Drawn Out

TUCKING MY KIRK CARTOON CAREFULLY in a folder and dropping Shaun off at day-care, I headed off with some trepidation for the Dominion building in downtown Wellington. It was a brooding neo-Gothic edifice. You could imagine gargoyles and a hunchback on the roof. The foyer was dark and echoing. I stood by the lifts for ages trying to summon up the courage to head for the offices of the Sunday Star three flights up. My nerve failed me and I returned to the pavement. It was a pathetic repeat of heading into a Massey University lecture theatre full of pretty girls then chickening out. I forced myself back to the lifts. ‘Going up?’ said a stranger, and I stepped in with him.

I told a receptionist on the third floor that I had something to show the editor. She told me to follow the bellowing. It came from a bear of a man who looked like a mob enforcer—the late, great Frank Haden. He was genuinely scary. He took my drawing in a huge paw, glared at it through heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, nodded approval, demanded another one next week and waved me away. The audience was over. The rapture I felt at that moment was repeated four days later when I opened up the Sunday Star and saw my cartoon in pride of place. I was a published cartoonist in a national publication!

Years later, Frank and I were part of a press junket to Eastern Europe just as the Iron Curtain was coming down and countries released from 40 years of brutal Soviet subjugation were frenziedly changing the drapes. In a bar in Budapest we met a local musician who didn’t speak a word of English but sang ‘St. James Infirmary’ beautifully, accompanying himself on harmonica between verses. To my surprise, Frank, now a jovial, cuddly bear of a man, joined in on the chorus. You think you know a guy!

Frank accepted another half-dozen cartoons and I settled joyfully into my new role, not realising that I was about to be reincarnated again. Across town in the offices of the Listener which, thanks to its monopoly on television-programme schedules, enjoyed a per capita circulation matched only by Pravda (more than a few people used to swear that in the right light you couldn’t tell them apart), the social historian, trade unionist and contributor of blackly comic pieces to this publishing juggernaut Tony Simpson was informing the new editor, the towering, handsome-in-an-aging-film-star way, Ian Cross, that due to commitments in Stockholm these contributions would cease for a period. In desperation Ian asked him if he knew of anyone who could possibly fill in for him.

Tony and I had never met. I was illustrating articles for the New Zealand edition of Rolling Stone, edited by Alister Taylor, which Tony also wrote for (he was everywhere!). One day I told Alister I would dearly love to do a parody of Tony’s idiosyncratic comic prose. This was duly passed on. Tony was flattered that some neophyte scribe wanted to mock his writing. When Ian Cross needed someone to come off the subs bench, Tony unhesitatingly selected me, for which I will be forever grateful and indebted.

Tony has just published an erudite, witty and wise memoir of his own, Along for the Ride, in which he recounts his slightly different version of the role he played in my becoming a Listener writer. He also adds a footnote to this story from his time working for Jim Anderton, in the deputy prime minister’s capacity as a member of the honours and appointments cabinet committee. Tony was asked to check with me whether I wanted to be put up for an honour. Tony phoned and I consented, cautioning that it had also been proposed under the previous Lange government but had been turned down on the grounds that I made fun of them. Nevertheless, writes Tony, Jim’s nomination went ahead and when the list was published my name was there. Tony commented on this to Jim, who grinned and said that mention of my name had triggered much the same response as earlier—‘He keeps laughing at us’—to which he had retorted, ‘Of course he does, that’s why we are giving it to him.’ Everyone looked sheepishly at the table and my name went through.

I should declare here that Jim has purchased more originals of mine than any other politician—both the unflattering and the flattering ones. He only stopped when he ran out of wall space. Michael Laws, both as an MP and as mayor of Whanganui, kept my children in shoes with his purchases. John Key couldn’t resist owning an original if it included President Obama in the drawing. He paid me in bottles of his own ‘JK’ pinot noir, which dazzled some guests at dinner parties and disgusted others. If Bill English starts collecting originals I guess I can look forward to pizza topped with Wattie’s spaghetti from a can.

I was holidaying in Malaysia with Averil when the 2006 New Year Honours were announced. I had become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit and I was thrilled. In some ways, I was very fortunate to make the investiture at Government House later that year. The day before the announcement was made we were in a huge enclosure housing thousands of feathered creatures. The heavens over Kuala Lumpur opened up like a spillway of a hydro dam, sending us scrambling for shelter under a spreading banyan tree. The tropical downpour was incredibly heavy and showed no sign of letting up, so gradually, one by one, flamingos, herons, ducks and pelicans took shelter with us, squeezing alongside, almost touching, avoiding eye contact like strangers on a crowded commuter train. Shaun, now a hefty six foot five with the lung capacity of a channel swimmer, asked forcefully but not unreasonably, ‘Why are we standing in Asia’s largest aviary at the height of the Asian bird flu epidemic?’

