Farewell, then, to the dear old Secret Diary in the pages of the Herald. Its journey ends here. It has been axed, dismissed, escorted off the premises; and although it has already found a new home elsewhere, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank readers of the Herald for their variously kind and unkind responses these past 10 years to my regular Saturday mission to present and mock the wretch of the week.
Only the other day I got a very nice message from a senior government minister. It’s not right to name them but I can say it obviously wasn’t my only friend in the National coalition, Kaipara MP Chris Penk, who stumbles along as a kind of junior-to-middling government minister. It was in response to a recent Secret Diary of the wretch of every week these past few months since the election – actually, a status that Chris Hipkins held during the election as well. The minister wrote, “I always enjoy these Steve but this one was literally laugh-out-loud and put tears in my eyes. Pure gold. Happy Easter.”
Good on the minister for laughing at the grotesque caricature of a political opponent. The Secret Diary has depended on such readers enjoying this kind of pleasure in its long existence – the column began life in the Sunday Star-Times, somewhere around 2009 – and has always tried to be an equal-opportunity satirist. Labour are easy to mock. They generate so many terrible ideas. National are easy to mock. They attract so many terrible people. Winston Peters and David Seymour are beyond terrible and ought to be mocked every day of their lives.
But there has been a new kind of tenor to many of the messages I’ve received since the election. They are all from the right, and they all have a tone of being sore winners. They seem exasperated and even bewildered that the Secret Diary seeks to mock Christopher Luxon and his coalition goons in government. I get it. There was widespread revulsion at the ways and means of the Labour Government; there has been something cleansing about the Luxon regime. To jeer rather than cheer is evidence to a number of correspondents that the Secret Diary is a part of a vast left-wing conspiracy to undermine our new political masters.
“I’m so disappointed in modern journalism,” wrote a correspondent called Frank. He was disappointed that a Secret Diary cast Winston Peters as The Abominable Peters, a legendary snowman forever wandering the polar wastes. I think this is an entirely accurate depiction. “Do you really understand the true meaning of the word ‘abominable’?”, Frank asked. It means very bad and unpleasant.