Here’s a cod psychology quiz for Andrew Little, former leader of the Labour Party, former national secretary for the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union and now Wellington mayoral candidate. It is: is he running for mayor because, a) he’s a hopeless sucker for punishment; b) because he’s a hopeless political junkie looking for another hit; c) because being mayor would be a sort of consolation prize for not becoming prime minister; or d) all of the above?
“Mmm. Um. Definitely not all of the above. I definitely don’t see it as a consolation prize. There’s a grain of truth to the other two. Anyway, I just think there’s a hard job there to be done. I like doing hard jobs.”
He does like doing hard jobs. Does he know why? “I like to see things that aren’t going so well, and I like to sort of be the one that can turn around and change it. And I think I’ve got the kind of thick skin and the temperament to deal with all of the, frankly, shit that goes with it. No one’s ever going to be completely happy.”
He likely wasn’t born with a thick skin because nobody is. If he didn’t have a thick skin “at the beginning of my time in Parliament I certainly did by the end of it, because you just have to”. He entered Parliament in 2011, on the Labour Party list, having previously been the party’s president. He was leader of the opposition from 2014 to 2017. He stood down less than two months before the 2017 general election. Jacinda Ardern became leader and Labour won as what was coined Jacindamania took hold.
You’d think that must have hurt and of course it did. But as he later said graciously, “It was incredibly gratifying and satisfying to see that because I knew that [the election result] was not just a possibility but a real possibility.” Of course, he also thought it could have been him. “Of course that’s there, but yeah, I guess that’s the thing about ego.”
He is, actually, good at engaging with people, but he didn’t manage to engage with Labour supporters.
Heaven knows why anyone would want to be the mayor of Wellington. Wellington’s stuffed, isn’t it? And so is the council. That is kind of the point, although he would never put it so crudely. And Wellington, he insists, “has a very bright future ahead of it”. What it needs, he says, in addition to fixing the damn water pipes and the lack of affordable housing is “a council that, I think, is more responsive, more understanding and better able to engage with people who want to get good things done”.
The problem with the current council, he thinks, is that it has developed a “sort of siege mentality. It’s very sort of internally focused but not engaging effectively with people outside of it”.
Sticking it to the bosses
I know him reasonably well. Or I think I do. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Back in his union days, we spent many fraught hours together, over too much coffee and in cold, dreary rooms, and, occasionally, in a pub frequented with hacks during a strike at the rag I was then working for. I was an underdelegate, which involved a lot of photocopying.
I have seen him lose his rag once. He shouted, over a table, at the head slime representing the bosses. He didn’t really lose his rag. It was a calculated performance, designed to make a barbed point. He’s a lawyer. Also, not too shabby an actor.
In Ardern’s recently published memoir, A Different Kind of Power, she writes, “There was an earnestness to Andrew Little that I respected.” And recognised in herself, no doubt. He recognises that earnestness in himself.
I always had this view that there’s no such thing as a mapped-out political career.
“Yeah, because I think that was the thing that was a bit of a turn-off for people. You meet really earnest people. You know that they believe in worthy and good things, but I find with heavily earnest people it’s difficult to sort of relax in their company. And I think I had that. I think I exhibited earnestness that caused discomfort in some people.”
He’s even earnest about being earnest. You can’t fault him for self-knowledge. He is hopeless at selling himself and this is, somehow, strangely, endearing. Still, it comes as a considerable relief to learn that his time as an MP, and in particular as a senior cabinet minister, has, he says, “made me a more relaxed person”.
That selfless act
Here’s the funny thing about him. He does have, as I once wrote, a sort of goofy charm. He’s a terrible dancer and doesn’t care about being a terrible dancer. He’s not as dry as you might think, given that earnestness. He is, actually, good at engaging with people, but he didn’t manage to engage with Labour supporters. He gave up the leadership when it became obvious the already dire polls were getting even more dire. This was, and is, widely regarded as selfless. It wasn’t, or not exactly. He believes in that thing called the greater good. Giving things up for the greater good doesn’t mean that it’s an easy thing to do.
Calling somebody a do-gooder is usually meant pejoratively. He is a do-gooder but the world needs do-gooders, surely?
“I think I’ve never let ego overwhelm my judgment,” he says. “I had to accept there was something about me that wasn’t connecting.” He has reflected on what that was. “I think people thought my appearance in the media, particularly on TV and possibly on radio, was sort of dour and humdrum. I think the other thing I was conscious of, too, was that going into the 2017 election, the leaders of National and Labour were two white guys in their 50s. It had the potential to be the most boring election ever in New Zealand.”
