Jim Bolger is being remembered as “a really good bloke”.
The former Prime Minister died peacefully aged 90, surrounded by his nine children, 18 grandchildren and his wife Joan.
He became the 35th Prime Minister after leading the National Party to a landslide victory in 1990.
Bolger was ousted by his party caucus in 1997 and replaced by Jenny Shipley.
Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent Barry Soper has reported on the careers of 13 prime ministers.
He told The Front Page he first met Bolger in the 1970s.
“I was the industrial roundsman for television in those days and he was the Labour Minister for Rob Muldoon,” he said.
A couple of decades and a few PMs later, and Soper would travel as part of the press pack as Bolger charmed foreign dignitaries around the globe.
“He loved to hark back to the Irish when he had a few drinks on board, and he would affect the Irish accent. One thing Bolger was very good at was accents. He did it almost subconsciously.
“When I was at a press conference once with him in Ottawa, I was standing at the back of the press horde with a Canadian journalist, [former Canadian Prime Minister] Brian Mulroney had just spoken, then Bolger had his turn, and this journalist turned to me and he said, ‘I never knew your Prime Minister was Canadian’.
“He just picked up on stuff. And you can imagine the difficulty we had after he met the Dalai Lama,” he said.
NZ First leader Winston Peters and Bolger led New Zealand’s first MMP Government from 1996 onwards, a coalition between NZ First and National.
“Everyone with a knowledge of New Zealand political history from the late 1980s and early 1990s will know that the two of us sometimes had our policy differences!” said Peters of his former colleague.
“He and Bolger used to be great mates until Winston was removed from the National Party and went on to form New Zealand First and then made his name in MMP,” Soper said.
“Bolger embraced it, had to take Winston on, and he was even reluctant to take him on as a minister three years earlier.
“Those two got along very, very well. Indeed, many a time I was up in the ninth-floor office with Jim Bolger and Winston Peters, knocking back a few good Irish whiskies.”
“Having now completed over seven years as Prime Minister, nearly 12 years as leader of the National Party, and 14 years as a minister, changing circumstances make it appropriate for me to step down as Prime Minister,” reads a press statement from Bolger dated November 4, 1997.
The “changing circumstances”, Soper said, were clear.
“It was a knife in his back,” he said, “held by Jenny Shipley and Wyatt Creech, who became her deputy.
“I was in Europe with Jim Bolger when they did the numbers back home, and we all knew that time was running out for Bolger in terms of his popularity within his own caucus.
“As a result, they did the numbers when he was overseas. The hapless Doug Graham was sent to the airport to give Bolger the news when he arrived back in the country.
“I had stayed on in Europe because I had some friends in Germany, thinking that he wouldn’t be rolled this year, he’d be rolled the following year. Well, I was called in the middle of the night in Germany to say Bolger is gone,” he said.
Bolger’s legacy, Soper said, will be his settlement of Māori land claims.
“Up until that point, there’d been a lot of talk about it. I think it had a lot to do with his Irish background. He was a Roman Catholic, born to Irish immigrants to this country. He left school at 15, which is rather remarkable, and he went on to become Prime Minister.
“But he always felt as a Catholic that they were sort of in the minority and somebody once said to me, ‘A Catholic will never become Prime Minister of this country’.
“Jim Bolger, he cut the mould. Because he could understand people who were considered a bit like second-class citizens, I think he understood Māori much more and really set about, with some urgency, to settle Māori land claims. He did that with Doug Graham, who was an excellent negotiator for the Treaty settlements,” Soper said.
Overall, Soper said, Bolger never shied from giving his views, “including to me when I stepped out of line”.
“Generally, I think those who remember Jim Bolger remember him as a really good bloke.”
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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