KEY POINTS:
We were supposed to be meeting Tim Shadbolt in the National Party's offices at Parliament.
This would have been an incongruous meeting place and, for that reason, had a lot of appeal. But his minder sent a text saying they were now at Copperfield's Cafe, also at Parliament,
and could we meet there?
If we could get in, I replied. You are not supposed to just go walking around Parliament as though you own it, unless, as it turned out, you are the Mayor of Invercargill.
"We've already had an incident today with Tim Shadbolt and Copperfield's," said a security guard, coming as close as a parliamentary guard gets to rolling her eyes. The woman at reception got Shadbolt on the phone. Her end of the conversation went something like this: "Tim. No. Tim. Tim. Listen. Tim!"
Obviously I couldn't hear his side; I can imagine it. "Oh, send 'em up. Nah, don't worry about it. She'll be right," and so on.
The famously laid-back joker (in both senses of that word) is wearing a very smart suit and a flashy gold tie. He has been seen on the telly looking for all the world like the best friend of the Nats while saying what he's been saying forever: "We'll bring the Government down."
He is in Wellington, hanging out with these new best friends, to make a racket over funding cuts to the Southern Institute of Technology. He, or his council, have been running ads: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," with a picture of the mayoral mug. If he goes on running these ads, now the Electoral Finance Bill has been passed, it is possible they could cost more than the $120,000 limit allowed under the bill.
"We're going to spice them up a little bit too," he says, an idea that makes him - what else? - grin widely.
And, he has said, with the typical Shadbolt liking for the dramatic gesture - he once compared his life to a soap opera - that he's willing to go to prison for the cause. "Yep, I'm going to prison." This seems excessively martyrish and it's obviously stunt talk. "Well," he says, "it does draw attention to it", and, getting into his stride, "it worked for Nelson Mandela".
I say, "thank you very much for the headline: Shadbolt thinks he's Mandela."
"Yep. Shadbolt Mandela, I'm renaming myself."
Reinventing himself is something that Shadbolt has either never had to do, or has done so often, so seemingly laconically, that we've all forgotten he was ever any other way.
I had, for example, forgotten, if I ever knew, that he was once a New Zealand First candidate. Even if you had never known, or had forgotten, it would come as no surprise that he was also once a member of the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party. "I've been a member of hundreds of political parties. When I'm in between mayoralties ... I still like to keep sharp, keep on the campaign trail."
But, New Zealand First? It seems an odd mix for the radical. He says he liked that party for exposing tax rorts and for being against asset sales. And "I just liked Winston as a sort of renegade, sort of man alone in a sense. He's what I'd call a survivor, a political survivor and I respect that". This sounds pretty much like a description of himself. "Yeah, he has got elements of me except he hasn't quite got the humour thing that I've got, but he's what I call an independent spirit. So he's what I call one of the great characters of New Zealand. There's a lot of very colourless people who never get into trouble and you never hear about them. But Winston isn't one of those and neither am I, no."
That is about as close as he will get to reflecting on himself - by way of commenting on somebody else's character. He says he's "not all that much into psychology or anything very much". I ask whether he is a serious person and he says, "Yep, pretty much. I've got two sides. Some people say the most serious and tragic people in the world are comedians, you know. And your comedy is a way of covering up your worries, that you have deep inner worries. I think I've got a serious side and a humorous side to my character and I'm serious when I'm running a council meeting, for example. I'm very conservative and very traditional."
He is, paradoxically, one of the hardest people to interview I've encountered. He has been so media-friendly for so long and that is perhaps the reason he talks about himself as though he is a character in some soap opera. He turns up, puts on a gig, and then he's gone without the usually obligatory handshake and you wonder whether he was ever there. Perhaps he's bored with talking about himself. I ask whether he's still accident-prone because the files are an extraordinary catalogue of misadventure after misadventure.
"I'm sort of accident-prone but I'm sort of lucky as well. I have narrow escapes. I was in a building in Australia and the whole building collapsed and everyone in it got killed except me." Nineteen people died. "I just seem to have these amazing experiences."
That is one way of putting it. He got attacked by a police dog when he was mayor of Waitemata and was being used in a demonstration. " That was 27 stitches.
He was the guinea pig in a bungy- jumping experiment from a helicopter. He landed on his head, on a TV camera, which probably saved his life. That was 28 stitches. And so on.
He is, I say, like something out of a comic book. "I don't think even a comic book would have stories like that. I liked the Phantom when I was young but even the Phantom didn't seem to fly out of buildings that collapsed and everyone got killed except him, you know."
He is not supposed to be telling stories about getting his bum bitten and I am supposed to be asking him about funding cuts.
Which is presumably why he has a minder today. This does rather surprise me. I'd thought he was the last person in the country who would need minding. "Does he need minding?" I asked the nice young woman who had this thankless task. She said maybe when he was driving, which wasn't really an answer. The minding involved removing a knife and fork from his hands (he had been about to tuck into baked beans, eggs and grilled tomatoes) when he began waving them about. It also involved straightening the mayor's tie, at the request of the photographer, and attempting and failing to steer both of us back to the topic of the cuts.
He takes this minding rather regally, for a radical. I suppose he has been a mayor forever now - "as I said, I've been elected seven times and I've done 21 years as a mayor at the end of this term" - and so has got used to being treated royally.
He is, by the way, still a radical. "Oh, yeah." What is a radical? "Well, I think it's such a loose term. I think it just comes from people who have an independence of spirit and are prepared to go to extremes to draw attention to a cause that they believe in ... I did look it up once. I forget what the definition of radical is."
I know what a radical is. It's someone who has been saying they're going to bring the government down since they were in their 20s. "Well, of course, that's just one of those phrases that's almost a cliché. You see it as a spoof when they do movies on Welsh coalminers or something."
And he likes saying it. I make him say it one last time, for the tape, and he almost manages it without laughing. What a funny man he is, so unexpectedly not funny - except when he's trying to say his slogan seriously.
And what an odd job he has. He says he is a promoter, for Invercargill.
He has to be nice and smiley all the time but I wondered whether he's really like that, all the time. "It has become part of my persona, I think, and it's a nice way to go through life, you know. Generally if you smile at people, they'll smile back. I hope they do! I mean, I'm half blind and deaf from working at Manapouri so the world's a bit of a blur to me. I just see everybody as really nice. They might be shaking their fists at me but I can't see them."
