The Big Read: Paul Henry

A respected therapist describes Paul Henry as the most highly functioning dysfunctional person they'd ever met. Photo / Sarah Ivey

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Paul Henry arrived and was really rather sweet and gave me a peck on the cheek. How he's changed, I thought. Ten minutes later, he said: "It's not my fault that you work for a rogue and a scoundrel."

Me: "Who's the rogue and the scoundrel?"

Henry: "Your editor-in-chief."

Me: "Tim!?!"

Henry: "Tim who?"

Me: "Tim Murphy."

Henry: "Oh. No, not Tim!"

Me: "Tim is the editor-in-chief!"

Henry: "Shayne (Currie)."

Me: "He's the editor."

Henry, shrugs: "Well, editor-in-chief, editor ... "

Me: "Don't you get on with him?"

Henry: "I do actually. That doesn't mean he isn't a scoundrel and a shyster."

The above exchange is proof of two things. The first is that even when he sets off on an argument in which he gets the facts wildly wrong, he ends up being right. At least in his own mind, which is all that matters. The second is that I must be around the twist to have decided, having interviewed him before, that doing it again was a reasonable idea.

He refused to let the photographer take pictures during the entire interview, which is what usually happens - and hardly anyone, except the most difficult of sorts, objects.

But he is hardly anyone; he is somebody whom the Herald has it in for, apparently, and so he wasn't having it. He posed for some shots and so I asked, I felt generously and hardly sarcastically at all, how he'd like to be portrayed. "Oh, no, no. Just like me." And what, I asked faintly, is that? "Now, you're making a bigger thing of this than I am. You see, the Herald has a track record with me and it's a track record of misreporting and it is just easier for me to nip it in the bud at the beginning." ...

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- nzherald.co.nz