The whiff of panic went all the way from the Beehive to the front page of your Saturday morning paper or website.

Did you see it? They hope you did.

Stuff, complete with pensive photo, "Jacinda Ardern talks to Stuff about why 2021 is harder than 2020." I actually have the answer, but we'll come back to that.

The Herald, this photo has her hands clasped in an almost praying format, she is staring to the heavens. "Ardern, the hardest year."

You see the theme here? She is back on the sympathy train.

After the crappiest of weeks where Newshub gave them a public spanking with poll numbers that they already would have known about. But it got laid bare for us all to see. It showed what most of us who are awake have known for ages or for those asleep, a rude wake up call.

The government are useless, out of touch, if not dangerous.

Let's not re-litigate the myriad of cock ups. What Saturday in the papers was about was a deliberate roll out of a Prime Minister in real trouble and the admission they know it. Because post the numbers, the back flips were of Olympic proportions.

The announcement of an announcement this Thursday, the pathway out of Covid. Spoiler alert, it will be nothing of the sort. Then the RSE expansion, then the cycle bridge which is on its way out. I am told there is mental health dollars to be tossed out shortly as well.

To cement it all, a blitz of the papers by the great leader. Rolling out her best sympathy routine about it all being hard and scary.

Now back to "why 2021 is harder than 2020." That's simple, it's because Labour got a majority. And emboldened by the vote and with no small sense of self-entitlement, they went nuts.

They went nuts with a series of policies they didn’t talk about during the election. They went nuts with a series of policies no good government should be event thinking about during a pandemic.

And as regards the pandemic, they got trapped in a corner. 2021 is the year elimination of Covid became the failure in planning it always was, and because there was no hurry for a vaccine because we had no Covid.

That fatal mistake, along with their ineptitude when it comes to delivering anything, has them appallingly exposed. They know, as do we all, that we are one cock up away from a Delta breach.

And when/if it happens, you watch the panic set in. The answer is the vaccine, and they don’t have it.

We know, they know it. So, they sit there every day praying the phone doesn’t ring telling them the bad news. It's a panic race. Do we get jabbed before the end of the year or does Delta arrive sooner?

When left to their own devices, they weren't up for it. Hence the poll result, hence the panic, and hence your Saturday morning sympathy blitz.