THREE KEY FACTS
He stumbled at the start, telling the crowd he was “so pleased to be in the room with all sorts of wonderful figures from public life“, but could not seem to remember the names. ”John Key," he said. “Gerry Brownlee,” and stared hopelessly at his notes. “So many others.”
Sir Russell Coutts was there, and Simon Bridges, Wayne Brown, Winston Peters and Joseph Parker, and about 800 more. A big show, put on by Duco Events and General Capital, with an audience that MC Kerre Woodham had no trouble anointing as “the great and the good”.
All of them crowded around the lunch tables in the Great Room of the Cordis Hotel to hear Boris Johnson, British Prime Minister 2019-2022, Brexit champion, Covid villain, a man for whom being clever often seems the ultimate virtue. A man who’s lived as if being funny is the purpose of living.
He said he was glad to be here. “At the airport they shouted my name! The difference between Auckland and London is that here they left out the string of Anglo-Saxon epithets.”
He’s not happy about the politics at home right now: Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour PM, is “a human bollard”. He’s also “Pol Pot”, because of his tax reforms.
But Johnson loves it here, or so he said, so his jokes about us were friendly. “I feel so fortunate, to be in this mind-numbingly, lovely place. Full of rugby-playing hobbits, carrying pianos up the mountains, that sort of thing.
“Winston Peters tells me that before humans arrived you didn’t even have animals with teeth. It feels to me it’s still like Tolkien’s shire. So safe and so friendly.”
Peters may have been forgetting sea lions, whales, dolphins and all the dinosaurs of much longer ago, but we know what he means.
Johnson mentioned Dame Jacinda Ardern and provoked a few boos. “No, really, I like her. She did her bit to make it so safe, you can’t even smoke yourself to death.”
He’d been for a swim at Mission Bay. “I had to swim out a long long way, it never seemed to get deeper than three feet. It’s so safe you can’t even drown here.”
But, he warned, he’s read that New Zealand has become “the number one destination for paranoid billionaires. This country is where the bankers are building their bonkers bunkers.”
It puzzles him and he wondered if it puzzles us. “What do you think of this phenomenon of being treated like this? In a generation’s time, the descendants of these tech-bro reality-TV Kardashian-breeding programmes will stumble out of their bunkers, into the air, and discover it was all a gigantic con.”
If there was a message he wanted to send out from this lunch, he said, it was addressed to those “tech troglodytes”.
“And the message is don’t worry, Elon and Zuckerberg, because it ain’t going to happen.”
Which led him to his view of the world. Technology, unleashed by the free market, will save us from everything.
“Climate change? We’re going to fix it. We have the technology. We did it in London, we are going to defeat it without giving in to the semi-Marxist control freaks who are using the threat to try to defeat capitalism. It is capitalism that is saving us. Just look at Tesla.”
He’s like a real-life tweet machine.
Pleasure to speak at an event in Auckland this afternoon involving former UK Prime Minister & Foreign Secretary @BorisJohnson.
— Winston Peters (@winstonpeters) December 3, 2024
Some photos from today’s event, as well as in the Churchill War Rooms in London in 2018. pic.twitter.com/rSyW22Uk8u
Then there’s AI. “Who believes that’s a threat? We’re far too smart. It’s not going to put anyone out of work, people just find other jobs. Show me a single lawyer who has been put out of work.”
The brain kind of free-associates in front of you. “AI is cutting dementia rates, and capitalism is pulling billions of people out of poverty.”
That led to Ozempic, thought by some to be a miracle weight-loss drug. “We’ve come up with an answer to human greed! It’s a cure for fatness itself! A cure for weakness of will.”
Created, he said, in an environment that allows science to make breakthroughs: western democracy. All good, keep rollicking on.
The audience liked him, and who wouldn’t? But it wasn’t riotous. A crowd that shells out up to $1500 a pop possibly hoped to hear something a little more insightful than that democracy is a Good Thing.
