Rosemary McLeod: Morgan's timing is perfect

Businessman Gareth Morgan seems to have his timing right with the announcement of his new party.

The timing was right: catch the momentum of the American election, and eclipse it. The role model was right: Donald Trump. The man himself was right: Gareth Morgan, on Trump's coat tails. Now was the hour.

The Opportunities Party, or TOP for short, was launched last weekend just as the world braced for Armageddon, offering up a Kiwi superhero to save the day. And the world gasped. I certainly did.

Here in Wellington there are tower blocks of bureaucrats who could sort out the world in an instant, and there is Parliament, where they think they could.

We have universities packed with profound thinkers, and bar rooms bustling with bon vivants where every problem known is solved by closing time. But they lack the essential ingredient Morgan has identified - money. It gives him the edge.

Money and reality TV enabled Trump to emerge as an avenging angel for the downtrodden, the misfits, the homeless, the pigeon poisoners, the unemployed, the plutocrats, the many-gendered, the Buddhists and the Baptists and the coloured people, not to forget the common man, and definitely not to forget the common woman, who so loves to be grabbed and fondled, Sir Les Patterson fashion, by men with tiny hands and weeny little mouths.

With money comes wisdom, and with wisdom - that shrewd investment - all you need is power.

To put it gently, what's the point of having lots and lots of money if you can't tell infinite numbers of people what to do about absolutely everything?

You owe it to the world - in the cosmic sense, not necessarily the financial one, though that helps. And so Morgan eclipsed the presidential candidate last weekend even as Trump zig-zagged across America to shore up votes.

When you're very rich, people can be found to tell you anything, and they likewise told Morgan that glory was upon him, and John Key trembled.

I liked the conscious imagery, riding to the launch on a motorbike wearing a T-shirt, youthful at 63, rivalling the iconic posters of Marlon Brando in the 1950s movie The Wild One. Unlike Brando, Morgan uses a motorcycle helmet. What the hell. He can summon a press pack.

Morgan is not the first rich man to offer himself as a leader in this country.

Roger Douglas had the Act party, Colin Craig the unfortunate Conservative Party, and before either of them, Sir Robert Jones took on both the New Zealand Party and Wellington local body elections, backing the city's famous transsexual, Carmen, in a failed bid for the mayoralty.

There has also been Kim Dotcom, the German internet whizz, who proved a brief distraction at the last election. But this will be different. Morgan has policies.

In Trump-ish fashion, he told us that problems like inequality and housing affordability won't be solved by "establishment" politicians who ride in Crown limos and practise the art of compromise - and hundreds signed on.

He set up The Morgan Foundation, to which he channelled the $50 million he and his wife earned when their son sold Trade Me.

That made him one of NBR's top 10 philanthropists for the 2016 year, which in turn helped him to wage war on the single threat facing the country today: the country's cats, both feral and domestic.

It's a policy Trump himself could have thought of, though his charisma is so vast that he scarcely needs policies, while Morgan could use Trump's marketing genius. I Hate Cats T-shirts, banners and tea towels should be in production right now.

I'm not the first to recognise Morgan's potential. Sir Robert Jones made a generous offer to Wellington's mayor in February this year to build a 5000-metre high statue of him on the site of Jones's Solnet House, to celebrate Morgan's "overwhelming wonderfulness."

Jones sought exemption from the council's height restrictions, saying his proposed statue would be scaled along the lines of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer.

In America, no doubt they will produce something equally grand for Trump, bigger and better even than his casinos and golf courses, those symphonies of quiet taste and subtle charm.

I'd build a smaller monument for Morgan, a life-sized figure of a cat rampant, say, spraying - yet again - on a tradesman's drop cloth.

In world-shaking times that's the stuff my inconsequential life is made of.

- Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.