Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: I cannot see Chris Hipkins winning the election

Oh, I tell you what, I cannot see Chris Hipkins winning the election now.

I mean, if you thought that Mongrel Mob fiasco was bad before, it's got so much worse for Labour. Their candidate has quit and Chris Hipkins himself now looks like he's been fibbing to the public.

It turns out, now that we've seen the video of Kerrin Leoni at the Mongrel Mob event, that it wasn't at all the family gathering Labour told us it was. She was there in her red Labour jacket with a placard featuring a picture of herself and Chippy, telling gang members to enrol and change the government.

That doesn't look like a family barbecue, does it? I don't know how many family barbecues you turn up to wearing your work jacket.

I also don't know how many voters are going to believe Hipkins when he says he didn't know about it and that Leoni misled him. Anyone paying attention would have seen Labour doing a fair bit of misleading themselves.

When Leoni was first accused of meeting the Mongrel Mob the week before the Green and Māori parties had, Labour said it wasn't true. They said she hadn't met the gang the week before. But she had. It was nine days before, not seven, and that looks very much like Labour playing silly buggers with the timeline so we'd never know the event had happened.

If they were prepared to mislead us on that, do you really believe they didn't try to mislead us when they said, "Hey, it's just a family event," when it was actually a political event?

This is devastating for Labour because it's no longer just about whether you share Labour's values or what you think about criminals and gang members. It's now also about the integrity of the party leader and whether he and the party tried to hide this from voters.

My suspicion is that, yes, they very much did.

And that, with only two weeks until election day, is, in my view, unsurvivable for Labour short of a miracle.

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