“It is too early to assess Nelson. But it is fair to say that, judged by his brief time as Liberal leader, there is room for improvement” – Gerard Henderson.

Wow. When even Gerard Henderson is declining to close ranks around the candidate, you know you’re in trouble. There must be more than a few 4am’s-of-the-soul over the choice of Brennie the ‘ring, at Liberal central. Putting a stooge in charge is one thing, but you should at least try to get Moe, not Shemp.

Fact is Nelson is already running dead, and the geniuses who put him there have simply delayed the Liberal revival for as long as he’s there. What sort of party selects as leader a man who was a member of its opposite number for years? Only a party with no real belief in itself, no conviction that it stands for anything worth arguing for, even from Opposition.

Nelson was already half-gone before last week’s attempt to clarify his mid 1990s statement that he had never voted Liberal in his life. Now he says he lied because the audience he was speaking to was full of “union thugs” and so he was forced to extemporise.

This ruse must have finished him entirely. To see why, let’s do what the management consultants call a “matrix analysis” when they bill you for telling you what you already know.

There are 2 x 2 possibilities. Either:

TRUTH TRUTH: Nelson had never voted Liberal and the meeting was full of union heavies = He’s lying now and willing to be thought a coward.

LIE TRUTH: Nelson had voted Liberal and the meeting was full of union heavies = He was lying then because he actually is a coward.

TRUTH LIE: Nelson had never voted Liberal and there were no union heavies = He’s lying now, and willing to rat on the movement he was once a member of.

LIE LIE: Nelson had voted Liberal and there were no union heavies = He was lying then, and he’s lying now about why he lied.

Man without honour, rat, coward or liar – those are the four choices about what Nelson is. There are no others. Who among swinging and Liberal voters was he supposed to appeal to? The swinging voters wanted a sign that the Libs had changed their ways, and the rusted-on Libs won’t trust him as far as they can spit him out. Which they will have to, and sooner rather than later if they have any wisdom.

And yes, yes, Churchill changed parties and became leader. But he was leaving a dying party (the Liberals, coincidentally) for one which still had prospects of forming government. And it took a World War to do it. I knew Churchill. I worked with Churchill (Brian Churchill, pulled pots at the Napier 1987-1989) and Nelson ain’t no Churchill. He’s not even a Stanley Baldwin – the man memorably described by Orwell as “a hole in the air”.