Simon Lusk’s boast, quoted from the book:
“I have at least half a dozen people in their twenties who will be in caucus one day. It is a never ending cycle, and I am the one that is capturing all the talent, they will all be clients.”
Lusk had spelled out the timeframe to Slater on 21 February 2011, in an exchange I reproduced in my book Unleashed.
“It is a long game and I am going to outlast the others.” — Simon Lusk, 2011
Jordan Williams, who worked alongside Lusk on Don Brash’s 2011 coup, took the model further. With David Farrar he founded the Taxpayers’ Union, and as I documented in 2020, the network spread into astroturf campaigns, polling and the media. Last month Hager returned with Dirty Work, the third book in his trilogy, on the Taxpayers’ Union itself.
More than a decade on, it is worth asking how the long game is going.
Winston’s heir
Winston Peters built New Zealand First in his own image. He wants it to be his legacy.
Peters is 81 and slowing down, though he bristles at anything that sounds like a valedictory. He entered Parliament in 1979. Shane Jones is 67 and is not the party’s future. Whoever follows Peters has big shoes to fill.
Who better than a former All Black captain?
Taine Randell is Maori, has a law and commerce degrees, is bright, a Hawke’s Bay businessman, with a background in Ngati Kahungunu asset management and the Highlanders franchise. He turned down a Labour approach in 2023 before what The Spinoff called “a long dance” with New Zealand First. He was unveiled in April as the party’s Tukituki candidate and is ranked ninth on its list.
Look at the map around him. Randell went to the same school Jordan Williams attended. Simon Lusk lives around the corner. Former Taxpayers’ Union chair Casey Costello is a New Zealand First Cabinet minister, ranked third on its list. Williams once fronted the 2011 campaign against MMP that stigmatised Peters. His former chair now sits at Peters’ Cabinet table.
There is money in the family, too. Randell married into the Edwards family. His father-in-law, Brian Edwards, founded Hastings firm Freeze Dried Foods and was its majority shareholder when he sold it to pet-food maker ZIWI in 2022. A year earlier, private equity firm FountainVest had bought ZIWI in a deal reported at $1.5 billion. The price Edwards received was never disclosed. But a candidate with that family behind him is not a candidate short of resources.
Then watch the advertising. In most New Zealand First adverts featuring its candidates, Randell stands in the back row.
In another, Randell passes Peters a rugby ball and Peters slots the drop goal.
For now, the old man kicks the goals. The successor feeds him the ball.
The chameleon
To know where David Seymour is going, look at where he has been. He has never stayed anywhere for long.
Seymour graduated in electrical and electronic engineering and spent nine years building a replica Lotus Seven, the same car that now stars in his election ad, filmed on ACT backer Alan Gibbs’ farm at Kaukapakapa.
As an Auckland Grammar student, he played his role model, Sir Edmund Hillary, in TVNZ’s documentary A View from the Top.
Then he dropped engineering altogether for politics. Each time: a project, a goal, then something completely different.
In politics, he found people to become. He was mentored by Larry Mitchell, Mark Mitchell’s father, and took Mitchell’s local government league tables to Canada, where they published a performance index together through the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in 2007. As I recorded in Unleashed, ACT stalwart Brian Nicolle had been grooming him as a future leader since 2007. Seymour even appeared on television with a Canadian accent.
He came home in the month Rodney Hide was rolled in 2011 and understudied John Banks as his staffer. When Banks resigned in 2014, Seymour replaced him.
Then came the impersonations. Dancing with the Stars had been a “reputational and physical game-changer” for Hide; Seymour signed up in 2018. He adopted Richard Prebble’s haircut and Prebble’s speaking style, and regurgitated the policies ACT ran the last time it was in power.
The project worked. ACT returned to government and Seymour became Deputy Prime Minister. Then the shine came off. His long-serving chief of staff, Andrew Ketels, quit. Stu Wilson and Anya Zohrab left too, and Seymour put the senior departures down to personal reasons. Vote Compass respondents now rate him 3.4 out of 10, below Luxon.
Now there is a new project. Seymour is engaged to Alex Martelli, whose buyer’s agency buys property for clients with budgets as high as $25 million. The wedding is planned for next year.
