Politics
Getting away with it
by Jane Clifton
What does John Tamihere have to do to get the push from Labour?
We all know them – people who get away with bloody murder where we would get knobbled. Call it charm, call it charisma. Sometimes it’s just a matter of dimples. But John Tamihere is one of those golden children whom the gods favour, just because he is John Tamihere.
Even when he is bad and gets found out and punished, his ordeal somehow ennobles him in the view of many members of the public. Where another politician would be strung up by his ears for venality and disloyalty, Tamihere is forgiven and urged to run along and have a lie-down. Others – the media, the Opposition – are told to stop picking on him. To take it from Helen Clark, he’s just Dennis the Menace – apt to be naughty, but good at heart. To his voter supporters, he’s a courageous truth-teller in a sea of Labour toadies.
We all know and tolerate and even indulge people like this. We know it’s not good for their character, but we make allowances, because character isn’t their strong suit. It’s the other stuff – the charm, the talent, the adorable curls – we go for. They have been genetically short-changed in the character department, and this we come to regard as a sort of disability, like being born with a club foot or a disfiguring birthmark. We wouldn’t discriminate against a congenitally lame person, so why discriminate against a congenitally corner-cutting one?
Sometimes, brute political reality must bow before the irrationality of human nature. Even if it makes you want to puke.
So it is that, after inflicting optimal offence, embarrassment and pre-election damage on colleagues who have bent over backwards to be loyal to him, Tamihere has emerged exhibiting all the signs of believing that he is the injured party – and with plenty of voters out there agreeing. Ritual paddiwhacks, followed by “There, there!”
It’s not fair that he’s got away with it. It’s not even logical. Whatever happened to pour encourager les autres? What happens if next week some back-bencher, emboldened by the Tamihere precedent, feels like criticising Michael Cullen’s fiscal policies or George Hawkins’s refusal to reform the police, which many are busting to do? They might expect a hug on the TV news and three weeks’ “reflection” leave, but they won’t get it.
The bookkeeping answer to this conundrum is that although Tamihere is a galloping liability, he is also a one-in-a-million asset. Labour has decided that a couple of months before an election is not the time to be taking a punt on which side of the ledger JT weighs heaviest on.
But on the evidence so far, you would have to bet on a surfeit of red ink. Tamihere seems to have the Winston self-destruct tendency big time, without Winston’s ability to strategise and stick to a carefully honed timetable, and demonstrably without his sense of loyalty.
Even Winston at his most slyly undermining would never have dumped all over his Bolger administration colleagues like that, even privately. It would have been dishonourable and, more important, it would have been too risky. Winston got almost dependently matey with some journalists, but he never unloaded. Self-protection always won over self-indulgence.
In those days, I was an impressionable and kindly young woman, and used to hope that he had a secret teddy bear at home he could confide in, for such was the rampant dimwittery in the Bolger team that I feared Winston would explode if he couldn’t bitch to somebody.
You could, up close, divine that Winston privately thought that even some of his supporters were pretty limited, but he would rather have bought a suit from Farmers than say so, even in his cups. And he would rather have been photographed in a shell suit from Postie Plus than be caught accepting any large sum of money, other than from his salary.
It may be a generational thing, but Tamihere has no hang-ups about wealth. And where Winston has worked obsessively at mobilising votes, Tamihere’s approach is somewhat more relaxed. He is simply entitled to them. If he says his righteous bloke stuff, they will come. He seems to have had some idea of positioning himself as a new moderate Labour leader for when Helengrad finally falls, but he was plainly not working to any well-thought-out plan.
How Tamihere’s voter appeal will pan out long-term – either for Labour or in some other Tamihere vehicle down the track – is the key issue. Clearly, Labour accepts that Tamihere is a short-term vote-mobiliser, or it would have behaved honestly and booted him out. It cannot afford to have an independent Tamihere sapping away Labour votes in his electorate, or run the risk that he could acquire a wider vehicle to deflect Labour votes nationally.
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