Radio stations and various news outlets tracked me down for comment. It is customary on these occasions to say that you see the award as a tribute to your profession as a whole, and that you accept on behalf of a team. I insisted the award was for me and for me alone—the cartooning fraternity could get their own bloody gong. It was obvious I was joking and that I was pretty chuffed by the whole exercise. I received warm letters of congratulation from the unlikeliest of people, which touched me.

My default setting of biting the hand I was supposed to kiss could account for the fact I have never been appointed to any statutory board or commission. Russell Marshall told me that shortly after Labour swept to office in the 1984 election, at an early cabinet meeting the subject of appointees to the board of broadcasting came up. Russell cheerfully suggested me and was shocked by the tsunami of fury that ensued. ‘Not that bastard!’ would best sum up the reaction. Nearly half his colleagues were smarting over something I had written or drawn. At the same enclave David Lange wanted a woman, a Māori and a South Islander for the board of Radio New Zealand. Judy Finn of Neudorf Vineyards fame in Upper Moutere was mentioned. Judy, Miss Massey the year I judged, had been a smart, witty broadcaster and lived in the South Island, thus ticking two boxes. Going for three in row, Lange wanted to know if she had any Māori blood at all. Mike Moore couldn’t help himself. ‘It is my understanding, Prime Minister, that from time to time she has a little Māori in her.’ He was joking, everyone knew it and laughed heartily. Some jokes are just too tempting to ignore and truth doesn’t come into it. When John Lennon was asked if Ringo was the best drummer in the ’60s, he couldn’t help himself either. ‘Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in The Beatles.’

IAN CROSS’S RECOLLECTION OF OUR first meeting differs from mine. In the foreword to my collection of parliamentary columns, Ten Years Inside, Ian writes that I turned up in bare feet and blue jeans, a slightly bemused expression on my benign face exaggerated by the lopsided angle of spectacles held together by sticking plaster. I can’t deny the latter because I don’t stare into a hand-held mirror when I walk, only sitting down. But I most certainly was not barefooted. Exposure to James K. Baxter ensured I was only ever barefooted on a beach or in the shower.

What I do remember with a searing clarity is putting my cartoons in a folder, strapping Shaun into a baby seat and setting off in my Ford Cortina for the Charles Fergusson tower block adjacent to Parliament with Alice, our chihuahua-fox terrier cross, yapping and leaping between the front and back seats. I must have come down winding Glenmore Street too fast because cartoons sprayed from the folder and suddenly Alice was carsick. I pulled over, close to tears, and flicked chunks of partially digested dog food off the cartoons with an old beach towel, then mopped up the excess fluid, leaving straw-coloured stains on some of the drawings.

Ian was very good about it. While I paced about jiggling Shaun he opened the windows of his office to let in fresh air and placed my smelly folder on his desk. Turning the pages slowly he studied each cartoon in turn, silently and with intense concentration. After an interminable, unnerving wait, probably only ten minutes or so, he flashed me a lofty, patrician smile—somewhat inevitable when you stand well over six foot—and said, ‘Young man, you are a writer! I have a small job for you …’

Cross had the vision of a South American condor when it came to spotting raw talent from a great distance—Geoff Chapple, Gordon Campbell, David Young and Rosemary McLeod were all hired by him and quickly became stylish feature writers or stylish columnists—in Gordon’s case, both. They are all still doing great work today in plays, books and on websites.

That first writing assignment turned out to be a financial writers’ seminar held by the New Zealand Society of Accountants at the James Cook Hotel called ‘Fact, Figures and Fallacies’. Hold me back! I hoped that it would be held in a large ballroom with a standing-room-only crowd, allowing me to hide down the back, but it transpired that the Discovery Room at the Jimmy Cook was not much bigger than a large lounge and only three-quarters full. The intimate setting and my early arrival meant a full gauntlet of introductions. With my blond afro, flaming-red beard, platform-sole shoes and flared jeans I stood out from the chartered accountants and stockbrokers. Everyone was perfectly civil but it was long, dull day. This was my first job with the Listener, I was desperate to do well and here I was fighting to stay awake. All I could do was send it up, which may well have been Cross’s intention all along. He could be very Machiavellian. It was part of his charm.

He was pleased with the piece and the next week I was sent off to cover the United Women’s Convention in Auckland, with baby Shaun and Christine. It was so earnest and well intentioned it made fun of itself. All I had to do was write it down accurately. Cross was delighted with my mockery. Middling pieces on assorted topics of my own choosing followed and I chose poorly. My new career was in danger of dribbling to a halt until Cross set me another test—though he was too shrewd to frame it like that. I was dispatched to cover the Royal Opening of Parliament in February 1974.

