Dialogue: Politicians are cannibals ...

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Who'd stand for Parliament? Who'd like to volunteer for heartless treatment during a coronary scare, or be abased before the nation for something less than pristine in the past?

Who'd like to be told from the country's highest court that they have less right to their reputation than those who don't put themselves up for election?

Not many. Political parties work hard to recruit candidates of sufficient calibre. The pay is not great, the perks quickly pall, the hours are punishing and the power, unless you get very close to the top, is minimal.

In return you accept that you are public property to be used as required - social worker, business booster, guest speaker, standing joke - and you stand to lose your job every three years.

You know that any skeleton in your closet is probably known to one or two other MPs, because you, too, have received strange mail about the odd member which you simply passed to the police.

At least if things threaten to get really rough you will be surrounded by a loyal party, won't you?

Watching the agony of Dover Samuels this week was a sharp contrast to the Maori loans affair.

Remember that? The Maori Affairs Department was implicated in a bid by a few indigenous entrepreneurs to raise a huge loan from dubious sources in Hawaii.

It was not the scandal of the century but Winston Peters was riding it for all it was worth to him and in Parliament the Minister of Maori Affairs, Koro Wetere, was wilting under the onslaught.

The only common feature of that affair and Mr Samuels' trouble this week is Richard Prebble.

After several weeks of unremitting hell for the Lange Government, word went around the press gallery one day that Mr Wetere would resign to take the heat out of the issue.

He didn't. It is said that when Richard Prebble realised what was afoot, he stormed upstairs and told his colleagues they were out of their minds. On no account should they hand a scalp to the Opposition.

They could tough it out. They did, Mr Wetere survived and when the subject was exhausted there was no discernible damage to the Government.

When Helen Clark received Richard Prebble's letter about her Maori Affairs Minister Dover Samuels this week, she acted much as her forebears in the fourth Labour Government were going to do with Mr Wetere.

Now in Opposition, Mr Prebble looked as surprised as anyone when Dover Samuels took a dive. It was the Prime Minister's idea, evidently.

She accepts Mr Samuels' word, as she did when he told her in January that nothing illegal happened in his sorry affair about 15 years ago with a teenager less than half his age.

The only thing that has changed since January is that Mr Prebble knows, and she fears what he would do with the information in Parliament. He could do what Winston Peters did. And Dover Samuels could have fiercely denied any wrongdoing and challenged his accusers to go to the police.

Instead, Mr Samuels has been thrown to the wolves - and perhaps he deserves to be.

He won't recover, whatever the result of the criminal investigation. In the likely event that the police do not present Helen Clark with a reason not to let him return, she has to think of one - a reason she was didn't have in January.

"Politicians," I once heard a High Court judge mutter after hours, "they're cannibals."

But there are codes to the cannibalism. The codeo holds that they do not take advantage of ill health. Would that the same decency and taste were observed by the rest of us.

When Norman Kirk was admitted to hospital with the illness from which he died, Sir Robert Muldoon famously sent him a card saying, "Get well soon Norm, a pensioner needs your bed."

The press, when it heard, were suitably disgusted. The incident has been reported ever since in tones of scorn, probably unjustly. Nobody at the time knew how ill Kirk was and Muldoon was making the kind of crack that men of that era understood.

When Jenny Shipley was rushed to Wellington Hospital with a coronary tremor recently, all sides in Parliament observed the code. Not all of the public and press did so.

Whenever a politician receives urgent treatment there are people who can be counted on to suppose they have jumped a waiting list.

(If it were possible to pull political strings with members of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Mrs Shipley's prospects would not seem high.)

All politicians expect to deal with that nonsense. But they can at least expect that newspapers deal with it rather than dwell on it.

And they have a right to be spared gratuitous comment on their health and lifestyle such as a particularly despicable little piece, dripping with schadenfreude, that confronted the defeated Prime Minister last Sunday.

Even politicians, believe it or not, have feelings and families.