Bill English: Gearing up for the hard sell

By MICHELE HEWITSON

On a miserable, rain-streaked Wednesday morning, the little Piper Cheyenne bearing the opposition leader towards Ardmore aerodrome is struggling to make headway.

With a strong wind at its nose, it will arrive 50 minutes behind time.

Bill English is going to be playing catch-up all day.

He might as well get used to it: this is a game he's likely to be playing all the way to the polling booths on July 27.

He bends his frame awkwardly out of the Piper, hauls his battered Smokefree sportsbag out and strides through the mud to the bright-red Squirrel chopper.

Anyone who thinks the most exciting thing about the National Party is Michelle Boag's suits might think again after a day on the campaign trail with English.

Actually, what he's doing today, buzzing over Karaka in this hired helicopter with its livery of the wrong colour, is fulfilling obligations for his Fronting Up Tour.

Now he's combining these meet-and-greets with business concerns with the concerns of campaigning.

He turns up in one of those suits of his - the contours sag shortly after he dons them - for a day grappling with mud that will end in a public meeting

at Papakura.

He really should have brought his gumboots. Because this is how glamorous a day out with Bill English is.

From Ardmore we fly over the rooftops of Papakura, while English jokes that he's checking to see people have mown their lawns. We land on a soggy handkerchief of green at NZ Hothouse, a horticultural outfit, where English gives a little talk to the assembled staff in their smoko room.

They've been lured with the promise of a free lunch. He talks about the striking teachers, and law and order. They want to talk about that boxing match.

He says, like a little boy lit up with the excitement of a party: "Can I have a piece of cake?"

Back into the chopper for the next visit: a look around Eric Watson's Westbury Stud.

We land in a paddock that is more mud than grass. When we've trudged halfway through it, a car arrives to pick us up. There isn't room for everyone, so I am forced to perch on the knee of Paul Hutchison, the National MP for Port Waikato, who has joined the party.

He tells me that in a former life he was a gynaecologist. Well, I did promise glamour.

Inside some flash stables, English listens to a pitch for tax relief for depreciation on stallions and has his photo taken with a horse called Cullen.

The horse pokes its head over its stall and does that horsey thing with lips pulled back over teeth. I tell English that the horse is laughing at him. He is adamant that it's actually laughing at me.

For someone who has a reputation for being a bit dull, English has a very vivid imagination (or very good spies).

He has obviously decided that I am some sort of citified sissy who spends her time in "cafes and bars". He points out an electric fence and says: "I can take a jolt. I'm not sure about you."

He says he's glad to see I'm learning things - like how to back a car out when it's stuck in the mud - because I plainly "don't get out enough".

By the time we get to AS Wilcox and Sons vege processing plant, where English gets right out among the spuds and onions, we are all splattered in mud. English more than most. He has leapt a ditch to pick a handful of some weed. What on earth is he doing?

"I wanted," he says, as though only an imbecile would ask, "to see what it was".

Y OU can't imagine most senior politicians (and certainly not the prime minister) carrying on like this.

While there is something endearing about his not caring about his muddiness, about his being so curious about an unidentifiable weed, you couldn't call this sort of carry-on statesmanlike.

It is hard not to think of those hayseed descriptions that have stuck to the former farmer from Dipton - despite the fact that he has more recently been a policy analyst and a minister of finance.

He says, when we talk later in his hotel lobby, "that coming in as a new leader, people want to slot you in somewhere and I've been a bit hard to slot. But that's changing".

He reckons he's difficult to stereotype, which is fine by him. Being Bill English means being a bloke who has "done a range of things. I can hang a gate and I can talk about Foucault's type of literary criticism".

He finds it terribly amusing when he hears "unconfirmed reports of my intelligence".

He has said he is more comfortable spending 15 minutes in conversation with a few people than working a room full of 200, that he is a naturally shy man who would not describe himself as charismatic. "I haven't had a job [before] selling Bill English. As a leader you just step up, I guess."

He finds himself enjoying playing the salesman. "When you're in finance ... there was a reasonably limited scope of people who think they should be talking to you. When you're the leader, everyone feels like they can and should talk to you."

Still, the big question is whether English can get them to vote for him.

To get people to do that - and the latest polls show National languishing at 27 per cent - he is going to have to sell harder. He is going to have to look and sound, as Herald commentator Colin James pointed out this week, "like an alternative prime minister".

Observing him in the smoko room of NZ Hothouse, he looks like a man easily overlooked. He has a pleasant face but a peculiar habit of leaning in from his shoulders down which makes him look intense, but off-balance.

The boss here uses English's presence to give his workers a ra-ra speech about the importance of business.

The gynaecologist jumps in over his leader when a manager asks a question about National's stance on the Kyoto Protocol. It makes English look as though he doesn't know the answer.

One on one, he's much more at ease. The workers want to hear about his kids. Six of them, he says. There's a collective and admiring "wow!".

A young Tongan woman on the onion-sorting conveyor is totally charmed. She wasn't going to vote for him. Now she will.

That's one vote for you, Bill, I tell him. He doesn't think that's very funny. He is, he tells me, going to win this election.

For all his assertions that he's doing just fine selling himself as leader, he's obviously aware of the general perception.

"I'm easily underestimated. For a younger politician [he is 40], people expect you to be more obviously trying to make an impact - and I don't do that. People can conclude that either I don't quite know the issues, or that I'm not determined. All of which are wrong."

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