Politicians are fair game, and Helen Clark was the subject of more than her share of satire, including even a semi-affectionate play, On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover. She was more fondly portrayed in bro’Town, an animated series set in Morningside, a suburb in her Mount Albert electorate.
Helen gave regular interviews on radio stations throughout the country, but had a particular soft spot for student radio, with interviewers such as Mikey Havoc at bFM. There were photo shoots for lifestyle and women’s magazines with stylists, fashionable clothes and personal interest angles, and at-home television interviews where Helen would cook dinner (always a curry) with her husband and friends. In the lead-up to the 2005 election, TV One’s Holmes show filmed at-homes with both Helen and political opponent and National Party leader Don Brash.
She also gave regular stand-up press conferences for the press gallery. She was known to the media for her text-ability, but new technologies are also fraught, and her time in office saw the growth of bloggers, some of whom could be vicious, and were not accountable to journalistic codes of ethics or interested in dealing with the truth.
GEORGINA BEYER In 2002 the queen and Prince Philip were out here for … the Golden Jubilee year of her reign. She touched down in Wellington, starting the New Zealand leg of their tour that year. Helen was not able to make it, she was out of the country and Jim Anderton as deputy prime minister was there to represent her. The night before the queen arrived, I got a call from Parliament’s kaumatua who is a whanaunga, a relative of mine, and he said, ‘Look, one of our kaumatuas can’t make it out to the airport tomorrow to meet the queen and we figured that since you are tangata whenua and whanau and a member of the government we would ask if you would come out.’ I said, ‘Ooh yes, yes would love to’, and off I went.
The next day we were out there, Dame Silvia Cartwright was our governor-general so obviously she was there, and then the line-up of military and diplomatic corps and so on, and we, the little Maori delegation, were tacked on to the end of the receiving line. I can remember the press pack standing over the way and they all sort of looked up, and when they saw me come out, they sort of went, ahh, this is going to be interesting, ‘Queens meeting Queens’, and so there was some sort of delight and glee. Those were the photos that went all over the world with banner headlines: ‘Bi George, it’s the Queen!’ They got some pretty good ones and it was fairly humorous in the press over there, and it was fine.
A couple of days later we were having the state dinner at Parliament for the queen, and Helen had to go through the ordeal of outrage from the British newspapers because – woe betide! – Helen wore trousers to the state dinner. She was ridiculed for it and almost demonised by the British press particularly. She had worn evening trousers to dinner as opposed to a ball gown or a dress, which wasn’t a common item of clothing that Helen wore that I can recall. She had a beautiful sequin top on and I understand that Peter Davis wore a red bow-tie, and oh, the protocols!
HELEN CLARK I was a host to the queen in 2002 and apart from the beat-up by the BBC royal reporter about wearing trousers, actually the visit went extremely well. I found the queen a very easy person to work with. We couldn’t be more different I suppose in many ways, a generational difference, different backgrounds and upbringing, but I found her a very well-informed woman because she has met every mover and shaker going back a very long time. However, that beat-up about the trousers was the beginning of several.
BRIAN EDWARDS Helen did have a media honeymoon, but I think it was a different sort of media honeymoon. If you look back on Helen’s career from when she came into Parliament in 1981, there were very few women in Parliament then, it was a very difficult time for her and she was treated extremely badly by the men in Parliament. There was an extraordinary amount of sexism, she was accused of being lesbian, there was never any truth about that, jokes were made about her voice, her hair, about the way she dressed, you name it. That was an absolutely miserable time and I think that probably set it firmly in her mind that being in opposition was a dreadful thing. She experienced all that opposition and lack of respect, and some quite nasty stuff that came not just incidentally from the National Party but from other areas as well.
So when she got in it was sort of a triumph over all of it. All of those things where you would have said that, from a presentation point of view, Helen Clark shouldn’t really have made it because she did have difficult hair, she did have teeth that aren’t absolutely wonderful, she did have a voice that is quite unusual and all of that, and there is a sort of a semi-Margaret Thatcher connection or similarity there, I think. So beyond her own people, the Labour Party people, I don’t think she had a sort of honeymoon. I think she was respected … her intelligence was admired, her sense of purpose was admired, her determination was admired, all of those things were admired by people whereas with John Key, John Key is liked. I’m not saying that Helen wasn’t. Helen was loved by the Labour Party people, absolutely loved. If you went to any of those meetings, they adored her, they just thought she was the bee’s knees. But the population at large admired her, in probably the same sort of way they might have admired Margaret Thatcher, they admired her intellect in particular.
MONTY ADAMS, PHOTOGRAPHER It was always quite interesting photographing her because she was willing to do anything. One shoot I did for Australian Women’s Weekly was very glamorous, for a certain demographic, and for New Idea magazine I did some fitness photos and that was for a different demographic.
