Deborah Coddington: Column born in scandal and raised on insecurity

I had to fit columns in around Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Five years, 260 columns, about 200,000 words, and it's happy birthday to us.

This half-decade is a record for me. Last time I was a columnist - for Metro magazine - I was sacked by new editor Paul Little. To his credit, he buckled to public pressure and re-hired me until I worked fulltime for North & South.

In 2004 I was excited when Shayne Currie, then deputy editor of the gestating Herald on Sunday, asked if I'd write a weekly column for his organ. What a coup for a backbench MP - controlling your own publicity. I hugged my secret. Six months earlier I'd crowed to caucus that Sunday Star-Times editor Cate Brett had requested the same of me. But after our initial meeting over wine in Ponsonby, silence - then a mind change.

But Currie meant business: at our first meeting he produced a contract and an offer I couldn't refuse. With new competition, APN did more for journalists' remuneration than the unions ever managed.

Deadline: Wednesday. As an MP, that meant fitting the column around select committee, the House, meetings, flights, family. I'm an old-fashioned girl in that I still use a book diary so as I write this I'm going back through the pages of those days to jog my memory.

I remember the first week leading up to the first issue. I thought my bad publicity days were over. Ha.

On Wednesday I handed in my column. On Thursday I woke at peace, listening to Geoff Robinson running through the newspaper's headlines. The Dominion-Post, he said, led with MP Deborah Coddington asking a Wellington businessman to stop bothering her.

My heart, I swear, stopped beating. I switched my mobile phone to silent and watched it light up. Mark Sainsbury. Duncan Garner. Mark Sainsbury. Mark Sainsbury. Audrey Young.

Why didn't these people ring me when I issued a press release about education?

I played the messages. "Hi Deborah. TVNZ. We want to talk to you about education issues." Yeah right, Mark. Delete.

I miserably answered just one call - from Currie: "I suppose you want to sack me now."

"Oh no," he said. "You just got a whole lot more interesting."

You see how contemptibly insecure we are?

I haven't missed writing one column in the five years I've been doing this, and it's not for the money, although that's very nice.

I've filed from all sorts of wonderful places - the deserts of Dubai, Catania in Sicily, the highlands of Scotland, Park Avenue in New York.

Every time we go abroad I go down on my knees and thank the techno-geeks for inventing laptops and internet. Without them I would not be able to sit up all night, on the other side of the world, writing my column, eschewing the pleasures of you-know-what in a bed the size of a football field followed by a sleep between sheets of the finest cotton.

I do not tell you this to make you envious, but to offer you a glimpse into the inferiority complex of a journalist.

If I can't do a column, I reason, they'll get someone else to do it who will be better, I won't be missed, and next thing it's "Deborah who?"

Oh well, when that inevitably does happen, my published diaries might be worth a giggle. The first Herald on Sunday, you may recall, led with the aforementioned sexual harassment story. "MP breaks her silence" was the headline, which actually boiled down to me saying: "I feel like shit."

Called to account two days later to explain myself, by the Act Party leader, president, and Business Roundtable chief executive, I now see in my diary that the very same day I had an appointment with someone whom they really should have been concerned about.

A year later he would be placed very high on the Act Party list, only to hastily withdraw for "personal reasons" linked to an incident at his church in the early 1990s.

As Pope John XXIII put it: "Men are like wine - some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age."

Like us at Herald on Sunday; we'll be Grand Cru. So in Plautus' words, "Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words."