KEY POINTS:
Mike Williams, the Labour Party president, was in a bit of trouble last week, and quite a lot more trouble this week. I'm afraid I'm about to cause him a tad more bother.
He no doubt thought the trouble would have gone away by now, which is presumably why he made a very bad decision and let me go to his house last week to interview him.
The trouble was over whether or not he said "damn good idea" when he should have said "bloody stupid idea" at the Labour Party congress over delegates handing out brochures from government departments as a way of advertising good things the Government has done. He said he never said any such thing, but it seems he did - there was a recording.
So he got a slap on the hand from the PM, and then a bigger slap when the recording emerged. Her president, said the PM, was "loose and confused". Not a good look, is it? I said so later when I phoned him. "Absolutely. I am totally ashamed of myself," he said, which is the equivalent of a public licking of the PM's boots.
When I saw him, I invited him to feel free to get in more trouble over the week. I called him on Thursday and he was in Blenheim - "No, no I'm not hiding out," he said, doing a reasonable job of trying not to sound as if he was speaking through gritted teeth. I reminded him, rather smugly, I admit, of my invitation and said I hadn't thought he'd actually oblige. "You put a hex on me," he said. "You're a witch."
Which is probably a toned-down expression of what he would have liked to have said to a few other journalists over the past couple of weeks, so I'll let him get away with it.
I can afford to be magnanimous because he's stuck with me and the interview, and he knows it. It would be, he said during the phone call, "the final interview, you can call it that. The Final Ever Interview".
I asked him what the PM said and he said of course he wasn't going to reveal that but "not too much different to what she said in public". I'm sure she told him to keep his mouth shut and his head down and not to give interviews but, oh dear, too late.
He still says he can't remember having said handing out brochures was a good idea but, "I know I f***** up. Let's be clear about that and from now on we've got absolute silence from me."
Which brings us to the tad more bother I'm about to cause him. Because he is not just in trouble with the PM, he is in rather a lot more trouble at home with the other important woman in his life - his wife, Judith. He had phoned me first and left a message - not to ask me to not run the interview (he's not that silly) but to ask me to please say his wife had been away the week I went to see him. The reason for this request was the state of the kitchen in his quite posh house in Te Atatu Peninsula. He made, by the way, a lot of money from his direct marketing company and so is surely, I said, "a rich prick" like John Key. "Not any more," he said, "I've been working for the Labour Party for 10 years." He gets $25,000 a year and gives it all back one way or another. He buys a lot of raffle tickets.
Anyway, it was a bit rude of me to call his place a tip, but I have never seen anyone keep such an assortment (that is being polite) of mad things on the kitchen bench. There was, he assured me, a method in the muddle of socks, nicotine chewing gum, dog shampoo, sun block, bread rolls, a bottle of medium sherry and box cutters. I bet he tidies that lot up before the PM comes over. It looked like the inside of a loose and confused mind to me. It's a shame he didn't tidy it up before I came over because his wife "hit the roof" when she heard he'd let me in. On balance, I asked, was he in bigger trouble with the PM or with his wife? "Probably my wife," he said.
OF COURSE the PM does come over and maybe still will - he says they'll never fall out - because they're great friends and have been since their university days. I wanted to know how he gets away with smoking and he said, "I keep it quiet. She doesn't tell you off." He tells me that at his recent wedding anniversary party Paul Holmes said to the PM: "I want a smoke," and she said, "that's all right, as long as you don't blow it all over me." Huh, I say, she sniffed me when I had a fag around the corner from her once. "Maybe she's different with more influential people," he says. I suppose that will serve me right for making disparaging remarks about people's idiosyncratic house-keeping arrangements.
He, of course, is terribly influential and is known as the Mr Fixit of the party when he's not, as I kindly suggest, stuffing things up instead. "Ha, ha, ha, I'm an organisation person," he says. I try not to look at the kitchen bench. He is supposed to come up with ideas, and then organise those ideas into strategies for winning elections. But really, if giving out brochures from WINZ, say, was the best idea to come out of the congress, then wowie! I say. He says that of course some good ideas came out of the congress but that it's a big party and there are always going to be some dumb ones. "You cannot stop people coming up with idiotic ideas and if I'd heard what he'd said I would have said, 'That's a bloody stupid idea'." At the time he said this he didn't know that "he" was Ruth Dyson's husband. Who is, presumably, not the same person as the one who "bugs me endlessly ... about putting lighthouse keepers back on lighthouses. He says, 'It's an absolute disgrace, this is a lifestyle you've killed'." This is most amusing, but his point in telling me is? "There are people who get fixated on silly things."
I am fixated on another amazingly silly moment from the congress: the god-awful sing-song by four lady Labour MPs.
"Well, I thought it was quite good."
He must, I say, be lying through his teeth.
"Well, I thought the words were quite good. I thought the singers were vocally challenged."
That is one way of putting it, although I was too engaged in snorting into my coffee to put it that way.
He says, "For God's sake, we've got to chill out a bit. You've got to have a bit of fun. I thought it was funny."
"It wasn't funny. It was appalling," I say. "The only thing that could have been a worse look would have been morris dancing."
"No," he says, "line dancing's worse. And I do think that in a political party you've got to have some fun, otherwise why would you join?"
"Fun!" I shriek. "If that's what passes for fun in the Labour Party ... "
"Well," he says, "I thought it was fun, for Christ's sake."
That "for Christ's sake" might look a bit shirty on the page, but it wasn't. It would take a bit to get him really huffy. He's been around politics for so long that his hide, he cheerfully offers, "is like a rhino". Helen is even tougher. "Yeah, tough as old boots."
She is one of his best friends, and I wondered if she could ever be soft. "Oh yeah, when my mother died and that sort of thing, she's the best friend you've ever got." Who will then bollock you in public? "Yeah, and in private. When necessary, yeah."
His public image is important "only in a negative sense. If I'm seen to screw up, I don't think it does us any good. So I try not to do that. How I could have avoided the [congress] incident, I don't know".
HE PROBABLY should have avoided telling me a funny story about going to a breakfast fundraiser put on by the Rainbow sector of the party. "It was the most expensive bloody breakfast I've ever been to. It was admittedly a very pleasant breakfast but it was $35 for ... a dollop of lumpy mashed potato and two almost totally dried out sausages that looked like desiccated dingo penises."
You can see how he can't help himself. The Labour Party should raffle tickets with a prize of lunch with the president. But I suppose he'll be gagged and locked up in a small room until after the election, which I can see might be the safe, if boring, option.
