There is an election next year. National will do well. Perhaps not enough to win back control of the Treasury benches but almost certainly much better than its result in 2020.

The party will win back many of the seats it lost last time around. That, together with the perception that the party is on the upward swing, will draw candidates to selection like moths to the back porch. Electorates will have their pick of the litter.

In the past, National has been too easily impressed by those presenting as wunderkinds or captains of industry. Quite how much the presentation has aligned with the reality has tended to… vary. That’s par for the course to some extent, as any employer will tell you.

The American author David Brooks draws a distinction between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues”. The resume virtues are those marketable things that you put on your CV. The eulogy virtues are those things that people will talk about at your funeral.

Looking at the problems that have beset the National Party over the last decade, you wouldn’t say that the party has suffered from shortcomings in the realm of resume virtues. Where problems have arisen, however, it has more often than not been the result of deficiencies in character.

My advice to delegates evaluating prospective candidates would be to only give the CVs a brief read. The work history of a candidate is not irrelevant but only to the point of establishing that the candidate has a respectable work history. Beyond that, however, a stellar career is no guarantee of success in the world of elected politics and the faithful and diligent representation of the people.

What follows are the matters delegates should concern themselves with:

• Is the candidate authentically connected to the community he or she wants to represent? If not, then it has to be acknowledged that some candidates who have “parachuted” into an electorate have proven to be terrific representatives. Does this candidate seem like the person who will become genuinely interested in the community?
• If the candidate promises to move to the electorate if he or she wins, can he or she be trusted to follow through? There is a long history of broken promises here. A candidate who honestly answers that they have no such intention should be preferred to one who makes a weak or contingent commitment.
• Has the candidate recently returned from an overseas career? What makes them think its appropriate to return home and then immediately run for office instead of reestablishing a life here first? Candidates with a saviour-complex should be viewed with some scepticism.
• Does the candidate see being an MP as a temporary period of service or the next step towards a lifelong political career? If the former, why should you believe them? Again, there is a long history of MPs initially declaring an intent to serve for a limited time only to become well-fed timeservers once ensconced in Wellington.
• Would the candidate sacrifice (or at least imperil) his or her political career on a point of integrity? What’s his or her backup plan? If the person has staked their whole professional life on a political career, it will take truly heroic levels of integrity to throw it all away rather than simply look the other way.
• How personally ambitious is the candidate? There is a good chance that, as an MP, this person will at some time find himself or herself out of favour. Could the candidate handle that? Would they be stoic in the face of a stalling career or do they seem the type to backstab and leak their way into relevance?
• How often does this person name drop? There is nothing more parochial or pathetic than a New Zealander who considers himself or herself to be part of the political, financial or cultural elite. We are a small country tucked away at the edge of the world. One of the best things about our country is that nobody here is that important in the grand scheme of things.
• Lastly, does this person have a glittering background in law, finance or what we euphemistically call “government relations.” If so, a further layer of scepticism should be applied. Most people who work in these fields are sincere, respectful and honest in their personal dealings. People with strong tendencies towards psychopathy, narcissism and manipulation (the so-called “dark triad”) are frequently drawn to those professions, however.

The above questions are not a litmus test for who will be a good MP. There are plenty of people who would breeze through the above criteria and still turn out to be a disaster. At the same time, there will be the odd person whose background and personality raise lots of red flags but who will go onto have an exceptional career.

John Key would have struggled to be selected on the basis of these questions. They would not have been fatal to him, however. Despite whatever criticisms may be laid at Key’s feet he was at the end of the day a good as well as talented person. The same cannot be said for others following in his footsteps.

At the start of 2020, National made much of the fact that it had a “strong team”. This became a *deserved) punchline by the end of the year. While there were certainly plenty of strong people in the caucus they were, by no means, a team.

It was, at best, a loose association of individuals, Many of them nursing various grudges, wounded feelings and anxieties about not getting what they wanted or felt they were owed.

It does feel like National has turned a corner from those days. Politics is so ego-driven, however, that cultural decline can set in very fast. And selection delegates have a duty to try to prevent that from happening.

And the number one thing they can do? When they’re being schmoozed by a wannabe MPs they should veer away from considering their CV. They should instead ask: is this person talking to me a good person?