So Judith Collins is gone.
This is English’s faction taking control of dealing with the Dirty Politics mess. There’s no way Bronwyn Puller would have placed a privacy complaint against Collins without English knowing. She’s still tight with the National Party and with his faction.
I have no doubt the email that Key used to sink her came from inside the National Party. Why else would it go straight to Key’s chief of staff and why would it be taken so seriously if he didn’t know its provenance?
I’d say that since English deliberately distanced himself from Collins in his PREFU stand up – which was coordinated with Key changing his position to say she was
“unwise” – they have been working to get to this point and cauterize the wound.
About the same time Steven Joyce dropped away from commenting on it.
It’s not taken much for National’s factions to come to the surface as I’ve previously posted there’s been a cold war on for a while:
It’s no secret that the small but vicious Collins faction has been worrying the rest of the party for some time. Fran O’Sullivan points to her sacking of John Judge as a reason for this, but Collins has caused many other, less public ructions and her proxies, Cameron Slater and Simon Lusk many more again.
There’s no doubt now that English is running the show. The question is will the remnants of Collins’ crew fight back or is it all over for them? And what happens to Steven Joyce?
This will really be a test of that famous National Party discipline.
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