KEY POINTS:
I was invited on TV One's Agenda programme this week. Act leader Rodney Hide was the main interviewee. My fellow panellist David Farrar asked some intelligent questions ("What are your non-negotiable policies?") which Rodney didn't really answer, ("Sir Roger Douglas for finance minister"), while I just gave him a gentle poke about his mid-life makeover.
What I should have told Rodney is that he needs to get fat again. I used to know Rodney when he was a roly-poly Christchurch academic and a boffin-ish NBR columnist who managed to make complex economic concepts sparkle. He was always good fun at NBR drinks.
I don't think he would be now, though. He'd be drinking protein shakes and wearing that awful hard-boiled-egg blazer. There is something contradictory about the leader of a party that stands for individual freedom choosing to wear a uniform. Especially one that makes him look like a gentleman gigolo at a QE2 tea dance.
Rodney getting fat again couldn't hurt Act's polling, since you can't get more emaciated in the popularity stakes than 1 per cent. The weird thing is, since he has adopted his gym-bunny "Fun Rodney" persona, far from being lighthearted, Rodney seems to take himself far more seriously.
It's like all those former high-kicking celebrities who turn into pompous marathon bores and twitter on about their training regimes and turkey diets. (Actually, for a marathon runner chick, Kerre Woodham is still rather "curvy", to use the weasel word beloved by women's magazines.)
Rodney's transformation simply confirms my belief that people go a bit loony when they lose a lot of weight. Just look at his former colleague, Donna Awatere.
Dropping a few stone must do something wonky to your metabolism. For some, it's like the class nerd who suddenly realises they could get a shag - a sudden rush of hormones to the head or other parts. For others, it seems to give them a heady sense of power that they had the willpower to get slinky.
But being thin can be an impediment to a politician. We might envy people who wear tapered jeans but we are more likely to trust those who need a belt and braces.
Can you imagine Winston Churchill and David Lange without their heft and prodigious appetites? ("My body is a temple," someone famously said to Lange. "My body is a warehouse," Lange shot back.) There are probably sound anthropological reasons why we feel more comfortable with leaders of stature, since thinness is equated with being neurotic and flaky.
Business leaders, too: Colin Giltrap, Craig Norgate (although now a shadow of his former self) and Theresa Gattung. Oh, and Owen Glenn - size confers authority.
I don't know whether Rodney getting porky again would make Act more attractive but voters at least might pay attention to his worthy campaign not to let Winston Peters off the hook over the Glenn donation, rather than his cult of personality. As Act's departing adman John Ansell must have realised, a vote for Act risks being a vote for male mid-life crises.
The Government is convinced that allowing competition for ACC would not be a vote-winner. They should see some of the many emails I received in response to my whimper last week about the horrors of ACC premiums for the self-employed.
"ACC dips, dips and double-dips from me. They get a payment from my full-time employer and another payment every time I write some pithy little paragraph for someone else," says another writer.
That was a common theme. As another correspondent noted: "I paid once as an employee of a company, and then again - more than $400 - when I did one freelance job that brought in $1000 ... Once tax was taken out as well, that job earned me virtually nothing ..."
deborah@coneandco.com
