Who does the Prime Minister think he is fooling?
John Key stunned journalists at his post-Cabinet press conference yesterday by suddenly asserting that when he said that contributing to the fight against Isis was "the price of the club", he was actually referring to the 60-plus nations in the United States-led coalition endeavouring to halt the advance of the jihadists across Iraq and Syria, rather than the Five Eyes spying alliance.
There was certainly some ambiguity in his reply to a question during an interview with the BBC while he was in Europe last month.
In the video of the interview, the Prime Minister initially appears to be referring to the multi-national force. But it rapidly becomes clear that the "club" that Key is most definitely talking about is the Five Eyes intelligence-gathering network, whose membership is restricted, along with New Zealand, to this country's four most longstanding allies - Australia, the United States, Britain and Canada.
That was the assumption that everyone took from the interview. It was widely thought that Key had blundered in his choice of language which effectively confirmed New Zealand's participation in the multi-national force was inevitable and the result of pressure from the Americans, real or implicit.
