Key's extraordinary mandate tempered by harsh reality

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

Stacking chairs and stuffing popped balloons and bunting into rubbish bags, the cleaners moved discreetly, but purposefully among the loitering guests.

The time was fast ticking towards the wrong side of two o'clock in the morning. But the hardy souls who remained in the New Zealand Room at Auckland's Sky City Convention Centre were not yet of a mood to leave.

For the host of Cabinet ministers, MPs, branch and electorate officials, activists and sundry party members at National's election-night party, this was a rare moment and one to truly savour.

The sheer size of National's vote on November 26 was on a scale which occurs only once in every couple of decades or so. This was an emphatic victory.

Sure, National had fallen short of an absolute majority. The election had shown that ideal to be nothing more than a cruel mirage.

Sure, National nearly fell victim to the punishing arithmetic of MMP politics. Having eaten up the vote of its in-decline partners, it is now relying on a parliamentary majority of just two on most issues, assuming the normal voting pattern of the Maori Party.

But the new Government is stable.

John Key promised stability. He delivered.

The sense of power not just renewed, but power enhanced was palpable as the Prime Minister circulated the room on election night.

While the congratulations showered down on him like confetti, everyone also instinctively knew - but would never tell him - that it might never feel so good for Mr Key again.

He is now swimming against the harsher currents of second-term politics. Labour will regain strength under its new leadership. National will suffer a slow erosion of its popularity in what may well prove to be a very difficult term, given the state of the global economy.

Within days of the election, the Treasury was revising its economic growth forecasts downwards, thereby already putting a big question mark over National's timetable for a return to Budget surplus.

Attitudes towards Mr Key have already undergone a hardening within the Wellington Beltway since the Epsom tea party fiasco.

A crowning first six months of 2011 for the Prime Minister was superseded by a less than majestic second half of the year. The election result suggests his series of minor gaffes and foibles had little impact on Mr Key's standing in the greater public's eyes. But they will if they continue.

What Mr Key does have going for him is that he has a mandate for second-term action - and a strong one, especially for the partial sale of some state-owned enterprises. That he does not is the first post-election canard being spread by National's opponents.

The scale of National's mandate becomes clearer once Mr Key's victory is put into historical context.

For starters, he comfortably beat his own record for the biggest party vote under MMP with National securing 47.3% this time as against 44.9% in 2008. That percentage was just a shade behind those attained by Sir Keith Holyoake in 1960, Sir Robert Muldoon in 1975 and Jim Bolger in 1990.

Those crushing victories, however, were achieved from the vantage point of Opposition under the extravagant swings of the two-party dominated first-past-the-post electoral system which meant votes for minor parties were almost always wasted votes.

On another measure - the unlikelihood of an incumbent prime minister increasing his or her party's share of the vote from the previous election - Mr Key's victory easily betters Helen Clark's success in 2002, when she raised Labour's vote from 38.7% to 41.3%. It falls just short of David Lange's second election win in 1987. It betters Mr Holyoake's victory in 1969. You then have to go back to the extraordinary circumstances of the waterfront strike election of 1951 for an example that betters Mr Key's result.