We followed her around the gym at Les Mills where she worked out and we had to photograph her on the different machines that she used and it shows a different side of her and she didn’t seem to mind. She was getting a sweat up and it was all fine, you know, the real Helen … We just tried to make her look as good as we could. We straightened her hair, we always put on more make-up than she would probably normally wear. We always did special lighting on her, we always put things on her that we felt she looked good in.
She wasn’t that hard, she is quite an attractive person. She certainly is a lot more attractive in real life than maybe she appears on television, but she photographs really well. The Labour banner is always red so we couldn’t have anything that was going to clash with that so it was always a variation of neutrals. One year it was black, one year it was a steely blue grey, next year was white. Helen looks particularly good in blue because she has got blue eyes and the pale complexion and dark hair, and she does look great in it but you know it is the opposition’s colours. The only time I put her in blue was when we did her book cover for the Brian Edwards biography.
DENIS WELCH When she became prime minister she milked the media and made it very easy for the media to relate to her. I don’t know if she was exceptional in that regard but she was good at it … She was ‘one of us’, she wasn’t a Muldoon, a Bolger or even a Lange, she was a university-educated professional liberal, a person who knew stuff. She was unlike most political leaders, she knew the arts, she knew the theatre, she knew books, she had a great geopolitical sense of what was going on in the world. She knew how the media worked, she cultivated them, we liked her, I liked her. She was someone you could relate to, talk to, but she wasn’t one going around and massaging the media as some tend to do.
HELEN CLARK There was a proposal that Tourism New Zealand contact a major travel reporter in the United States, Peter Greenberg. He had done a programme with the king of Jordan, where the king had showed him his country. They called it The Royal Tour of Jordan. Tourism New Zealand saw the potential to do something like that here, of course it would be pretentious to call it the ‘royal tour’, especially with me fronting it. Eventually Peter Greenberg agreed and he came out to New Zealand in April 2002 and we spent a week filming, all the way from Fiordland to all sorts of places, up to the Waitomo caves and the climax was a barbeque at Waihi Beach with my family and others involved. Then, in December 2002, I went to the premiere in New York and did a lot of publicity for the film. I remember I went on what was called a satellite media tour, I was programmed to talk to a radio station or television show every four minutes around America to promote it. You will see this film on many international flights when you go into the digital menu and see a programme on New Zealand: there I am chatting about Fiordland, Lord of the Rings sets, the Abel Tasman National Park, canoeing with the seals, abseiling into Waitomo, places right throughout New Zealand.
BRIAN EDWARDS How it works is that media advisors like Judy and me, we are not involved in the policy – that is not our field – so whatever the policy is, you hum it and we’ll sing it. That is the arrangement. So for most of the three years between elections we would be chatting, say once a week … Sometimes Helen wouldn’t want to do an interview and we would be in a persuasion mode. So we’d say, ‘Look, I really think you should do this.’ ‘Oh no, I can’t be bothered.’ And that was usually a reflection that she wasn’t comfortable with it or was nervous about it … You had to have a certain courage to do this, to say, ‘I disagree with you here’, but that was the job, and so during the year it was mostly that sort of stuff. For individual programmes, for a very big interview, we might meet and chat it through: ‘What are they going to ask?’ ‘What are you going to say?’ ‘Maybe here’s a better idea.’ And so on. Mostly she knew all the stuff anyway.
HELEN CLARK There was obviously a lot of morning radio shows and you built up those which you could fit in. I did quite a number as prime minister. I had a routine of doing the TV breakfast shows and the Paul Holmes interview which I’d pre-record quite early in the morning before I left for the airport. Radio Dunedin was another very loyal station, Neil Collins down there was a marvellous interviewer who I spoke to every Monday morning … So you build up long-term relationships with a lot of the people in the broadcasting field.
You could have a bit of fun and I enjoy doing things like bro’Town which is of course modelled on a suburb around here in Mount Albert, Morningside. ‘Morningside for life . . .’ as the phrase went. So, yes, you could have a bit of fun like that but it had to be measured, you didn’t want to go over the line. And there is media and media. Ha ha! There are the people like Neil Collins at Radio Dunedin, Mikey Havoc at bFM, who are without malice, it’s really a kind of a ‘service radio’ if you like: Mikey to his youth and student audience, Neil to a Dunedin audience that listens to him morning after morning. So you can have a much closer relationship in a way with them because they’re not out to score off you or to take you down. But there are others whose reputation they think will be made by scoring off you, so that becomes a much more combative relationship.
