Blue blood-letting
‘It was like a form of therapy for them,” Andrea Vance explains when asked why so many current and former members of the National Party spoke to her, both on and off the record, for her new book, Blue Blood. In it, she documents the bizarre, gothic psycho-drama of National’s recent political history – a horrible torrent of coups, leaks, betrayals, vendettas, tantrums, blunders, resignations and breakdowns.
Vance is an award-winning journalist known for high-profile political scoops and scandals, and is probably the last person in the world that people in National should talk to. Now the party is clawing its way out of the deep and bloody hole it had dug itself into by the end of Judith Collins’ leadership, the timing is particularly unfortunate.
Why were they so willing to pore over the past, when the past is so awful? “We’d have these long conversations,” she says, “and we’d go through things in quite a lot of detail, and at the end of it they’d put down their spoon or their coffee cup and they’d
