Well, blow me down - they had a leadership vote in caucus, called by Chris Luxon himself, and he survived.

Good on him for doing that. That is exactly what I said  he had to do if he wanted to shut this stuff down for the next week and a bit that Parliament has left to sit.

And even if you think sticking with Chris Luxon was the wrong call by the National Party - which, by the way, I do; I still think he needs to go before the election - you’ve got to respect the fact he had the courage to do this.

Leadership votes are always a big risk. They’re always a guess. It doesn’t matter what the MPs say to you. It doesn’t matter if they tell you they’re going to support you. When it comes down to it, and it’s a secret ballot, it’s always a roll of the dice. It takes real steel to do that and he had it.

Now the question, of course, is: is that it? Right - is it going to be quiet all the way through to November’s election?He’s going to be the leader, nothing more to say? Not necessarily.

I think this increases his chances of staying on because it has to have killed off any spill momentum his detractors might have had - at least for now. And it has to have lifted his confidence, which in turn has to lift his media performance, surely to God.

But ultimately, none of that really matters. It’s the polls that determine his future. If National keeps on this downward trend they’ve been on for two years, and if it drops another 2 percent and is sitting on 27-point-something in the next few weeks, all of this is just going to start up again. MPs will see themselves at risk of losing their jobs, they’ll freak out and the chatter will resume.

What this does do is, first, buy him a significant amount of time to lift those polls. And second, it has to earn him a grudging respect from his MPs, who now have to look at this and say he’s more of a formidable opponent than they might have thought.

Even if it’s just grudging respect for calling the bluff of the leakers, that’s what he’s done. It turns out they never had the numbers they pretended they had.

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