The piece began with a true account of a conversation between middle-aged ladies and the gentlemen of military bearing, whose contribution was mainly body language, that I eavesdropped on in the foyer of Parliament Buildings as her Majesty entered.

I finished the article on the Queen hoving into view after exiting the old Legislative Council Chamber. A curious soft moaning emanated from the same watching women. I wrote that it was unlike any other sound that I’d heard before—exhaled from deep in the larynx, it could only be likened to the sound young children make when holding a kitten. It morphed into language as the Queen approached.

I must have passed the test I didn’t know I was sitting because Ian immediately made me the Listener’s parliamentary correspondent. I got my own column right up the front of the publication, emblazoned ‘TOM SCOTT’S PARLIAMENT’, with my photo printed alongside it. I am all hair and spectacles. I was once described in a comic debate televised live on a New Year’s Eve, quite possibly by Jim Hopkins, as resembling a rat peering through a toilet brush, an apt description that was shouted out joyously in the streets by strangers for years afterwards. Muldoon even borrowed it once for a speech at a National Party conference, but with the inexorable passage of time the description no longer fits and it has fallen into disuse. I am no longer recognisable, and a hairless, neonatal possum peering through a toilet brush with white plastic bristles doesn’t have the same ring to it.

BACK THEN YOU ONLY GOT to work in the Press Gallery if you had done tours of duty reporting on court proceedings, city council meetings, industrial disputes and the return of the much-feared Island Bay dog poisoner. Only a handful of elder statesmen—they were all men—got to write their own political columns. I was a virgin in a brothel with the instant status of a madam. It was galling for the older gallery members, some of whom made no effort to hide their dislike and suspicion of me.

Accreditation was confirmed annually. In what may have been just coincidence, when Muldoon came to power these older members challenged my membership at a Press Gallery AGM. I don’t pay much attention to these things so I wasn’t present to defend myself, but I did run into TV reporter Spencer Jolly shortly afterwards. He was still ropeable. ‘It was an outrage, mate!’ he railed. ‘I bloody told them so! I said this is a kangaroo court! You are acting as judge and jury! If this vote goes ahead, I want my abstention recorded in the minutes!’ Thanks, Spencer.

Years later I was made a life member of the gallery. If the mood takes me I can sling an identity tag with a magnetic strip on it around my neck and wander freely about the corridors of power, with the exception of a few hallowed sanctums like the Prime Minister’s lift and the members’ swimming pool—but then again, the last thing you really want to see is an MP in a string bikini or budgie smugglers.

Before I could begin my new life, I had to purchase a tie, get a haircut and trot down to the coin-operated photography booth in the foyer of the railway station in search of a suitable likeness for my first press card. When it arrived, Ian Cross guided me across to Parliament like a proud parent taking a child to their first day of school. We entered the building through an unattended rear door, of which there were several. There is only one entrance for members of the public today. You have to step through a metal detector and your bags are X-rayed. Ian knew the old building well and headed unerringly for Bellamy’s. We went down back corridors that had peeling plaster ceilings and worn carpet. Shallow wooden boxes filled with sand serving as ashtrays lined the walls, along with mysterious dark bronze tulip structures which I later discovered were spittoons. What should have taken just a few minutes took almost an hour because we kept running into politicians he used to cover as a young reporter on the Southern Cross newspaper. They invariably greeted him like a long-lost friend, including former prime minister Sir Keith Holyoake, who boomed, ‘Ian, dear boy, dear boy! How nice to see you!’ He had an incredibly deep voice for such a small man. In one edition of Masskerade, beneath the bold headline ‘TESTICLE TRANSPLANT FOR PM’, I published a news photo of him holding two hairy kiwifruit in the palm of his hand. Given the rich baritone bouncing off the plaster and marble, they should have been coconuts at the very least. I was actually quite fond of old Keith by then. I had warmed to him ever since he told Brian Edwards on television that his favourite book of all time was Origin of the Species by Charles Dickens, and that the simultaneous worldwide eruption of student protest against the Vietnam War was due to sunspots.

