Breaking: Spull? (Patreon)

There are credible rumours coming out of team National tonight that a ticket with Paula Bennett and Mark Mitchell is doing the numbers on a potential leadership coup.

This particular pairing has been talked about for a long time. Previous incarnations have had Mitchell, the former cop and mercenary who served in Iraq, as leader with Bennett staying on as Deputy. Whether that's tonight's version remains unclear.

Nikki Kaye and Todd Muller have also been making phonecalls just to "check in" and see how other MPs are. 

Other than Todd McClay and Paul Goldsmith it doesn't seem that Simon has much support from any senior National MPs.

This would be a sensible time to roll Simon. He's had a particularly bad 24 hours, with his Facebook post attacking the Government receiving well over 24,000 comments - the vast majority negative - and he seems to have burned a lot of party support. Taking over the opposition now would give the new leader a clean slate. It would also give them time to bed in before the economic realities of the COVID-19 lockdown really start to bite.

These are nothing but rumours at the moment. But if they're starting to break out of the National bubble then people are getting itchy. Those two polls with National below 35 and Simon's terrible publicity this week will be making a lot of list MPs very nervous.