Blue blood-letting

A new book on the National Party's post-Key era lays bare its inner turmoil of the past six years.

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

'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 ..." [she sighs and sags with relief]. "And this happened many times. No one had sat down with these people and said, 'Hey, what happened to you? What was the real story behind that?' And it was a cathartic process, I think."

But wasn't there also an ulterior motive? Many of Vance's interviews are anonymous, because "if you talk to them on the record politicians are not very honest. They're very guarded. So, that offered people a shield." And if you were a National MP during the party's civil war era and you knew that your political enemies might be talking to Vance confidentially, wouldn't you sit down with her and provide your own highly flattering version of events?

"Some people talked to me because they genuinely care about the National Party and were horrified and didn't want it to repeat the mistakes of the past," she says. "But there will be others who just really wanted their side of the story put across."