John Armstrong

Prime Minister John Key might seem a winner, but let's look at the rest of the field.

What is really going on inside the Labour Party caucus? The show of unity following Tuesday's discussion on the negative fallout from Phil Goff's "nationhood" speech did not quite square with some rather odd happenings the next day.

Lesser mortals would have been nowhere near as relaxed and unperturbed as Don Brash seemed to be after the Prime Minister put the kibosh on the radical recommendations of his 2025 Taskforce.

For the critics hurling brickbats at National for coming up with an emissions trading scheme even more feeble and spineless than was expected, John Key would probably have this message: feel free to hurl plenty more.

Whether to put an "h" into Wanganui is going to be one "h" of a decision for Maurice Williamson to make. That's "h" as in huge, hell or heck. It is an H-bomb-sized political dilemma.

So far, so hopeful.

Was there political interference?

It takes a lot to stop Phil Goff in his tracks. Labour's leader was temporarily lost for words, however, when his path crossed with that of a Taranaki local while he and his caucus colleagues were bussing their way from Wellington to New Plymouth this week.

Bill English would rather be hauled over hot coals and dragged through broken glass than sanction a parliamentary inquiry into whether the Australian-owned trading banks are profit-gouging at New Zealanders' expense.

How on earth did that happen? If they haven't already conducted a postmortem, National's strategists might well ask themselves how Labour managed to set the political agenda so easily this week on the crucial question of how to preserve jobs in the current economic recession.

Some time around the middle of the week, John Key woke up to the fact that scrapping with Phil Goff over Richard Worth was doing him no good at all.

Where to now for Richard Worth? The MP may yet face criminal charges in a court of law. He will as likely not. Regardless, there can now be little question about the verdict of the court of public opinion.

Bill English's Budget may have paved the first few kilometres on what he has called the "road to recovery".

The Labour Party is absolutely correct.

The unwelcome ghosts of austere budgets past loom large and linger ominously in the dank, though slightly lightening economic gloom. The Prime Minister accordingly has set in train the necessary rites of exorcism.

The horror endured by 3-year-old Nia Glassie during her short life had a profound impact on former St Hildas Collegiate School art pupil Ashlee Carr.

When Helen Clark flies to New York to take up her prestigious United Nations posting, will New Zealand's so-called independent foreign policy take flight with her?

So the National Government is variously inching, shifting, drifting, veering or lurching to the Right, depending on where you stand on the political spectrum.