Clark planned to attend the World Cup quarter-final. She has great admiration for All Black captain Richie McCaw: ‘Extremely level-headed.’ When I asked her if there were any All Blacks who excited the blood, she replied, ‘I wouldn’t use that phrase for myself. I don’t find people excite the blood.’
She recently went skiing for a couple of days. She goes to the gym, eats properly and makes sure she drinks enough water: ‘I have an approach to life that says every day you wake up fit and healthy is a bonus.’ Would she be more pleased if novelist Lloyd Jones won the Booker Prize than if the All Blacks won the World Cup? ‘Equally pleased.’ She remains close to her parents, now aged eighty-three and eighty-five: ‘It’s nice to have people in your life who give you unconditional love and support. I’ve been very lucky to have that from my parents and my sisters.’ She added: ‘And my husband.’
Over the years I have traipsed after Clark on official visits to Nigeria, Fiji and Crete. I’ve always liked her intelligence, found her forthright and amusing, and thanked God I don’t work for her. ‘There was a programme called Facelift, which I’ve never seen,’ she said. ‘I asked someone, “What on earth are they saying about me?” They said, “You and Annette King always seem to be telling somebody off.” I think that’s probably quite accurate.’
Such a singular person, who always occupies her own space, not exactly adrift, her social awkwardness overruled by her self-belief. The easiest way to unwind her in an interview is to lead her towards a remorseless insult.
Q: Have you identified weak performers in the National Party? A: ‘Just about the whole front bench.’
Q: Do you ever miss Don Brash? A: ‘Who?’
Fun and cruel games. But the short, sharp put-down isn’t always intended as an amusement. Last week, I interviewed Garth McVicar of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, who wants New Zealand to house criminals in tent prisons. Clark’s response: ‘Ludicrous.’ I asked her if there were any ideas she had taken from the trust. She said: ‘Nothing.’
When I raised the trust again, she said, ‘We don’t look for simplistic solutions to that issue.’ She meant the issue of violent crime and child abuse. And yet her emphatic rejection of the trust (‘Nothing’) had such a shocking arrogance about it; I put it to her that the trust was providing a voice for victims, who were being ignored by her government. She didn’t agree, and droned for a short time about recognising a ‘burning sense of injustice’.
But I wondered whether there was something wider in all this – a sense, real or imagined, that Clark’s government was alienating great swathes of New Zealanders, who took the view that New Zealand was burning while Labour and its inoffensive little policies fiddled. In short, the whole resentment against that dread phrase: political correctness. ‘That’s always been there, and always will.’ She allowed herself a mirthless laugh and said, ‘It’s the rich fabric of society.’ She added, ‘It’s the same people who would have attacked anti-smoking legislation or any number of things.’
I’ve never exactly been a fan of anti-smoking legislation, but ‘any number of things’ now includes rather more serious issues, particularly child abuse. Would she call that a crisis? ‘No … But it’s too high. There are issues our country’s got to deal with. What haunts me is seeing us right down there at the bottom of the OECD league in violence against children and in the family. That’s appalling and we have to do something.’
Well, yes. Peter Dunne from United First has said that what the government has achieved is ‘hand-wringing and navel-gazing’. Clark went on about The Taskforce for Action on Violence within Families (‘A lot has happened under that’), and a new television advertising campaign. More fiddling? Clark’s view of social breakdown in New Zealand: ‘I don’t see a breakdown. New Zealand stands out as a complex multicultural nation that is relatively at peace with itself.’
Opponents will continue to use child abuse and violent crime as sticks to beat the government. In election year, Clark predicted, it would get personal. Did she see another dirty campaign? ‘I suspect it will become very personalised. I don’t expect the Exclusive Brethren have gone away. It’s just that people will be more alert to the tactics.
‘One of the features of the last campaign was the National Party really thought they had it bought. They spent so much money, they had others spending so much money on their behalf, overtly and covertly, and they actually couldn’t accept that they’d lost. And so what we’ve dealt with ever since in parliament is a National Party that thinks it has a right to be sitting where we are. Well, it didn’t earn that right. But that’s made for particularly bitter politics … Yes, I absolutely expect it to be a bitter and unpleasant campaign.’
It might even excite the blood. Clark attends a great many art openings and plays, that sort of carry-on; I asked her if art actually moved her. ‘Of course.’ Genuinely moved? ‘Of course.’ I doubted it. She mentioned going to see Sir Ian McKellen in King Lear. ‘Fantastic. It’s a morality tale – the foolish old king …’
[September 9]
15 John Key
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Each of the eighteen rooms in The County – a terribly romantic hotel, the flashest in Napier, five-star, built as the county council chambers in 1908, which means it’s not, blessedly, another example of Hawke’s Bay Art Deco – are named after native birds. John Key stayed there on Thursday night. He was in the room next to mine. I got a boring species of duck; Key’s room was the huia, once a quite amazing and very successful bird, but now extinct.
I wondered whether the same was true of its occupant. As I listened to him and looked at him during our interview in the hotel’s plush ye olde library, it wasn’t as simple as thinking
