Prime Minister Bill English has announced late this afternoon that he will be following the lead of Labour leader Jacinda Ardern, and breaking tradition by casting an early vote.

English says he plans to vote tomorrow morning, before he changes his mind.

“Look, I think what you’ve seen is a real competition between the main two parties. A drag race, if you will. Every vote counts, and we want every potential National voter locked in,” he said. “That includes me.”

The Prime Minister said he “wasn’t necessarily” saying he wasn’t going to vote for his party.

“So right now, at the moment, I’m inclined to vote National,” he said. “That might change, it might not, but I owe it to myself to get myself into a polling place as early as possible, and say ‘right, that’s it, you’ve done that, no more worrying about it now. The time has passed.’”

He acknowledged it was “problematic” that his democratic right to vote had “a certain conflict of interest” with his job.

English’s wife, Mary English, said the next fifteen or so hours would be the most difficult.

“There is a sense that time is running out,” she said. “He’ll want to get to bed as early as possible, and not wake up until the polls open again.”

She expected the dinner table to be “especially tense.”

“He’s been afraid one of us is going to say something and it’s going to flick a switch in his brain.”

Mary said Bill had been watching back his debates against Jacinda Ardern, and had found her to be “much more convincing.”

“It wasn’t good, so he switched over the debates from his first campaign, but that was even worse. He couldn’t tell which one was him.”

Nevertheless, English is determined to vote for himself this time around, after famously caving and voting for Helen Clark’s Labour Government when he last led National in 2002.