I thought, Where has he been all his life? He was like a missing person. When I asked him what I would find if I cut him open, he said, ‘You’d find a pretty decent person. Someone that’s balanced. I’m actually an extremely decisive person at making decisions.’ I was tempted to ask: Are you sure? Instead, I asked him if he thought he was an interesting person. ‘Oh, I reckon,’ he said. ‘I’m reasonably interesting.’ Did he possess an imagination? ‘Sure do! You have to have dreams, and you need an imagination for dreams, and you can actually live those dreams if you have enough determination.’
It’s true, of course, that he was decent. An eager man with a nice smile and lasered eyes. (‘It used to annoy me when it rained and the water was on my glasses.’) The kind of guy who probably doesn’t have a bad bone in his body. But did he have any bones? If I had cut him open – nothing I wished to perform; I doubt it’s possible for anyone to bear any particular malice towards him yet – what I might have found were the latest exchange rates. ‘I have a photographic memory,’ he said, ‘for numbers.’
Is this man our next prime minister? The polls say yes. More accurately, they say yes please. Key was in Napier for another of his groovy evenings sponsored by the groovy conservatives who make 42 Below vodka. The young and the aspirant gathered at East Pier in the city’s lively new waterfront to hear him stand in the middle of the dance floor – no tie, no jacket, a hint of middle-age midriff spread – and bang on and on and on about his promise of a brilliant new future. True, as time wore on and on and on, they fiddled with their handbags and pulled at their goatees. But they regarded Key as their saviour.
They wanted Key to show them the money, and he did. He talked their language: wealth, opportunity, incentives. China, India and Indonesia, he said, would soon boast a population of one billion people, all on high wages; the time for New Zealand to start pocketing some of that loot was now.
But the notion that this man could be our next prime minister struck me as ludicrous. His ambition was like a challenge, an idea, a game: ‘I’m interested in building things that work.’ I asked the man who might lead the country whether he believed in destiny, and he said, ‘Yeah, a little bit. I’m quite superstitious as a person. It used to be that if I wore ties on days I lost money, I would never wear them again. I’m a bit like that in politics. I recently had a set of cufflinks that didn’t treat me well. I’ve put them to one side.’
How big was his wine collection? ‘Reasonable.’ What’s reasonable? ‘I don’t know. Seventy-five dozen or something like that.’ Why did he buy paintings by Hotere and Goldie? ‘Good investment.’ Does art excite the blood? ‘Oh, I quite like it.’
Key was an accountancy student at Canterbury University in the early 1980s; who was he more into back then – The Clash or Billy Joel? ‘Probably more Billy Joel … I like a whole range of music. I like The Corrs and Robbie Williams and Hayley Westenra. I like a lot of stuff that doesn’t require any energy or effort.’
What, I asked him, does excite the blood? Finally, he said something that was inside of him: ‘Winning the election.’
We talked about leaders. Did he think Helen Clark would have made a successful foreign exchange dealer? ‘No. I don’t think she’s naturally intuitive, or has gut instincts. I think she studies hard.’ He regarded Bill Clinton as a great leader: ‘He undertook some difficult things around welfare reform, but did it with a heart.’
Did Key think he was a born leader? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think the answer to that is yes. It depends on how you define a leader, but I think leaders are primarily … one, they’re focussed, two, they can actually make decisions, three, they have a sense of purpose, and four, they have a degree of discipline. History would indicate I’ve led in lots of different things I’ve done.’
He very often spoke in such long, convoluted sentences. Asked whether he would privatise health and education, he banged on and on and on about personal freedoms, and finally answered – or dodged – the question when he said, ‘We do like the idea of engaging the private sector in things like the running of a prison.’ A new biography of George Bush quotes the US president saying that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog; was it like that in Wellington? The full reply: ‘I have great people around me, in parliament but also my support staff, who are a world-class team, right up there with anything I’ve seen in the commercial world, but in the end leaders make decisions, and what that means is you have to live with those decisions, and on that basis if you want a friend, get a dog, is probably right.’
In short, the answer was yes; and to cut to the chase, this was his position on the US invasion of Iraq: ‘I don’t think it was illegal. At the time … it was a genuine use of force.’
At least he hadn’t reached for his favourite term and said, ‘It depends on how you define