I know the man. He lacks original thought. He absorbs the personalities of those around him to gain attention, completes the project, then goes looking for the next person to impersonate.
Marriage is the next project. Politics is the one he has finished.
The Epsom exit
It doesn’t get any better than Deputy Prime Minister. Every politician would rather choose the moment they leave than have it chosen for them.
Seymour owes his political survival to National. ACT has held Epsom since 2005, and Seymour has held it since 2014. I saw how that happened from behind the scenes. I watched the 2011 Brash coup against Rodney Hide unfold. I watched Jordan Williams. And I watched National voters keep ACT in Epsom, election after election.
This year the boot is on the other foot. Paul Goldsmith, a five-time Epsom runner-up and National’s sixth-ranked list candidate, is telling Epsom voters they no longer need to back Seymour, and says he is “very confident”. ACT is polling comfortably above the 5% threshold. Goldsmith’s problem is the overhang: if National wins more electorates than its party vote supports, it gets no list seats at all, and list MPs like Goldsmith are the casualties. I set out the arithmetic in April.
Meanwhile Don Brash is urging National voters to split their vote, Reality Check Radio is pushing the same line, and Harry Mowbray is running a Split Your Vote campaign promising that “a centre-right coalition will retain the Treasury Benches for the foreseeable future.”
More recently, Paul Henry fronts an ACT advert suggesting that voters give their party vote to Act, but give their electorate vote to a “local MP”, denying that it is designed to create an overhang.
Epsom voters understand strategic voting. It has worked before. But consider what a Seymour loss would achieve. Epsom would still send two right-wing MPs to Parliament. And Seymour, top of ACT’s list, would become a list MP, free to retire mid-term without forcing a by-election.
So who would replace him? Look no further than the person standing at the back.
The man from Tamaki
ACT’s other strategic electorate is Tamaki, and how ACT won it matters.
In June 2022, National’s Tamaki MP Simon O’Connor celebrated the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. As I recorded in Unleashed, prominent National women wore pink in protest and approached ACT, suggesting Brooke van Velden stand in Tamaki. Paula Bennett and Desley Simpson turned up for cups of tea. The Taxpayers’ Union commissioned the only poll of the seat, showing van Velden had momentum. She won by 4,158 votes.
Van Velden became ACT’s heir apparent. Then she peaked. In March she announced her retirement, saying she had “never wanted to be a career politician” and had no ambition to lead ACT.
Her replacement was not a sitting ACT MP. James Christmas, a former staffer to Chris Finlayson, John Key and Bill English, was 28th on National’s list in 2023 and seen as a favourite for Attorney-General. With National winning so many electorates, he missed Parliament by a handful of list places. Judith Collins became Attorney-General instead.
In April, with another overhang looming, he switched to ACT. He insists “there’s no hidden story there.” Asked whether Christmas could one day lead ACT, Seymour replied: “There’s always the possibility, but let’s just see if we can get him elected to Parliament first.” ACT has ranked him seventh: well back, out of the spotlight.
Then came his first big campaign message. After Peters’ comments on late-term abortion, Christmas posted a video telling Peters his views on “a woman’s right to choose” “aren’t going to fly here in Tamaki.” Even former ACT leader Rodney Hide called it “a nasty comment.”
It was the very issue that mobilised National’s women against O’Connor four years ago.
It is quite obvious who is wearing the pants in Tamaki. In my view, Christmas is the next stage of National running ACT as its puppet.
The hero in reserve
National’s factions are struggling for control of the party, and the struggle is not new.
Jami-Lee Ross was the candidate Lusk and Slater backed in the 2011 Botany by-election. His 2018 implosion against Simon Bridges eventually cleared Botany for Christopher Luxon, who became leader some time after. In the middle of that implosion, Ross named Mark Mitchell among the MPs more capable than Bridges.
In August, Chris Penk challenged Luxon and lost. He was stripped of his portfolios and announced he won’t seek re-election. The Prime Minister’s Office was quick to confirm the challenger was Penk, not Erica Stanford or Chris Bishop, and Penk denied making calls on Stanford’s behalf. The focus fell on Stanford. Mitchell stood behind Luxon, called it an “unnecessary distraction” and denied being a deputy leadership contender.