We eventually made it to Bellamy’s and caught up with Ian’s old chums in the Press Gallery who could give me some pointers. Bellamy’s back then was a ramshackle old wooden structure that leaned against the south wall of the main building. It was always busy. You came down rickety stairs through an air-lock of cooking smells, tobacco smoke, body odour and hops. Every evening it had the casual gaiety of a benign riot. The bar was one of those continuous-counter affairs that you can still find in the odd country racecourse. Thin partitions segregated the various castes. At the far end, messengers got a bare wooden floor. Next door to them, the press got greasy linoleum. The Members and Members and Guests bars graduated to carpet the colour of bile, sticky with spilled beer. Any pattern had long since been obliterated with cigarette burns. (Ironically, the adjacent dining rooms, similarly segregated on class lines, had grand kauri sideboards, gilded mirrors, crystal chandeliers, starched linen tablecloths, heavy silver cutlery and the finest china.) People entered the cubicle appropriate to their status, hung up coats, tucked briefcases against the walls, then checked the stainless-steel warming drawers to see what tasty morsels were left over from lunch. Sometimes there were crumbed oysters and sweetbreads but mostly it was fish in limp jackets of batter. Stomachs lined with carcinogenic lipids, they were ready to battle through a Japanese commuter crush to the bar where warm beer was served through a long hose.

‘Well, young man,’ shouted Cross above the cacophony, ‘what do you think?’ It was amazing.

MY FIRST COLUMN APPEARED ON 9 March 1973. I acknowledged that, in appointing me their parliamentary correspondent, the Listener had avoided the pitfall of hiring an expert, and I would bring to the hallowed calling of political reportage much-needed bumpkin simplicity. My political philosophy could best be described as dynamic conservatism—which was akin to virile impotence. I was trying too hard.

I read those early columns today with a strange mixture of pride and embarrassment. In my own defence, they were like Bellamy’s fish and chips—best consumed hot off the press before they had time to cool and congeal. They had a galumphing energy and innocence, which automatically made them different from what everyone else was doing at the time.

I didn’t want to write the same column twice, which was difficult because much of parliamentary life was repetitive. When the House was in recess I ransacked my childhood for columns. I wrote about my time at the CIT and grisly anatomy lessons conducted around a cadaver in dimly lit, chilled rooms at the back of Wellington Public Hospital. A morgue attendant with a macabre sense of humour played the same prank every week. I had to dash in first, crank the body out of the rust-coloured embalming fluid and rearrange the partially dissected hands before the innocent girls studying occupational therapy arrived and were confronted with a dead man masturbating. I got an official warning that the article breached the Human Tissues Act.

I was on a downward spiral. In a few short years, I had gone from libelling someone who had risen from the dead to someone who hadn’t. Had I been prosecuted I would of course have gratefully written about the trial. I wrote about anything and everything that I thought might amuse my readers. I was still trying to get the hang of things and was in a near permanent state of high excitement and low-grade anxiety. Plus I was moonlighting on my final edition of Masskerade with John Clarke.

When John rang me from a second-hand clothing shop it provided the inspiration for one of my favourite pieces—The Dead Man’s Coat. It was too good to waste so I later incorporated it into my stage play The Daylight Atheist, on the assumption that it is perfectly acceptable to plagiarise your own work.

I’m now the proud owner–occupier of a dead man’s coat. It’s a very fine coat and must have once been very expensive. I was very pleased with myself when I handed the lady the $10. I said to John, ‘The cloth alone is worth twice that!’ ‘Yes, you’ve got it very cheap, son, probably on account of him being dead and thus in no position to argue.’ It was John who found it for me in one of those small second-hand shops in upper Cuba Street. ‘I’ve got just the thing for you, lad. It’s huge. It should fit you like a surgical stocking.’ It took three assistants to get it off the hanger and across my shoulders. I cooperated from below as best I could by stepping into it with a clean-and-jerk movement. It was truly magnificent. While rummaging through the pockets I came across a discreet label: Anderson and Sheppard Limited, 30 Cellar Road, London W1, and the owner’s name. He’d been knighted. ‘He must have been down on his luck to sell this,’ I commented to John. ‘He’s dead,’ said John. ‘You don’t come much unluckier than that.’ There was no gainsaying that. ‘Is it warm though?’ he asked. ‘As toast!’ I replied. ‘Crikey! He can’t have been dead long!’

IN THE EARLY 1970s, Hunter S. Thompson’s extraordinarily visceral and brutally candid Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, covering the 1972 US presidential election, was the inspiration the world over for a whole generation of fledging political journalists, including me. The young Bill Ralston was an early disciple, and you can still see Thompson’s influence in the gifted descriptive passages of Steve Braunias and the brilliant comic essays of Raybon Kan. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, except Hunter was impossible to imitate even though I tried. His book included these killer lines.

Ed Muskie talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.

Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old wardheeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese Current.

Thompson’s approach to journalism was to swamp his bloodstream with every legal and illegal mind- and mood-altering substance he could grab, then to deafening rock accompaniment pound away at the keyboard of an electric typewriter in a hallucinogenic frenzy before sending dazzling stream-of-consciousness prose to his editors, who were white with panic as deadlines ran over, on a new-fangled invention called a fax machine.

