Michele Hewitson Interview: Chris Laidlaw

Free spirit: Chris Laidlaw says that in all the jobs he's had, from All Black to diplomat to MP, he's never felt he fitted in. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Chris Laidlaw, who may or may not be exactly like that chap you hear on National Radio every Sunday morning, has a new book out, called Somebody Stole My Game. The blurb for his session (today at 2.30pm, at the Aotea Centre) at the Readers and Writers Festival reads: "With the world cup less than 18 months away, it's time we talked about rugby." I said: "Is it? Are you sure we're not sick of talking about rugby?" He said, "Ha, ha. I don't know. Some people can't get enough of it ... And I've been thinking about this for quite a long time and I wanted to write a sort of philosophical book about what it is and where it came from and why it is what it is."

I wasn't sure why he cared. He seemed, for years, to be sick of being known as the former All Black. He said, "Oh, I care about rugby. I've been involved with it on and off all my life."

He has also spent much of his life getting over, or getting other people over the idea that he was an All Black, and what he calls "the imagery" of being an All Black and hence a boof head, when what he is really like is ... Well, what?

I'd hoped he might be coming to Auckland for the festival party in advance of his session so that I could attempt to figure that out, and I wanted to see whether he's the same in person as he is on the radio. But when I phoned, he said he wasn't coming to the party so I said, oh well, he'd have to remain the voice on the radio. I thought he probably was the same person.

But he said that the person on the radio was a much more polite person, and that was because National Radio was "Edwardian" in some regards (this has the air of a complaint, but who knows?).

He then said that some people accused him of having no sense of humour, and that he thought this was quite funny. I said I thought it was a bit sad. He said that, at 66, he is "well past the point where I worry about what anyone thinks of me now".

After this rather odd conversation, I phoned him back and said we could do the interview on the phone. He was, after all, a voice on the radio. He would later tell me that he is hardly ever recognised, "and that's nice. I mean, it wasn't always like that. But it's oppressive in a small society, if you're a reasonably reticent, reasonably shy kind of person, and I think most of us are in our own ways."

While he was telling me this, I was looking at a picture from the Herald files, dated 1970, of him and his wife, Helen Kedgley (Green MP Sue Kedgley's twin) on their wedding day. His files are about a public figure. Was he a reasonably reticent, reasonably shy kind of person? "I certainly was. I kind of got over it."

So he is at home in Wellington, sounding just as he does on the radio, talking to me from his "sort of a study but it has a door at one end and a door at the other so there's a lot of traffic".

I asked him to describe what his sort of study looked like. He said, "The phone and laptop, three or four trays full of paper and a huge pile of books." Then he said, as though he had just noticed there was something of possible interest: "What is sitting beside me is ... a rather large and curious metal mounting on which there is an old rugby ball. And all the All Black test captains have signed it, and this was done about 10 years ago." It sounds awfully attractive. "It isn't. But it reminds me all the time of that part of my life."

Oh, yes, that other part - or one of the other parts - of his life. The list includes: Race Relations Conciliator; Rhodes scholar; ambassador; Labour MP, for a year; and now broadcaster and independent member of the Wellington Regional Council.

With the exception of his current jobs, he didn't much - according to me - enjoy any of his earlier incarnations. When you read his files there seems to be a theme, which is that he has never quite fitted in and that he has been outspoken about saying so, and hence often reviled for not just shutting up and appreciating his good fortune.

You are, for example, supposed to say only gracious things about the glory of having been an All Black. He wrote a book, "a worm's eye view", called Mud in Your Eye, which broke the "what goes on tour, stays on tour" rule. He's said: "I fought being one of the country's pet rugby players for years. It used to get right up my nose." He said, of campaigning: "I was never a personality who could stand in draughty supermarket entrances asking people to vote for me. It was beyond me, so I simply didn't do it."

