KEY POINTS:
Jim Anderton, the socialist MP, who has been, I suspect, having rather a jolly time this week, is staying at the Hilton.
I am delighted about this. I get to use the words "socialist MP" and "staying at the Hilton" in a sentence for the first, and quite likely last, time.
The fact of his accommodation made him fair game for some teasing. Or so you might think. At first he said he actually found hotel rooms a bit claustrophobic. I said we'd be happy to drop him off at the Y. "I've done my share of being billeted out," he said, and spoke of Tokoroa and cups of tea - the good old days.
That was early on. Later, I got around to asking what he is these days - he's a socialist, always has been, he says, although "if you want to categorise me across the world spectrum I'd be a moderate social democrat".
"Who stays at the Hilton?" I say. "Ha, ha, ha," he responded, not for the first time in my hour and a half with the moderate social democrat. "Who's paying?" I ask. "Well, the people are paying for it. But here's the thing. The good news is that when you have a lot of stays in a place they drop their rates." Yes, but you need to have had a lot of stays in the first place, surely?
"What are we going to do? We've got fax machines. We have deliveries at two in the morning, sometimes. I mean, I've stayed in motels where you can't get a phone after nine o'clock."
I was only teasing, Jim. But, really, fax machines? Land lines? I wasn't up to asking what he has delivered, probably by pigeon post, at 2am.
Well, he has been in politics since 1883. "You may well say that. That's a Mike Moore-ism! He doesn't check the facts! Ha ha ha." Since 1963, actually, for Labour in local body politics; as president of the Labour Party from 1979 to 1984; since 1984 in Parliament.
I don't doubt that MPs of all political hues stay at the Hilton. I just can't think of another who would meet a journalist there, unless they were paying for it themselves. I also can't think why he'd let me go on about it, and go to such lengths to defend it.
"No, well, I think it's fair. I was just asked today about all of the perks. Well, is it a perk to fly from Wellington to Christchurch? Well, actually, if you want to move Parliament to Selwyn St [in his Wigram electorate] I'm quite happy to walk to work. I haven't worked out how to walk across the Cook Strait. I haven't quite figured out walking on water yet."
He says this very smugly, with that Cheshire cat grin of his. I have tried to get him to admit that he might be seen as smug because, honestly, anyone listening to him would think it's only a matter of time before he works out how to walk on water.
He's doing this on purpose, and it is a way of emphasising what he has already told me (quite a few times), which is that he doesn't know what people think of him; that he is long past worrying. He's been around too long, had too much flung at him - and has flung it back with dedication. Besides, he says his Catholic conscience is clear, on the political front at least, although there are things in his personal life he could have handled better.
He's just come from cutting a ribbon at a new biosecurity building at the airport. He has cut a few ribbons in his time, which sounds boring. In fact, he says, he "always gets a bit of a kick out of these things" because it gives him a chance to then go on about "big steps forward" and how this and that would never have happened "before we turned up".
When he says "we", he means it a bit royally: as in Anderton, of the Progressive Party, and the Labour coalition. Of which he is, and of the PM in particular and particularly this week, the great defender.
He has got himself embroiled - with great vigour and, I think, relish, although he denies it - in the spectacularly silly Mike Moore-versus-the PM row that has now turned into two ageing gents of the Left (they'd row about that as well) brandishing pop guns in public.
Moore said the PM was morphing into Muldoon. Anderton rushed to her aid. Moore said he thought Anderton was dead. Anderton said many children had had much pleasure in colouring in all of those books Moore boasted of writing. And so on and with many disputed facts about who did what when and who believed what when and who betrayed who when.
Honestly, why did Anderton bother? That was partly why I wanted to see him - to ask this. But also, and I could hardly tell his press secretary this, I wanted to see how life-like he actually was (answer: very), and to see whether he dyed his hair, another of Moore's little pops at him.
Asking why Anderton bothered was the wrong question as the following story - you have to stick with it - will demonstrate.
"The funny thing" about opening all these buildings, he tells me, "is that you end up, I don't know about this one, I don't think so but you end up with those plaques on the wall. I used to see those plaques and they'd be [the name of] the politician who opened this building or post office or whatever. But when I read them they were always, you know, 30 or 40 years ago and all those people were dead. And I thought you had to be dead! To actually get one of these plaques, it was like a tombstone!"
According to Moore, he is dead. "Well, this is true and according to him I dye my hair as well, so ... "
Does he?
"No! I mean Annette King said to me, 'If you dye your hair, Jim, I'd advise you to get hold of your hairdresser and tell her she's not doing a good job'."
Boom, boom.
He set that one up from the moment he launched into what had the casual appearance of the longest story about nothing I've heard in a long time. In other words, he bothered because he is combative, because he wasn't prepared to let what he saw as nonsense go unchallenged and, of course, he's loved every minute of it.
"No. Not at all." He must have enjoyed the colouring-in book quip? "Yep. I did."
He enjoyed a few more at Moore's expense, but I think they're both enjoying it far too much for me to be involved in extending the thing. Anyway, he reckons if he saw Moore in the street, Moore would say, "Oh, gidday, Jim."
Oh, probably. Stranger things have happened. Like Anderton leaping to the defence of his one-time great mate Helen Clark, whom he then fell out with. They've both said awful things about each other, and now they're great mates again? He says he made a "pragmatic, deliberate, political decision" to get on with her again.
He is nothing if not pragmatic, deliberate and political. But for those of us outside politics, you wonder where all the loathing goes, on a personal level. This is a ridiculous line to pursue and earns me one of his little talks.
"You, as a journalist, have to do something which I think most experienced journalists find almost impossible. You have to suspend cynicism and you have to believe the truth. Very hard for journalists, because they find it very hard to believe there is any truth to believe.
"But the truth is I made a decision in 1988 that the Labour Party and the Alliance Party, fighting each other the way we were, we were never going to serve the people."
And so on. Which wasn't what I was asking at all. But I am obviously not an experienced enough journalist to know that you can't go asking politicians who have been around since 1883 questions about airy fairy things like personal feelings.
Still, he might concede his defending the PM could look a little ironic? "I didn't do it because it was ironic or it wasn't ironic." Well, of course not. But it might look that way. "Yes, I suppose that's true. I couldn't possibly comment."
He is very good at talking, and journalists complain that he just keeps talking, over the top of them. "Well, sometimes you have to. What do you want to say? I'm listening."
There is nothing casual about his approach to being a politician. He had printed some of my previous interviews and brought them along so that I would know he had. He had ticked off paragraphs as he read them, so as not to lose his place if he was distracted during the reading. I say: "I'm supposed to be doing the research on you." "Oh, no! I've been around for a long time."
One of the interviews was about a politician who addresses people like a public lecture. Anderton is good at talking; he is even better at doing his homework. He only gave me that one little talk (although he did repeat his point, three times, subsequently.) I was going to claim that I deserved a plaque on the Hilton. To pay him back for all that talking he's done over the years, I kept going long after he said, "You got enough?", which might well have been a world first.
But I was exhausted after it and he skipped off, fresh as a daisy, with his Cheshire cat face on, no doubt thinking, "There's more than one way to skin a journalist".
