Mike Hosking: Has the Prime Minister had a worse week?

 

I would like to think that as the Prime Minister reflects this weekend on what happened this week, that she might just stop for a moment and admit to herself, even if she never admits it to anyone else, that she has lost control of the pandemic response. 

When you are thought bubbling booking times to leave the largest city in the country, you’ve literally gone mad, lost the plot, been exhausted of any decent clarity of thought, or all three. 

To have to roll poor old Grant Robertson yet out again and patch it up just shows you how loose all this is. 

The start of the week involved the mad cap idea of opening shops this Wednesday with no vaccine app, then changing the rules with the vaccine app, then moving to the traffic light system. Two of those three things we don't even have a date on. 

Then came the protestors who showed a side of Ardern that we haven't really seen before, and one she hasn’t had to deal with. It wasn’t pretty. She can't handle it, she doesn't know how. 

Being an accidental Prime Minister is going to catch you out eventually. Unless you've built into any big role, you're not properly equipped. She early on survived, if not thrived, on her smile, one liners, or gushing generosity of spirit. We liked the window dressing. 

But that never lasts and at the tail end of two hopelessly disorganised and shambolic years of Covid, the veneer is scraped thin. The madness abounds, the confusion reigns, and the empress has no clothes. 

To be as agitated as she was by some loudmouth in Northland is a worrying sign and it only got worse in Whanganui. 

You can't run an entire election campaign running away from people by cancelling stuff. Lord only knows what they’ve got planned for Auckland this week, because protestors smell weakness at 100 kilometres. 

And remember Auckland was a major problem and mistake before the protestors. To have misread the room to the extent she has by not being in her hometown for three months, pretending phone calls cover it, shows a tin ear of Guinness Book proportions. 

And then to have that old fool of a Speaker change his invented rules to accommodate a royal return further heaps embarrassment onto an already embarrassing calamity. 

Despite all that, I note she still had time to wax lyrical to another of her favoured music stations about eating crayfish and shot meat at her wedding. Does she honestly not get it? And if not, has no one told her that planning weddings in the middle of a pandemic and lockdown as businesses go broke, while banning people leaving town for Christmas is about as "let them eat cake” as it gets? 

Upside? It's a new week next week and it can't be any worse than this. Or can it?

Mike Hosking is a New Zealand television and radio broadcaster. He currently hosts The Mike Hosking Breakfast show on NewstalkZB on weekday mornings.