Muldoon had one on the 1978 campaign trail. It was a closely guarded secret. It was the size of a small chest freezer. I saw it being loaded into the boot of a car at Napier airport by two men wearing sunglasses. Granted it was a sunny day, but this added to the air of mystery and intrigue. Rumours swirled that it was a gift from the CIA. Over drinks in a bar that night I poured wine into Muldoon’s press officer and he let slip that staff in National’s election HQ in Wellington could draft speeches for his boss and then transmit them to him anywhere in New Zealand over a telephone line. Holy Toledo! We were shocked and dazzled. These were the days of miracles and wonders.

Thompson called his fax machine the ‘mojo wire’ and he dubbed his writing ‘gonzo journalism’. The novelist Tom Wolfe called it ‘the new journalism’ and The New York Review of Books, which didn’t approve, called it ‘zoot suited prose’—which is a compliment in my book. Thompson was to baby boomers what F. Scott Fitzgerald was to pre-World War Two America—with not dissimilar tragic endings.

I hate seeing people out of control, stripped of dignity and talking gibberish when intoxicated, so I am averse to drug-taking of any description—apart from caffeine, the odd hefty slug of Jameson’s and a glass or two of pinot. I have always maintained there is nothing wrong with double standards as long as they are high.

Christine had returned from a trip to China visiting collective farms, crèches and the like, convinced that Shaun should go into childcare. He was such an eccentric little boy, voluble and full of fun at home, but quite shy and timorous in the outside world. We tried placing him in a perfectly acceptable playcentre in Campbell Street, Karori.

‘You go,’ smiled an older woman running the show. ‘He’ll be fine.’ He was racked with sobs by the time I got to the door. I crouched outside a window for twenty minutes listening to him howl. When my bawling got louder than his I went back indoors and took him away.

A group of like-minded friends was setting up a family group to look after each other’s kids—Shaun had no problems with adults he knew and homes he was familiar with—so we joined. My turn in the child-minding barrel was Friday morning—as luck would have it, the same day as my Listener deadline. I was too busy chopping up apples, dispensing cartons of yoghurt and cleaning up after the odd toilet accident to be a wild and crazy guy. As far as I was concerned, gonzo wasn’t feasible in God’s Own.

The closest any of us ever got to fear and loathing was while covering Rob Muldoon at the height of his considerable powers. My first parliamentary exposure to him came when I was covering Roger Douglas’s Superannuation Bill Select Committee in the old Parliamentary annex behind Broadcasting House. (Douglas was an innovative, reforming, democratic socialist long before he became an innovative, reforming neo-liberal. Only his polite, unswerving, deadly zeal never changed.) Close up I witnessed a nifty piece of footwork by Muldoon that completely blindsided hapless government MPs on the committee. I mentioned him in dispatches:

Most of the Opposition members were on time but only two Government members had arrived. The deputy leader of the Opposition seized the moment. ‘Your lot are late,’ barked Muldoon. ‘Standing orders say we start at ten. Where is your chairman?’ His gravel-voiced delivery and his expression—a frown in the process of becoming a snarl—seemed to unnerve the forlorn Government members. ‘If you lot don’t nominate a chairman, then we will!’ And he did …

IT WASN’T MY FIRST CLOSE encounter with Muldoon. I wrote a piece on him for Chaff after he addressed a capacity crowd of students at Massey and ran rings around anyone foolish enough to challenge any of his assertions. As an exercise in intimidation it was only bettered by Māori activist Dun Mihaka in the same lecture theatre some months later. Wearing heavy boots, short footy shorts exposing thighs and calves the size of tree trunks, and a torn white singlet, he paced back and forth like a caged big cat, except we were the ones feeling trapped. He tore strips off smug Pākehā liberals who thought they should be congratulated for all they had done for the tangata whenua. Despite being outnumbered 300 to one he kept us all cowed and trembling for well over an hour.

Years later we became friends when he asked me to draw a picture of Prince Charles and Lady Di in the back of a speeding Daimler witnessing him baring his tattooed buttocks—which actually happened as they left Wellington airport in a crisp southerly. Dun was very lucky the wind-chill factor didn’t kill him. It was for the cover of his book Whakapohane, which someone should make into a film. When drawing the picture I discovered a tender side to Dun, which I hadn’t expected. ‘Make her, beautiful, eh!’ he purred. ‘She’s a very pretty lady!’

When Sir Robert Jones founded the New Zealand Party in 1984 with the express intention of prising the clenched, arthritic fingers of his old chum Rob Muldoon off the levers of the economy, the party held its inaugural conference in Wellington. Dun, who had joined the party that day, tried to speak to a remit on prison reform. He was denied permission and was asked curtly to leave the stage. He started arguing with the chair. Jones left the stage to call the police. The delegates stared screaming, ‘Out! Out! Out!’ It was a terrible moment for a party congratulating itself on its tolerance—and not the most pleasant moment for Dun either, who listened to the animals baying for some time before turning his back on the hall and dropping his shorts. Horrified members and security guards surrounded him like hyenas nipping at a wounded rhino. From the press benches I could see hurt and a rare fear in Dun’s eyes. I got up and led him away before anything crazy happened, whispering to Dun that it wouldn’t matter who threw the first punch—he would be the only one arrested. He was grateful.