And, yeah, I love Mikey Havoc. I talked to Mikey Havoc on the radio probably for the best part of fifteen years, and I thought he did a great job. In fact he was one of the best interviewers because he had no malice. He just wanted to know what you were doing, what are you thinking. It was always a very lively interview.
PETER DAVIS Mikey Havoc had a way and she liked the university connection and she liked relating to young people. He had a particular way of asking questions and seemed not unsympathetic, rather than trying to trip her up the whole time.
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Quite often she wouldn’t go on Morning Report if she felt an issue was being handled at a level that somebody else should handle, so there definitely were some things that she didn’t front up for. I think years of being in politics and protecting yourself means you are controlling and presenting yourself in a particular way and trying not to trip up. And that’s been her way, she’s serious about the job and the public was prepared to wear that, so good for them.
HELEN CLARK You can’t be available every minute of the day or night, but inevitably in public life, if you’re out and about, you’re going to have stand-ups. The media are going to want to have access so you have to organise around that. I had to turn out to a press conference every week, no matter how sticky things were, and over the time I was prime minister, this practice of always stopping you on the bridge walking to Parliament developed as well. So those media scrums became kind of inevitable and less satisfying, obviously, than something that you could give more thought to. But, yeah, I think media expect access and you have to try to arrange for that in a way that is not too disruptive.
DON BRASH Parliament tends to bring out the worst in people. It does in some people, some people it doesn’t. Some people go through the process without losing their integrity and I think of a guy like Stephen Franks, everyone in Parliament regarded him as an expert in the law and when he spoke in the House, the House went silent. People listened to what Stephen Franks had to say, and that didn’t happen with either Helen Clark or me. When either of us spoke, there was an enormous amount of braying and a cacophony of boos and cheers, or what have you, which one had to get used to … Most of the people listening in radio land couldn’t hear it, but trying to give a speech ignoring the background ruckus was not always easy. Funnily enough, she didn’t give many speeches in the House. She gave a few set-piece speeches, the ones which are not interrupted by and large, the sort of state of the nation speeches which are part of the routine of being in Parliament. But the number of actual debates she took part in was very few, a very small number. Of course she was normally there at question time, at least on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, she was often not on Thursdays. But she had a huge advantage in having both Jonathan Hunt and then Margaret Wilson, speakers of the House, who allowed her to get away with blue murder. Helen Clark did not answer straight questions from the leader of the opposition, which I used to find incredibly frustrating. I’d ask her a question which could really only be answered with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’, and she would say, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb’ and you’d appeal to the speaker on a point of order and the speaker would say, ‘Well, she addressed the question.’ It was an absolute nonsense.
DENIS WELCH Helen could get quite snarky. She didn’t like it when they climbed into that speeding incident, or signing the painting that wasn’t hers. She could get quite uppity, but I don’t think any more than any politician when the tide was running against her. Even John Key can be quite dismissive when things are not going his way.
PETER DAVIS What I remember is the political cut and thrust in Parliament, where you’ve got to be on your mettle in dealing with the media. The worst of it was … maybe each year I’d go to APEC and you’d have some really weighty issues, and then when the New Zealand media stepped up, they’d ask you about some pitiful thing about a cat on the roof or something that hadn’t been got down in time and you thought, Is this what it’s all about? That’s what used to irritate me because I felt Helen was dealing with these matters seriously and dealing with them in a very wise and sensible manner, and it wasn’t exactly being appreciated. But the truth is, in politics I don’t know how much appreciation there is, you’ve just got to believe in yourself.
MICHAEL CULLEN She would have a lot of off-the-record briefings with the media. She would have the media up to talk with her in her office and she was trying to make sure the media unit maintained as good relationships as possible with the press. Like any prime minister she had her favourites in the media, and people she didn’t like so much. Again like all PMs or anybody senior in politics there is a kind of cycle that occurs, where you are coming up on the crest of the wave and it’s looking really good, and then people start getting a bit tired and you are basically old news, and ‘next please’ becomes the sort of cry after a while.
BRIAN EDWARDS When media disaster struck, if I am perfectly honest, she would tend to scapegoat, she would tend to point the finger a little. She would be cross. And you would just talk her through the alternative ways of dealing with things, like what to say. Our position was always the same, be straightforward, tell the truth and admit your mistakes … Most politicians can be straightforward and can tell the truth, very few politicians can admit their mistakes and Helen was no different. There is just something that is in the DNA of the politician who cannot say, ‘I was wrong.’ So we might have discussions in those situations, that the best thing to do would be to say, ‘I got it wrong, made a mistake.’ The painting might be an example of that, the painting that she hadn’t actually painted. My personal view of that is it is easy enough to make a mistake, maybe not thinking, but it was a mistake. Rather than saying, ‘This is a mistake, I’m sorry’, then you start looking for other explanations and other reasons, a bit of denial comes in and that sort of thing … I think Helen’s instinct would have normally been to tell the truth but when you know you are going to be beaten about the ears by the opposition and you are going to lose some cred, I think it can be difficult to make those straightforward admissions.