So why did he want to be an MP? He says he spent much of his life doing what other people thought he would be good at doing. He got talked into things. "Take politics, for instance. My friends told me I was ideally suited to going into Parliament." I suggested that, with the benefit of his own retrospective view of himself, that his friends didn't know him very well - and that he didn't either. "Well, that's probably right, because none of us knew what we were at all suited for really."

He wasn't even a member of the Labour Party, and was signed up "ex post facto and I suppose that tells you something".

It tells me almost everything, given the theme of his serial careers, and what comes across as serial discontent. He hated the public image that went with being the ex-All Black; he loathed the politics of rugby; complained about his role as the constrained diplomat and didn't enjoy the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He didn't ever fit in, anywhere. "Yep. That's probably right. I can't help seeing the inconsistencies and the sort of stupidness that go with a lot of those sort of jobs." But they were his jobs! "Mm, hmm, yeah." Which makes him sound a bit ... I wasn't sure. "Frivolous?" he helpfully offered. That wasn't quite the word I was after.

He said he has had jobs where he thinks, "I've fitted into and done well".

He loved being the Race Relations Conciliator, and the High Commissioner in Africa and, "You know, I really enjoy being a regional councillor in Wellington." He's described this as "prosaic but vital". I'm afraid I said it sounded boring. "Yeah, well, there's a non-boring dimension to it and it's a whole realm of sustainability ..." I wasn't going to let him go on, because this is a pet subject and he has very long opinions on things - and I was thinking of the description of his study.

He knows people have accused him of being arrogant and pompous, because it's been put to him before and of course he doesn't enjoy hearing it - who would? He says now that, "if you're opinionated, then you're a target, I think".

What strange things people accuse him of, I said. He said, "Oh!" Such as giving himself an Oxbridge accent. "Oh! Really? And when did I do that?" After his time at Oxford. "I can't remember that. I wasn't exactly captured by the system. I spent half the time, like a lot of colonial students, trying to reassert your colonialism."

David Lange wrote in his memoir that Laidlaw was "self-centred and indolent". He says it hurt at the time and that Lange was "waspish", and he had written about Lange's shambolic organisational skills so perhaps it was payback.

Winton Peters called him a "sickly white liberal". "I can remember asking myself, 'I wonder if I am a sickly white liberal and what does it actually mean?"' It means something very rude and he's not one, he says, "nor a sickly brown bigot". That might be evidence that he's not always that polite chap on the radio.

He ought, on paper, to be a bit of a free spirit. He never fitted in. He was into New Agey pursuits: self-improvement courses, dotty sounding massage therapies. At Oxford he drove around in a pink Pontiac "while everyone else rode bicycles. So that was by way of saying something." Yes, but what?

It's telling, I think, that he has long been interested in the question of class in New Zealand, which is about where people fit in, or don't. Where does he fit? "Oh, somewhere in the middle, I think."

You can see that he had to reinvent himself. "I got labels put on me right from the beginning." He had to prove he wasn't just an All Black; that he wasn't thick; that he didn't get jobs just because he was a "pet" rugby player. He despised the "stuffiness" of Oxford, and the Foreign Service, yet there is a whiff of stuffiness, I think, attached to his public profile.

I figured if he wasn't stuffy, he couldn't mind being asked. He said, "No. I'm less stuffy than I was."

That sounds like an admission of past stuffiness. "Joining the Foreign Ministry means there's a certain stuffiness thrust upon you," he said - a magnificently stuffy construction of a sentence.

You see, he does have a sense of humour, of the sort known as tinder dry. I asked about his close friends and he said Peter Dunne was one. One doesn't want to be less than polite but some people think Peter Dunne is boring. "Yes. But he's assiduous. And he's very interesting to listen to." I may have laughed, immoderately and not at all politely. But that wasn't the joke. He said, "I can understand why people think he's boring." Why? "Because he's not given to hyperbole." Is he? "A bit more than Peter, I suspect."

At the end of my hour on the phone with the chap on the radio I asked who I'd been speaking to: the chap on the radio, or the other guy? He said, "Somewhere in between. The man in the middle. Something like that." And that's a reasonable answer to another question: What's he really like?