Ironically, when Labour won in a landslide a few weeks later I met a delegation of Māori elders milling about one evening in Parliament’s foyer. ‘We’ve come down to talk sense into these new fellahs, eh,’ said a silver-haired kaumātua with a carved walking stick. ‘We’ve got to get Māori off the tit, Tom. We’ve got to get our young people off the tit of welfare.’ There were affirming nods and murmurs all round. Then his handsome face clouded over. ‘And you know what? We had to pay our own way here, eh! We had to pay for our own airfares!’

Dun’s finest gate-crashing was the time he eased past Parliamentary security and made his way to the august offices of the Speaker of the House, Dr Gerry Wall, who also happened to be his local MP. Wall was shocked to see him. Half rising in his chair, he pointed to the door and demanded Dun leave. Dun replied that given the fact he lived in Wall’s electorate, he had visiting rights. Differing views were exchanged on this matter. It got tense. Dun says he pushed Wall ever so lightly on the chest at this juncture and his ergonomic chair on rollers flew backwards, striking something and depositing the Speaker of the House of Representatives onto the carpet—across which he proceeded to crawl, reaching for the phone on his desk. Dun told me his mind started racing at a million miles an hour.

‘I said to myself, think, Dun, think! You are in a power of shit now, boy! Think!’ Wall’s bony, nicotine-stained fingers were about to dial. ‘Then it came to me!’ Dun slapped his huge hand on Wall’s, pinning it to the table. ‘You tried to touch my cock!’ Wall looked up at him, aghast.

‘That’s preposterous! I did no such thing …’ Dun told me he could see horror and uncertainty on Wall’s blood-drained face, which gave him some hope.

‘I’ve heard about you Pākehā perverts who love brown cock!’ Dun turned on his heels and exited. He expected running footsteps. Nothing. It was the same when he descended the front steps. No shouting, no ringing alarms. He reached his old van parked on the concourse and turned the keys, bracing himself for thumping on the door that never came. He drove off scarcely able to believe his luck.

I WAS PUSHING MY LUCK with Muldoon in the pages of the Listener. He was so confrontational and belligerent in the House that I had no choice but to write about him. Over the next ten years many people would ask me why the press didn’t simply ignore him. My stock response was that would be like driving across the Desert Road on a clear day and refusing to look at Mount Ruapehu—it couldn’t be done.

Shortly after Muldoon’s psychological victory in the Superannuation Bill Select Committee, he was at it again in the chamber. After a Beehive banquet and a bellicose address from a visiting US Secretary of State on the evils of communism where, to borrow Denis Welch’s great line, the Müller-Thurgau flowed like wine, Muldoon was more splenetic than usual during Question Time, accusing the elderly, amiable and somewhat bumbling Speaker Stanley Whitehead of shielding a minister. This is the parliamentary equivalent of a player shoving the referee—at minimum a sending-off offence. Hurt and rattled, Whitehead lamely requested that Muldoon withdraw and apologise. Instead he snarled that he’d had enough and was going to walk out, compounding the offence. His colleagues rushed to his defence, pleading clemency. Muldoon’s scowl softened and with a knowing smirk he rose and said, ‘I made it honestly. I withdraw and apologise.’ Throughout the afternoon. Opposition members came across to speak to Muldoon. Grins and quiet pats on the back were exchanged.

I wrote that the Terror from Tāmaki had done it again, and that it was a schoolboy apology from Parliament’s most famous schoolboy. Tiny hairline fractures began appearing in our relationship about this time. Two years later the wings fell off.

These days Winston Peters employs similar theatrics in the chamber but they lack his former role model’s deadly menace. It doesn’t help that at the height of his outrage Winston will sometimes wink at his bench-mates or flash a grin at journalists in the gallery.

When Winston was a relatively new, second-term Member of Parliament I was exposed to this bipolar skill shortly after I had mocked him in a cartoon. We bumped into each other in a back corridor and he immediately flew into a self-righteous, Old Testament fury—he knew exactly what game I was playing and he wasn’t having it. I reminded him of Mark Twain’s advice that you should never pick a fight with people who buy printer’s ink by the barrel. I was looking for a cartoon idea and he just might feature again. At approximately twice the speed of light his molten rage morphed into silken charm and an infectious crocodile grin bisected his handsome face. I have cartooned him mercilessly and viciously many times since, yet we remain on friendly terms. He sure knows how to hurt a guy.