His wife has spoken about going with him to pack up his office. He didn’t cry, she said, but he was very withdrawn. He did cry later while, of all things, watching some silly talent show on the telly. The really interesting thing, to me at least, about this story is that he told it at all.
“It’s probably just emblematic of the evolution I’d been under, which was that it’s okay to talk about that stuff and it’s okay to talk about yourself. And I think probably what I accepted after I stood down from the Labour Party … is that people do want to know about the personal aspects of people in public office in a way that probably wasn’t the case before. And that’s the thing that I understand more now than perhaps I did at the time.”
He once said he didn’t care for political memoirs because they were inevitably an attempt to rewrite history. He’s writing a political memoir. Will it be a ripping read? “I’ve done about 20,000 words and I go back every now and then and say, ‘Oh god, this is so boring.’ It needs a major zhuzh-up, otherwise it’s going to sound like a legal submission to a court.”
Did I happen to mention that he is absolutely hopeless at selling himself? If he does finish his memoir, all I can say is god help his publicist.
Cosy stability
He lives with his wife, Leigh Fitzgerald, an office administrator at a Wellington school, and Harry, the elderly border terrier, in their pretty and tidy red brick bungalow in Island Bay. Their son is 24, teaching at a primary school and no longer living at home. They have lived here for 20 years. It is not flash. It is cosy with lots of books and all houses with lots of books are cosy and welcoming. He likes stability. “Yes. I like predictability. I think probably I like to know what’s coming. I like to know sufficiently in advance what’s happening, what’s coming up. Yes.”
Here’s a prediction for him. Of course he’s going to win the mayoralty. I was going to call it now, I told him. He said: “I’m not going to encourage you.” He is certainly not going to say that it’s a foregone conclusion because that would be beyond silly. He said, as though explaining to a dimwit, because that is exactly what he was doing, that “people still have to vote”. Obviously, if people who want him to win think he’s a sure bet then why would they bother turning out to vote? Even a dimwit could figure that out.
He has, in addition to that earnestness, what his wife calls an English reserve. His parents were English. His father, Bill, was so reserved he somehow neglected to mention that, in addition to his five children from his third marriage, to Little’s mother (he and his twin sister are the youngest), there were two siblings from a first marriage and two more to a second marriage. He found out when he was about 19, when a Christmas card arrived at his parents’ house from people he’d never heard mentioned. I am fascinated by this story and even more fascinated by the fact he never really talked to his father about this secret collection of children.
“No, he was very difficult to talk to. He was hard to warm to.” In later life, when he became ill with Parkinson’s and his general health was deteriorating, he was “in a funny way, sort of more accessible … but it was harder to talk to him for his own comfort. And I just regret so much not having conversations when he was in a better position to do so.” There was some idea that he was a spy. He spent a lot of time in the Middle East and would vanish from home without telling his first wife, or anyone else, where he was going and when he’d be returning.
He wasn’t a spy, alas, because that would have been even more exciting than the collection of secret children. He was an intelligence officer for the army. So you can see that he might have been secretive. “I think there’s a lot more that he could have volunteered to my brothers and sisters about his past life than he actually did. And so I don’t know whether he felt shame or embarrassment about some of that, or if it was just his nature. I think he was a product of his time.”
Deflating ego
His mother, Cicely, was, he says, “pretty amazing. She was this kind of practical, no-nonsense Englishwoman who had an amazing ability to pop bubbles of pomposity. She had this amazing knack just to completely undermine them. She tested vanity and conceit and those sorts of things. So I think that’s part of the thing about keeping your ego under control. I very much trace it back to Mum’s approaches to people who thought they were better than everybody else.”
It has always been a bit hard to know how much he really wanted to be prime minister. But then it’s a tricky thing to pull off: not being seen to want it too much while demonstrating you want it enough to really go after it.
“It was an ambition of mine. I think I would have enjoyed it. But I always had this view, too, when I went to Parliament and got more politically involved, that there’s no such thing as a mapped-out political career.”
Yes, as we know, all political careers end in failure. He did not for a moment feel humiliated because, again, it was the right thing to do. And you could certainly argue that it’s better to have stood down than stand around waiting to be pushed out of your leader’s office by a posse of colleagues.
Doing the right thing is, as already noted, quite earnest. But having known him since before what he calls his “evolution”, he is, by his standards, almost laid back these days. I did say almost. Still, and here’s another funny thing: the evolved Andrew Little would likely make a rather successful leader of a political party.
