Phil Twyford is fast becoming the most disagreeable man in politics.

Poor old Phil Twyford had quite the week last week. He’s replacing Clare Curran as the minister most likely to get sacked.

In the early days, I was one of the few pointing out that the KiwiBuild program was a farce if not a fraud. The numbers didn’t add up, didn’t come close to adding up. Six months on, I am now one of many who sees this as the charade it was always was.

If you follow the story, you’ll find no shortage these days of commentary from those who have crunched the numbers, seen the shift in the promises, the change in the language, and have come to the inevitable conclusion that this is the policy that might ultimately bring the Government done.

Why? It’s their biggest promise, and it’s been run by a bloke who is a liability

Phone calls on planes goes to personality. It takes a type of person to conduct himself in that fashion, there is a flagrant arrogance about it, a disagreeable self-importance.

He damaged himself further by referring to the ‘kids’ in treasury. The same personality type applies to that level of condescension.

Neither of the offences leads to hanging, but they are a clue, a red flag. What treasury was saying is true; Twyford’s number have had the look of snake oil about them the whole time.

100,000 houses magicked up over 10 years using the same small pot of money over and over. The affordable figure isn’t even remotely affordable, and a figure that’s going up, making it even less affordable

The Government buying stakes in houses, using money they were going to build with because no one’s got the coin to buy them by themselves. No real acknowledgement that the construction sector’s overworked before Phil’s houses even get started, against a backdrop of a promise of 30,000 cut in immigration.

It’s been smokes and mirrors, a classic piece of political puffery dreamt up in an election campaign to fool the economically naive to think a  government can manipulate as large as housing markets with money they don’t have and labour they don’t have with prices they pulled out of a cornflakes packet. The Commerce Commission should be looking at it for fraud.

And the trouble with it all is apart from the fundamentals is the politic bit.  Policies need to be sold. Now, you can’t fault Phil for enthusiasm, but you can fault him for fact, for approach, for attitude, and it’s the attitude, the phone calls, the insults, the telling offs from the leader, that make a virtually impossible job even harder because he’s coming across as a knob.

And the Government can’t afford it’s biggest bit of work to be run a ruin by the sort of bloke who’s fast becoming the most disagreeable man in politics