MATTHEW HOOTON She was prime minister for nine years, so we can say she handled attacks pretty competently. I think that the role of commentators on political blogs is overstated by politicos and political journalists … she was subject to vicious attack from some quarters. All political leaders are subject to vicious political attack, you read thestandard.org.nz about John Key and it’s similarly disgraceful, targeting different things, but still I think that the idea she was unfairly picked on is … well, all politicians are unfairly picked on. Life is not fair but I don’t think she was picked on any more aggressively than other political leaders.
MARGARET WILSON The vicious sexual violence of the images posted on blogs are truly hateful, and it is hard not to be affected by that, but at the same time, you know that what you are doing is noble and good. The purpose of doing that is to undermine your confidence, and to try to ensure that you will give up. I think they underestimated Helen myself, but if you understand what’s behind it, you have to live with it and you have to move on really.
HELEN CLARK Some people have very vivid imaginations and they are pretty vile. And they wind-up in the blogosphere, again with right-wing journalists, there is not a shred of truth in them and they do the rounds, which is pretty bizarre. But the internet is hard to prosecute for libel and make it stick.
CATH TIZARD The lesbian thing is so absurd, it goes back such a long way. One of my colleagues at university said to me one day, ‘Look, Cath, I don’t care who you are living with and I don’t think it is anyone’s business.’ ‘Who am I supposed to be living with?’ And she said, ‘Oh, someone called Alan Clark.’ I thought, Alan Clark? The only Alan Clark I know of is the car yard up at Albany which I used to drive past occasionally. ‘No, no, I’ve got it, it’s Helen Clark! It is Helen Clark that I am supposed to be living with!’ I said, ‘It is absolutely true, she’s been living with our family for a couple of years now.’ But that nonsense went on, and it is sheer political malice.
BRIAN EDWARDS You heard [rumours] all the time, the lesbian thing never really went away. It wasn’t just Heather Simpson, there were a variety of other names, which I’m not going to bring up. As it happened Helen had two or three lesbians working for her on staff. They were working for her because they were extremely good at their jobs and that was all there was to it, and if you knew Helen and you knew Helen’s relationship with Peter, you knew that was absolute nonsense – that was the most extraordinary warm and affectionate relationship, absolutely wonderful. Different from the sort of relationships that most of us probably have with our partners. I mean most of us can’t be away from each other for months on end. Look at the situation now, she is in New York, he is still in New Zealand, they meet a lot, but they understand that sort of relationship. It wouldn’t suit me and it may not suit you, but it suits them perfectly well. But they are affectionate. You will see these two holding hands quite regularly, it’s not horribly overt, but you can’t miss it. This is a loving couple. It wouldn’t do you any good to address the rumours, it would be giving it life, you would just leave it alone.
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She was capable of being hurt, capable of being affected by unpleasant things being said about her. Capable of being affected, for example, by the cartoons that Emmerson published in the New Zealand Herald. In those cartoons she was portrayed really as a witch, really what he drew was a witch, an unpleasant portrayal of her, and those things have an effect on public perception.
PETER DAVIS I have no problem with good satire. I think that Tom Scott is so funny and astute. What I think is that cartoonists from the New Zealand Herald have been second-rate. I have no problem with people making fun of you as long as it is reasonably even-handed and insightful, but sometimes you are scratching your head and saying, ‘What sort of point is this guy trying to make here?’ One of the weaknesses of the New Zealand Herald is to show its failure as an organ of the media. When you compare that with someone like Tom Scott, Peter Bromhead or Malcolm Walker, you look at them and you think, that’s very astute, even though it’s getting at you. So I have no problem with that at all, as long as it’s in good spirit as it generally has been.
HELEN CLARK I can think of some who have been malicious. I think of some iconic cartoons of me that can be genuinely extremely funny, but apart from that, there is a lot of mean-spiritedness in politics from your political critics – especially now with this blogosphere which is very right wing and anything goes. You have to shut your ears to that. I remember Bob Tizard saying to me, even before I went into Parliament, ‘You need to remember that at a general election, even if you are successful, that only 50 per cent of the electorate ever vote for you or like you, therefore, you have to expect half of them to say malicious and spiteful things about you.’ That is now especially true under MMP. So for that reason half the people are not going to be very keen on what you are doing, and I thought that was good advice.
Good satire is not malicious satire and is relatively well meaning – you can have a bit of a chuckle at yourself.