Especially from an ex-PM who prorogued Parliament, which the British supreme court judged unlawful, and remains a supporter of Donald Trump, despite Trump’s still-unresolved role in the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Earlier, Woodham warmed them up with a string of self-deprecating sex jokes and some sustained abuse for people with special dietary requirements, people who voted for Labour or, even worse, the Greens.
And smokers. “Mr Cat’s-Arse Mouth,” she called a man who admitted to being one.
It was all for fun. Peters, also on the warm-up list, was in good form too.
His praise for Johnson went like this: “While the rest of us were trying to look our best, you arrived in public life looking like you’d just climbed out of the shower and combed your hair with a towel.”
After the big speech, it was Paul Henry’s turn, this time in an interview format, with the two of them sitting in winged velvet chairs.
“I’ve read your book,” said Henry. The book, a memoir called Unleashed, is why Johnson is here. He’s hawking it about.
“The most awkward thing about it,” Henry went on, “is that I have a hard copy. Every time I fall asleep reading it, it hits me on the head and jerks me awake.” He insisted it was good, though.
“You’re the Trump whisperer,” he suggested.
Johnson said fear of Donald Trump was “greatly overdone, liberal-left hysteria, it’s all mad. Never mind how he talks or behaves, look at what he did in America last time. He wasn’t bad on foreign policy, either.”
He did get some claps for that, but not a lot.
Henry asked him about Ukraine and Johnson said, “Putin must not be allowed to win,” and “It would be a disaster for the world if there was aggression across the Taiwan Straits.”
Henry sat up straighter, trying to work out how his guest had got to that, before Johnson added, “The US would intervene and it would be appalling. You solve it by solving Ukraine. You stand up to Russia and you give Ukraine the wherewithal to win. We’re paranoid about Vladimir Putin and his ego, we think he must not be humiliated ... But we will greatly reduce the risk of global trouble everywhere if we quieten Putin down by protecting Ukraine.”
But how? He did not say.
Nor, over a long lunch that went past 4pm, did he acknowledge there had been any problems in Britain with 14 years of Tory rule, which ended just this year. He declared the formula of “tax cuts and levelling up” had been working well.
The common view of the election in July is that the British public did not agree. The Conservative Party was comprehensively swept from power.
He crowed about Britain’s progress in the wake of Brexit, although British economic growth, inflation and debt are all poor relative to the EU.
And of the Covid years, he boasted he had led the first and best vaccine rollout in Europe, “if not the world”.
He didn’t mention the party culture that repeatedly broke lockdown protocols in his own office. He said nothing to suggest he was even aware Britain’s death rate of 3404 per million was one of the highest in the world.
In all, 232,000 of his citizens died. That’s close to the number of British soldiers who died during World War II. (Our rate, in contrast, was 870 per million.)
Henry asked him about Trump’s one-time adviser Steve Bannon, who went to jail for refusing to testify about the January 6 insurrection. “You write, ‘I was fascinated by Steve, and I liked him, I saw a faint air of mania.’ Did you see a kindred spirit?”
Johnson responded that Bannon understood something about people. Apart from the usual things, “What people want is the biggest possible house with the biggest possible garden!”
Johnson knows how to win elections, so is there something to that?
Then he was back to the jokes he loves best. “At school, it was a very good school, very exclusive [it was Eton], it was striking to me how many of the other boys, in spite of having every possible advantage in life, including breeding, were not very bright. And they won’t mind my saying this, they’re proud of it.”
Believing himself the smartest guy in the room, does he think the rest of us are like that too? And did he really not have some analysis to share about his time close to the apex of world power? Not even a delectable anecdote or two?
It was a day for jokes, and Woodham rounded the event off in her inimitable way.
“There’s dessert to come,” she said. “It’s tarte tatin,” which is an apple tart cooked upside down. “Who among us doesn’t love an upside-down tart?
”Actually, who among us hasn’t been an upside-down tart?”
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, and urban issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
At its peak, 20 fire engines were on-site battling the blaze.