Hang in there, Chris Penk!

I have said, in print and on air, that there would have to be some bloodletting once this business was finished.

Now, Sylvia Wood could have simply produced a goat, ceremonially place the sins and transgressions of the entire caucus onto it, and they could all then have chased it out of the precinct, but that wouldn’t have been enough. A blood offering of some sort was required. Without it, the stakes of doing this kind of thing would just be too low.

I have no illusion that my words carry the slightest weight in the National leadership. Nevertheless, I regret them all the same. That’s because the scapegoat has now been found and it turned out to be Chris Penk, whom I should disclose I consider a personal friend.

I do not know what his role in the ructions actually was. I have not asked him and I am not going to. Clearly he was at least asking some of the questions that led to the story which then resulted in this circus.

I have also never pretended that any overegging of “the coup” was a sign that nothing was wrong. The smoke may not have indicated fire, but something was smouldering away.

Talking to Ryan Bridge today I said that the loser of a leadership contest should walk away from public life. I hope Chris Penk does not do that. And, at the risk of doing an “explaining is losing” let me set out why.

The rule should be that you leave politics if, having been a persistent antagonist of the incumbent, you finally make your move and then miss. That kind of failure poisons everything downstream of it.

But that is not what this was. This was a man who has never been shown a great deal of loyalty by any of the various leaders he has served under, asking the sort of questions that half the country was asking at the same time.

He has now been stripped of Defence, Veterans, Space, the GCSB and the NZSIS (all of which he had held for four months) and of Building and Construction (which he had held since the government was formed). That is more than fair. It is what happens in politics.

Stick your head above the parapet and it just may get blown off. That’s the risk you take. You have to take your licks.

Anyway the story was that Chris Penk was going to be used as a stalking horse for a real contest involving one or more of the true contenders. Whether or not that was ever the plan, it played out like it usually did, with the designated patsy drawing fire away from the more likely contenders. I hope they are grateful.

It’s hard not to feel bitter about this, even if it was inevitable. But it is worth saying what is being lost.

Chris Penk is a principled conservative in a party that does not have a great many of them and is not always sure what to do with the ones it has. More to the point, he holds those positions in a way that does not alienate the general public, which is the rarer accomplishment by some distance. The usual failure modes of New Zealand conservatism are awkwardness and abrasiveness and he has been good at avoiding both.

He has also been a hardworking and diligent minister. He has shepherded unglamorous reforms in Building and Construction in the hopes of making it marginally less impossible to build something in this country. He has also been one of those rare things in New Zealand government: a defence minister with actual military experience.

He did a great deal of good work for National. I hope he will keep doing it from the back bench for the time being. From what I can see, he has taken his sacking in his stride so far.

National goes to 7 November with a leader who has now won two confidence votes he should never have needed to hold, a front bench full of people who were careful to say nothing until they knew which way it would fall, and one fewer conservative of conviction and good cheer in cabinet.

So, yeah. Banner day for the National Party.