Police Minister Mark Mitchell as a constable in Taupo with Czar in 2000, who was retired by then. Photo / Nicola Topping
It started as a conversation with Police Minister Mark Mitchell about why he had been absent from the Beehive on sick leave when he looked perfectly healthy on his return (spoiler alert: he wasn’t throwing a sickie).
It turned into a much longer discussion about how many parts of his body are held together with nuts and bolts, how he lives with daily pain through various encounters with an arsonist, a samurai sword, four members of the Mongrel Mob and insurgents in Iraq.
The roll-call of injuries was acquired in his previous life as a police officer in Gisborne, Rotorua and Taupo, and his job as a protection officer in Iraq, looking after people such as the former British cabinet minister Rory Stewart.
We’re talking in his Beehive office, with his inhaler close by - something he hadn’t used since his 20s - until now.
He is now 57 and a few weeks ago, just before he was due to accompany Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to China, he got a chest infection. He dismissed it but it persisted for weeks.
“Basically it just felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest, just very hard to breathe,” he says.
He was treated for bacterial pneumonia, but testing traced it back to lung damage he received while attending a fire in Gisborne as a young cop in the 1990s.
With his dog, Czar, they had tracked an arsonist with a bottle of accelerant from a burning school. It was the dead of night in summer, they were hot on his trail, tracking him to a residential area. The arsonist had poured accelerant through the open window of a house and the curtains were ablaze. Mitchell was the first to arrive, broke into the house and woke a sleeping mother and son to get them out.
“But of course, when I went into the house, I inhaled some hot and toxic smoke, which did impact my lungs, which I found out has created a bit of scarring, which means that as you get older and you ... have these respiratory or chest infections, then that’s an aggravating factor. That explained why it was taking me so long to try and shake this thing.”
He had also felt some effects at the time.
“I was in my 20s, you know, like a hard-charging 20-year-old doesn’t think about it too much. I had to use an inhaler for 12 months, then I sort of came right and never thought about it again.“
He is back on an inhaler now, steroids, and hopes it will be temporary.
His favourite pastime is spear-fishing, and he said it might impact how far he can go down holding his breath.
It wasn’t his only injury in the line of duty.
His face was rebuilt after getting “a hammering” from the Mongrel Mob. He said he was tracking them with Czar following a gang rape in Gisborne, but they were waiting for him.
“There were four of them, and they jumped me and they got me a real good one.”
Czar attacked them, but Mitchell was left with severe facial injuries.
“The doctors thought the nerve that runs under your eye was severed. That nerve gives you all the feeling in your face, right? So I had no feeling in one side of my face. And so when you smile, you can’t even feel your own smile.
“It’s the most awful, unnerving feeling ever.”
But he had maxillofacial surgery at Waikato Hospital, and when they rebuilt the eye socket, they released the nerve that had been trapped with broken bone.
“I woke up and I had the feeling back in my face again.”
But it was held together with mesh and nuts and bolts.
It was while he was serving as a dog handler in Rotorua that he got stabbed. He had been approaching a young man with a Samurai sword who was wearing a bulletproof vest and heading towards the hospital. Czar went for the offender in an effort to get him to the ground but instead of incapacitating him, he grabbed the offender’s vest rather than his flesh.
“The guy just brought the sword straight down and stabbed my dog straight down through between the shoulder blades,” says Mitchell.
Mitchell then went in to try and push the guy over, but the offender had tied the sword to his arm.
The sword went through Mitchell’s elbow.
“I was like a shish kebab.”
But as the offender fell to the ground, the sword came out as well because it was connected to the offender.
“And it’s the pulling back out that does all the damage. It’s not actually the going through, it’s the coming back out. That’s the bit that cuts and slices everything out.”
The hospital staff came rushing out to help Mitchell staunch his wound, and Czar was rushed to the vet and miraculously saved. It’s the wound from the stabbing that Mitchell lives with every day.
“I’ve never had a pain-free day because it’s done all the nerves.”
He has had many operations on it, and he sees a specialist every year.
“I’m waiting for medical science to change, and this might sound awful, but when you live every day with chronic pain, there are days, and I have had the conversations around ‘just take it, take the arm off.’
“But the problem is that if you take it off, you still end up with phantom pains, so you may not actually get rid of the pain, and then you end up without an arm. “
Mitchell used to take painkillers but stopped them when he went to the Middle East, originally with the private security company Control Risk Group.
“I realised that they blew your decision-making a bit.”
He survived three explosions in vehicles caused by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), but the last one was almost directly under the vehicle, so he got a whole lot of shrapnel up into his lower back and backside.
“What that’s done is given me a lot of nerve damage, which has affected my right leg.”
He was originally in a training role in various Iraqi services, including the technical support unit (TSU) in Basra in southern Iraq and then became embedded in the TSU.
He said he spent a lot of time in Nasiriyah as part of the coalition provisional authority providing protective services. That was when he came across Rory Stewart, who now runs The Rest is Politics podcast with former Downing Street spin doctor Alistair Campbell.
Mitchell: “I was the head of the close protection team, and [Stewart] was deputy governor. He’s an extraordinary guy, an amazing guy in terms of, even back then.
“He’s packed full of EQ. He understood the country probably as good as anyone from the interim government. He would listen and negotiate, but he was as tough as they come.”
Mitchell had several other dogs after Czar retired, but it is clear that none matched him.
Czar was sent to stay with a police officer and his family in the Bay of Plenty after the officer received threats, but on the basis that when Czar was near the end of his life, he would be returned to Mitchell on his lifestyle block in Taupo, and that day came.
“He came back to me, and he was going downhill rapidly, so the whole dog section came over.
“We put him in his blues. The vet came out, and we had to put him down. We had a ceremony and we buried him up on the hill where you can see the mountains.”
The people who bought the property from Mitchell are running a homestay, and they built a cabin near the burial site.
“The cabin is called Czar’s Rest.”
Audrey Young is the NZ Herald’s senior political correspondent. She was Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards in 2023, 2020 and 2018. She was political editor from 2003 to 2021.