Most political parties in Parliament host drinks evenings for the Press Gallery, and the Press Gallery reciprocates with a huge omnibus piss-up/barbecue at the end of the year where normally mild-mannered people get absolutely shit-faced. It is estimated that the majority of the members of the Speaker’s Chair Club gained entry to it in the murky aftermath of these Rabelaisian evenings.

The Speaker’s Chair Club is the ground-level equivalent of aviation’s famous Mile-High Club. To qualify you have to engage in an act of sexual congress in the Speaker’s chair, and it has to be with a land mammal of some description. For obvious reasons this is frowned upon when the House is actually sitting. The practice began during the tenure of Speaker Richard Harrison, the loveliest and most genteel of men, a Hawke’s Bay farmer who started the tradition of upholstering the Speaker’s chair in lamb’s fleece. It proved too tempting for the libidinous and Harrison could never figure out why the wool ended up with more lanolin than it ever had on the animal’s back.

Sadly, I never qualified for this most secret of societies, but in March 1974 I was invited to drinks hosted by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in their caucus rooms on the ground floor of the old Parliamentary Library. Journalists and their partners waited in a line to be formally welcomed by the elegantly attired Leader of the Opposition, the former Prime Minister and Attorney General Jack Marshall. The man who once threatened me with blasphemous libel, the man who I had recently drawn declaring he’d set up a shadow cabinet and he was head shadow, greeted me so courteously and so effusively it was almost embarrassing. Equally warm and gracious was his wife Margaret, still a great beauty in late middle age. Next in line was Marshall’s rumpled deputy, in an ill-fitting pale grey suit, white shirt stretched to breaking point on his billowing gut and a poorly knotted tie: Rob Muldoon. He took one look at me, shook his great dome of a head and refused to shake my extended hand.

I was shocked, but pretended to be quite unruffled—a lesson my father had taught me. Grabbing a fruit juice and a club sandwich I worked the room talking to surprisingly affable Opposition MPs until Marshall, with a little help from his friends, climbed unsteadily onto a red leather couch and in his soft, slow fashion and with a thin, damp-lipped smile, announced that next time we met for drinks National would be back in government. Gallery chairman Terry Carter sprang onto the same couch and said the press couldn’t possibly wait that long, and could they bring the drinks forward a few years. This elicited good-natured laughter, but Gentleman Jack was not wrong—except he would not be the leader. Within weeks of that drinks night his deputy had deposed him.

Two years later Marshall invited me to be a guest on the pilot of a television show he was hosting called something like After Dinner with Jack. Towering John Roberts, the left-wing, loquacious and opinionated professor of political studies at Victoria University, was one of the other guests. We pretended to eat a meal until Jack pushed back his plate, tapped a glass of wine and asked our opinions on the great issues of the day. I remember a fun-, banter- and laughter-filled hour ensuing. Afterwards a BCNZ producer armed with a clipboard came dashing into the studio to declare himself thrilled, but could we do it all again please, and could we let Jack say something this time?

Marshall’s demise came as no surprise to regular observers of the House. His aloof immobility contrasted starkly with Muldoon’s constant interjections, endless points of order and withering contributions to debates. Even more telling was the incessant exchange of notes, secret signals and knowing grins that Muldoon exchanged with his colleagues. There was a feeling that Marshall was prepared to let things happen, whereas Muldoon would make them happen.

The Third Labour Government had enjoyed an extraordinary honeymoon in their first year back in office. The Prime Minister, Norm Kirk, was much lauded, both here and abroad, for New Zealand’s fresh and independent voice in world affairs. In the House itself Kirk was an imperial, unassailable colossus. There was a feeling in National’s ranks that to give themselves any chance in the next election they needed to be led by a bare-knuckle street-fighter with scant regard for the Marquess of Queensberry rules. The Member for Tāmaki fitted the bill—even when perfectly still, slumped in his seat, he appeared to be grinding his teeth together. Blessed with a splendidly fierce countenance he would occasionally slowly scan the government benches and this would invariably leave the observed looking queasy and uncomfortable, as if caught in the glare of a searchlight sweeping from a watchtower. In a prison movie Muldoon would be the one leading the rioting and the throwing of food.

About this time, perhaps by sheer coincidence, his first and best book The Rise and Fall of a Young Turk came on sale. I went to the launch in a Wellington bookshop. Devoted fans lined up for autographed copies, asking for dedications to themselves or for relatives. I waited patiently in line then slid my copy onto the desk in front of him. Muldoon looked up without expression.

‘Could you inscribe it “to the fabulously talented, warm and witty Tom Scott”?’ I smiled. He said nothing and wrote: ‘I love your wit—such as it is.’

