Should Hone Harawira prove to be the National-led coalition Government's heartbreaker, it will not be the first time that a member of this forthright northern Maori whanau has elicited political tears before bedtime.
Few pundits will forget the humiliation - and the subsequent fallout for relations between Ngapuhi and the Labour Party - that Mr Harawira's mother, Titewhai Harawira, wrought upon former prime minister Helen Clark at Waitangi's Te Tii Marae in 1998 when she challenged Miss Clark's right to speak on the marae.
Now the rebellious son, whose time in Parliament has been punctuated by a series of headline-grabbing antics, has thrown down perhaps the ultimate challenge to his own party political masters.
The reverberations will be felt across the spectrum.
The question is whether the fuse the firebrand MP keeps attempting to torch will take hold and burn, or whether the Maori Party, and its National ally, will have the patience and the wherewithal to douse it and avoid a political meltdown.
The signs do not look promising for the Government and will surely present Prime Minister John Key and his advisers with an urgent challenge as they return to Wellington and begin to survey the year ahead.
The latest incendiary initiative by Mr Harawira arrived on Sunday a week ago in the form of a column in the Sunday Star-Times newspaper.
In it the maverick MP launched a broadside against his own party, its leaders and the senior National coalition partner.
"The downside of being in government with National," he wrote, "is having to put up with all the anti-worker, anti-beneficiary and anti-environment (and therefore anti-Maori) legislation that comes as a natural consequence of having a right-wing government."
For good measure he added: "...
I am being constantly told by Maori in the street, in the shops, on marae, at the airports, and even in the cemeteries at tangi, that the Maori Party is coming off the rails ..."
While the exuberant Mr Harawira has always strained at the leash of collective silence - in favour of an official voice, usually in the form or one or other of the party's co-leaders - his ruminations go well beyond the merely provocative.
The outburst was initially met with what might be described as a stunned silence.
Later last week Maori Party whip Te Ururoa Flavell filed a formal complaint against the rebel MP, to be entertained at a party hui originally scheduled for last Friday, but subsequently postponed until later this week.
It seems that wiser heads may have prevailed in playing for time, hoping that tempers might cool.
But the "deed" cannot be undone: what Mr Harawira has said, has been said, and with an ongoing platform in the same newspaper, it might be expected there will be more of the same forthcoming.
The problem for the Maori Party is that its prodigal son has a considerable constituency, and it knows it.
To date, it has been prepared to embrace Mr Harawira's pronouncements as indicative of a virtuous diversity within the caucus and indeed the larger party.
For a minority party within MMP there is always a danger of being smothered.
Mr Harawira has been an insurance policy against this, as well a bulwark against the accusation that the party has turned its back on its rank in file members; and that the "mana" of Government has proven too costly in terms of concessions the party has had to make in maintaining the coalition.
But only so many claims can be made against such insurance.
Tariana Turia and Dr Pita Sharples must now know there is a dangerous edge in their rebel MP's rhetoric, not least with respect to the Marine and Coastal Areas Bill against which he is bitterly opposed.
The party has been here before with Mr Harawira, notably after an outburst of coarse and racist language threatened, by association, the standing and dignity of his colleagues.
The patience of the National Party, to many of whose constituents Mr Harawira's remarks - not least those urging "strategic relationships with the Greens and with Labour" - will come as a final straw, must be fast running out.
The conundrum for Mrs Turia, Dr Sharples and Mr Key, albeit motivated by their own prerogatives, will be whether and when to cut their enfant terrible loose: too soon and Mr Harawira could gather a head of steam as an independent at the forefront of a growing body of disaffected Maori, and others on the left; too late and this political time bomb could explode in the Government's face in the lead up to this year's election.
