Week in politics

So it's goodbye Mr Smile and Wave, and hello Mr Grumpy. Or so the Prime Minister's critics would have you believe.

National's "mixed ownership model" - the innocuous-sounding vehicle tasked with making the party's unpopular privatisation agenda more appetising - paradoxically may yet end up making the partial sell-offs of state corporations even less palatable to voters.

Labour leader David Shearer and Prime Minister John Key had a brief conversation last month on the short walk from the debating chamber to the Legislative Council Chamber for the official opening of Parliament.

The bar had long closed. The dimmed lights in the cavernous functions room had been turned up to full brightness.

Some elements on the left of the political spectrum have long cried wolf about National supposedly having a secret agenda, especially when it comes to privatisation.

Prepare the high altar for sacrifice. The Labour Party can dither no longer. Some of its most sacred cows are in need of slaughtering.

Borrow and hope; tax and spend. For months, that has been Bill English's pithy, double-phrased encapsulation of how Labour would run the economy.

How will Finance Minister Bill English handle unhappy news next Tuesday when Treasury updates its Budget forecasts, as it is obliged to do before next month's election?

As British prime minister, Harold Macmillan was once asked what was the most likely thing to blow a government off course. "Events, dear boy, events," he famously replied.

Backdown with a capital "H". That is "H" as in humiliation; humiliation complete and utter.