Mark Sainsbury: Truth be told, many of us are over MoT

Glenn Greenwald and Kim Dotcom. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Opinion

My phone rang on Sunday night. No caller ID. But I'm curious. "Hello Mark, this is Kim Dotcom."

I strained to hear the whirring of GCSB recording devices or maybe even the controlled breathing of John Key listening in, but nada.

I'll come back to that call, but of course as you read this, the much heralded "Moment of Truth' (MoT) will be done and dusted.

How excited we were some weeks ago at the prospect of it! Regardless of your politics, the prospect of secrets revealed and potential embarrassment at the highest levels always quickens the heart.

The MoT was, of course, the promise by my unsolicited caller, Kim Dotcom, that he would blow this campaign out of the water with revelations that went to the heart of our democracy and as to whether Prime Minister John Key was a liar.

It seems an age ago now. At the time, everyone wondered how we could wait that long and surely it would leak beforehand. It didn't leak until controlled bursts in recent days but it was certainly gazumped.

Nicky Hager's book grabbed the dirty-tricks quotient for this campaign and you've got to wonder how much capacity we have for any more.

The fact we can even contemplate that there is only a limited capacity for the voter to entertain "dirty tricks" is frightening but it only goes to reinforce the view that this election was determined months ago in the voters' minds.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have missed last night's Town Hall performance for quids, which made it even stranger when out of the blue I get the call on Sunday evening from Kim Dotcom asking if I'd like to talk to one and a half million people. He was inviting me to MC the big event. Quite why he was still scouting around for an MC the night before the much-vaunted centrepiece of his campaign did raise a few questions, but I politely declined because of prior commitments.

There's also the very important practice of leaving yourself free to comment on politics with no baggage or appearance of favour, but in this case it didn't even get to that consideration. I had, in fact, made a prior commitment of a family nature. But it left me wondering. When did I abandon even the intention of attending the MoT and, like a lot of others, decide that what was happening in my own life was more important.

Kim Dotcom is no mug, and involving Pulitzer Prize-winning author Glenn Greenwald has added a degree of credibility the Internet Party "visionary" and his election vehicle could never have mustered alone.

But these are weird times. How weird? Well, they're talking up Winston Peters as PM again. It was John Armstrong in this very paper who first floated that scenario and many scoffed. Not now. I can't wait until Sunday when I host a five-hour election post-mortem on RadioLive - that's what I call weirdness.