IN THE TWENTY YEARS THAT I covered politics for the Listener, the Auckland Star and the Evening Post (the latter two now deceased), I attended more party conferences than World Health Organization guidelines say is strictly good for you. Both major parties had their fair share of earnest lunacy. Put simply, Labour saw it as their sacred task to save the world, whereas National’s sacred task was keeping Labour out of office. It meant Labour’s annual get-togethers were like Lent and National’s like Mardi Gras.

At one National Party conference in Christchurch I sat in the back seat of a rental car in Hagley Park on a wet Saturday afternoon watching a girls’ hockey match, while in the front seat, the late Neil Roberts, a television reporter with more pirate charm than a flotilla of Johnny Depps, and Marilyn Waring, National’s rebellious outspoken lesbian, passed a joint back and forth, debating which girl they would most like to take to bed—though they didn’t express it quite that politely. I couldn’t help thinking I was not in Feilding any more.

At an after-match function at a National Party conference in Dunedin’s lovely old town, while music played and corks popped, I pointed to a not unattractive, blousy, Dolly Parton blonde across the crowded room and whispered to my colleagues that rumour had it she was Muldoon’s mistress. At National’s next conference one year later she pushed through the crowd, glowered fiercely and said she had a bone to pick with me.

All wounded innocence, I insisted that I would never say such a dreadful thing and that she was completely mistaken.

‘Don’t bullshit me!’ she hissed. ‘I teach deaf children. I am a lip reader.’

This sort of weirdness just never happened at Labour conferences, which was a great shame. Federation of Labour conferences were never that weird either, but they could get pretty whacky.

I was at their forty-third annual conference in Wellington’s old Town Hall when newly elected chairman Jim Knox, famous for his mangling of the English language, rose to his feet and announced proudly, ‘Fellow delegates! I have been coming to Federayshun of Labour conferences now for twenty-five years in concussion.’ It was hard to disagree with him.

That was the year his secretary mistakenly stapled two copies of the same address together and Jim didn’t twig to the suspicious thickness. Even at single thickness Jim’s speeches were not noted for their linear precision and clarity. Tossing caution and the rules of pronunciation to the wind, he would attempt ad libs. The effect was much like a stereo needle on a dirty LP—halfway through one train of thought the needle in Jim’s brain would skid and he would suddenly be ranting about something entirely different.

On this occasion his improvisations had pushed the speech out beyond the critical 60-minute mark. Bladders were filling, blood-sugar levels were falling, hairpieces were itching, nicotine cravings were kicking in and appointments for casual adultery in nearby hotels were fast approaching (in that regard, they had more in common with National than Labour). Delegates began shifting restlessly in their seats craving the magical words, ‘In conclusion …’

They waited. They waited. And they waited some more. Finally, there was a collective sigh of relief when Jim simultaneously bellowed and mumbled—something only he could do, ‘In conclusion, fellow delegates, lemme say thish! We’re not on a collishion course wiv the Gummerment! The Gummerment are on a collishion course with us! Thank you! Thank you very mush!’ Severe leg cramps prevented most of them from leaping immediately to their feet to applaud, and in that critical micro-hiatus Jim turned the page.

‘Fellow delegates! I have been coming to Federayshun of Labour conferences now for twenty-five years in concussion …’ It was too late. He was already reading the entire speech again. I stole this incident for my screenplay Separation City.

The weirdest National conference of all was just after Marshall’s dumping by his own caucus. The party at large didn’t know it was coming. They weren’t consulted and were still sentimentally attached to their former leader. Matters weren’t helped at their Sunday church service when Muldoon gave the sermon and quoted scripture to the effect that if a limb was diseased it needed to be cut off, while the Marshalls sat stoic and stony-faced in a pew below him.

It was more of a poor man’s Sodom and Gomorrah back at the South Pacific Hotel at the bottom of Queen Street, where most of the press and National MPs were staying. The BCNZ’s silver-haired and utterly charming current-affairs maestro Des Monaghan used the company cheque book to shout a huge swag of us to a raucous meal at the ritzy rooftop restaurant. Wild parties spilled down the corridor I was staying on. I remember being shocked when people poured champagne they couldn’t be bothered finishing down the ventilator shafts. One MP’s wife, half out of her frock, rolled around in a wardrobe with a young reporter. Pat Talboys, the wife of the gentlemanly, universally well-regarded former senior cabinet minister Brian Talboys, slurred tipsily, ‘I hope we don’t get back into government. Our sex life is so much better now we’re in opposition.’

‘Darling, darling …’ demurred the horrified Talboys. So much for power being the ultimate aphrodisiac. You got the feeling National had done something precipitate that they felt slightly ashamed of.