Thursday 17 August 2006

Ask not for whom the tipping point comes. It comes for Helen.

It's fairly widely agreed that Margaret Thatcher's eleven years in power were ended when she lost touch with the electorate and brought in the poll tax. (Having just landed in the UK with my girlfriend, I can tell you first-hand what a severe shock it was to be handed a NZ$4000 bill just to be able to rent a flat!)

For Thatcher the poll tax was the tipping point, the moment when even her supporters turned against her, and when all those critics who had been biding their time figured out it was then safe to attack. Once the floodgates were opened by the poll tax debacle, all it took was one mauling by a former ally (whose verbal thrusts had been likened to "being savaged by a dead sheep") to bring her down -- and with Thatcher it wasn't the electorate who sacked her, it was her own colleagues.

Once the tipping point comes, it only takes a 'small putsch' for the House of Cards to fall.

It seems that with the Auditor-General's revelations of Labour's electoral corruption now ringing out around the country, the tipping point has now come for Helen Clark and her Labour Party.

Recent articles and editorials have uncharacteristically savaged her for her "Government's absolute determination to cling to office at any cost," even as her deputy threatens the media with attack by the IRD. And now, as David Farrar observes, "today's Dominion Post editorial on the illegal pledge card spending makes the others (which were very stern also) look like wimps."
It starts by asking:
"What part of shameless and arrogant does Labour not understand?"
And it just gets more acerbic by the sentence.

What's noticeable with these recent richly-deserved MSM attacks is the point made by Insolent Prick in a comment to that post: "This is the same mainstream media that ate out of Auntie Helen's hand for the last ten years, and swallowed her spin hook, line and sinker. Shows you just how low Labour's got if even the editorials have turned on her."

Quite. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it would seem to be ringing for Helen. Roll on Darnton V Clark.

LINKS: 1990: Howe resigns over Europe policy - BBC: On This Day
Shameless and arrogant - Kiwiblog (David Farrar)
A blatant opportunist - Editorial, Dom Post

RELATED: Darnton V Clark, Politics-NZ, Politics-Labour, History-Modern

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Check out some of the other comments on the post by the Labour true-belivers like Logix, Noddy etc.

What would it take for the likes of them to turn against dear leader?

I shudder to think!

EXOCET

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Amazed, Leighton Smith read out passages of the editorial today.

Libertyscott said...

She is convinced that what she does is right, and prepared to defend it at all costs. She loves the power and the job, and, like the last fanatical power hungry PM we had (Muldoon), she cannot believe she deserves to lose it. She is convinced she understands middle NZ and the part that opposes her doesn't know what's good for them or the country

Anonymous said...

the teflon bitch might lose her non stick surface!!