KEY POINTS:
John Banks, the amazing transmogrified mayor, peers at me, up and down, very thoroughly. "It is you," he says. What could he mean? No idea. But he did rather pinch my line. I have come to see first-hand this transmogrification, as promised when he ran for his second tilt at the mayoralty. This is a word only Banks would have conjured; "changed" would have done for most people. My line was going to be: "Is it you?"
He shakes my hand, and the photographer's hand, ushers us into his office, then announces he's just going to wash his hands. I have never met anyone who rushed off to wash their hands after shaking mine. When he gets back, I say, "Not an obsessive compulsive disorder thing, is it John?"
"Probably," he says, cheerfully. I think it is fair to say that he would not regard an OCD as anything to worry about. On his desk he keeps a dispenser of anti-bacterial hand wipes, a can of all-purpose insect spray. He says he'd be much worse "if I didn't have these three wonderful kids. The kids have helped with that". Well, they obviously haven't helped enough, have they? I say. He says he used to get his lawns mowed every day, now he gets them done only once a week. "But they are mowed every week." Perhaps he could try not having them mowed. He must know that the sky wouldn't fall in if the grass wasn't cut.
"It would annoy me and it needs to be done. I just have an absolute commitment to doing things right and doing the right thing and doing things on time because everything needs to be done in a timely manner."
He has been fiddling with my coffee cup, lining it up, straightening the teaspoon. When the coffee is delivered, he says to his personal assistant, "Umm, is this for Michele?" Then, to me, "How much milk did you need? It looks like about 12mls. It might be too much." "Twelve mils!" I splutter while thinking, I don't even know how much 12mls might be, and why not 10, or 20? "Ha, ha, ha," he goes, making the odd snuffling noise which precedes his laugh. "I've taken a rough estimate."
He doesn't do rough estimates. If there had been some way of extracting the milk, I have a horrible feeling there would indeed have been exactly 12mls in my cup. And this is quite clever given that I have come to see him about a secret deal over heritage homes that was almost slipped by him this week. Rest assured, he may be a changed man, but he is still a details man.
He says, "Do you notice the pictures on the walls here hang absolutely correctly perpendicular, horizontally?" "Now you come to mention it," I said faintly, thinking, "and we're only five minutes into our hour."
He felt a little speech coming on, so he gave it. "I was just reflecting this morning while walking up my favourite piece of real estate in this great city, Mt Hobson on the northern slopes of Remuera overlooking our magnificent harbour, that this meeting with you reminds me of the advice I was given when I was a very young member of Parliament: nine times out of 10 it doesn't happen and when it does it's only half as bad, and on that basis I've consented to this meeting with you this morning, Michele."
He does like to give these little speeches - he doesn't really do conversation, which is possibly why he is never invited to parties. His manner of speaking, like the way he hangs his paintings, is "absolutely correctly perpendicular".
I don't really know what he's on about, but I'm going to take his meditation on walking and thinking to mean that he is now so philosophical that he won't ring me up and shout and carry on. Not that he ever has shouted and carried on with me (he once told me to be "very careful" in a manner intended to make me go away) but he did once shout through a megaphone at a colleague and called another a wanker. He denies this, although it is not the idea of abusing a journalist that he objects to, merely the language.
"No, no. You don't hear me using the lexicon of some of your interviews. I wouldn't use that kind of language. But I would shout at people." As for the megaphone performance, "I don't recall that, but it's been a long time, but I've been given another opportunity for this privileged position and I'm going to treat it with respect and, at this late stage of my life, I want to bring some gravitas to my role in Auckland City. Not for me personally, but for the Mayor of Auckland City". Which implies his last stint as mayor lacked gravitas. "Oh, I think my last mayoralty had a big component of bull at a gate."
To tell you the truth, I have been waiting for him to stuff up before going to see him in his second incarnation as mayor. He would not be offended by this: "You're always remembered for your mistakes, not your achievements."
But he seems to have been running along rather smoothly. He says he learned from his "three years in the wilderness" that his leadership style had to change and, amazingly, he seems to have managed it. I did ask around a bit and heard "obliging, transparent, inclusive". He says, "It is still important to disagree but it is not necessary to be disagreeable". Which suggests that he does now agree that he was disagreeable. "Of course."
He is not about to agree that he might be seen to be nicer now. That's a wussy concept (and of course Dick Hubbard, whom he refers to only as "my predecessor", which is thoroughly old Banksie, was the nice mayor). "I wouldn't want anyone to mistake my friendliness with weakness because this is a job that needs consistent, decisive leadership."
This week he was alerted, by the Herald, to that secret deal, involving the city council planning boss, allowing the demolition of homes in heritage suburbs. The mayor admitted he had been kept out of the loop.
This is not an admission I can imagine the old Banks having made. "No. Well, the first critical point I need to make is that I am responsible for every single decision taken by every single employee at the Auckland City Council. And, you know, previously I would have been tight inside every single loop and that in itself produces a crippling workload." But I bet there was a bit of the old-style shouting going on.
"I don't tend to get angry at much these days. If I allowed this job to capture me as it did in the first three years, then I'd need to have a weekly visit with my cardiologist." Yes, but did he shout? "I want you to know that the chief executive and the bureaucracy have been given the message."
One strange aspect to the affair this week has been the joining of forces of Mayor Banks and Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee. I am about to ask him about this when - and I swear this is true - a God awful squawking erupts. "Cockadoodle do, cockadoodle do!" This is his cellphone. "I'm an animal rights activist. I'm opposed to chickens being kept in chicken coops ... Oh, greetings. So, Mike, to what do I owe the privilege of this call from the chairman of the Auckland Regional Council? Oh, you've rung me especially to thank me for buying free-range eggs? Oh, you've made my day. My mayoralty has arrived! It's just amazing that I should get a call from the chairman of the Auckland Regional Council thanking me for my moral leadership."
After he hangs up (and I did take the phone to check it was Lee and not some stunt arranged for my benefit), he says, "Now, isn't it amazing how a Tory like myself can have such a good working relationship with a cloth-capped socialist?"
It is fairly amazing, but what about that mad phone ring? "I just love it. Do you know, what I do love is buying wheat and taking it up to Albany on a Sunday, in the pockets of a motorcycle jacket, and feeding it to those beautiful chickens and roosters that wander around the village there. That is marvellous. That's my recreation."
His definition of being an animal rights activist is eccentric - he says he used to get out of his ministerial car in his "meet the people suit" and clamber across ditches to unleash goats on country roads.
He is eccentric. He gets up at 4.15am, if you can say he ever really goes to bed. He's up and down all night. He doesn't really like sleeping. "Michele, you've got to clearly understand that a lot of people die in bed."
He watches telly and reads and thinks and feeds his two cats. "I'm not going to have my cats go hungry in the middle of the night. Somebody might report me to the SPCA."
Does he think he's odd? "Probably." So no change there. The transmogrification might be that in the past he might well have got the huff at the question being asked.