Mitchell knows how this works. In 2011, Penk and Mitchell were rivals for the Rodney selection. The Lusk–Slater messages, published in Dirty Politics and reproduced at length in Unleashed, show them working to clear Mitchell’s path: discredit the electorate chair, undermine the frontrunners, and give Mitchell a clear run with a positive message, untainted by the dirty work.
“i’d really like to have him win to prove it can be done,” Simon Lusk wrote.
Mitchell has said Hager’s account was false and that Lusk advised him only on speeches and brochures. But I published the full conversation between Slater and Lusk that prove otherwise.
Mitchell has wanted the top job before. He stood in 2018 and withdrew before the vote, then lost to Judith Collins in 2020. For most of this campaign he has been a nodding head in the back row, while Goldsmith fronts on crime and justice. Compared with before the Penk challenge, Mitchell has had little to say.
That is the pattern. Penk took the risk and the fall. Others were tainted by association. The man who kept his hands clean is the one available when the party needs rescuing, just as he was in Rodney.
Whatever the election result, Mark Mitchell will be the next leader of the National Party.
The pattern
We have seen this before.
When Simon Bridges led National, Todd Muller was often in the back row of caucus photos. In May 2020, Muller rolled Bridges, then dismissed as a “great conspiracy theory” the claim that he had been campaigning for months.
It isn’t height that puts these people at the back. Christmas, Randell, Mitchell and Muller are tall men, but that is incidental. It is behaviour. They let the leader own the front row, and the risk that comes with it.
The back row is not where ambition hides. It is where ambition waits.
The captain’s call
Luxon may not need rolling. He may already have written his own exit.
On 27 July, at his post-Cabinet press conference, Luxon ruled out working with The Opportunity Party:
“we ain’t doing business with you.”
Then he walked out. Labour’s Kieran McAnulty said he had blurted it out. Luxon insisted the position had been discussed with caucus and the board over several months. Either way, it was the leader’s call, and it is the leader who owns it.
Then the polls moved. The latest RNZ-Reid Research poll has National on 25.9%, with Opportunity on 5.5% and holding the balance of power. On those numbers, National, ACT and New Zealand First have 56 seats. Add Opportunity’s seven and they govern. Without them, they don’t.
Luxon now says he will work with “whoever I have to” to secure a second term. His office says that doesn’t mean Opportunity.
So on election night, Luxon could face an embarrassing choice: break his word to keep power, or keep his word and lose it. Either way, the bright line becomes a noose.
And look at who survives a result like that. At 26%, National’s seats come almost entirely from electorates, and its list MPs are wiped out. The caucus left standing is the safe-seat caucus, including Mitchell in Whangaparaoa: the very seats the factions, and Lusk, spent years working to fill.
A leader who can’t form a government doesn’t need a challenger. He just needs someone standing at the back.
The prediction
So here is my prediction, on the record, 18 days before the vote.
Within the next parliamentary term, Mark Mitchell will lead National. James Christmas will lead ACT. Taine Randell will be Winston Peters’ anointed successor at New Zealand First.
Those three parties make up the right bloc. Two of the three come out of National’s orbit. The third stands in a Hawke’s Bay network that loops back to someone whose long term plan was to control the National Party. And the split-vote strategy being run this election is designed to keep that bloc in government “for the foreseeable future.”
What Lusk described in 2011 was a long game: capture the talent, place it, and outlast everyone else. The point of Hager’s material was that the architects never wanted the rest of us to see the plan.
Twelve years later, the plan is in plain sight. It is standing in the back row of the campaign photos.
That is what makes this a two-faced election. The faces on the hoardings are Luxon, Seymour and Peters. The faces in the back row are Mitchell, Christmas and Randell. Voters will tick for the first set and, before the term is out, be governed by the second.
The Romans had a god for this. Janus had two faces: one looking back, one looking forward. Each party on the right is campaigning with the face that looks back. The face that looks forward is already in the photo.
So by all means, vote for the face you like. Just check who is standing behind it.
