Labour's tactician at war

Hodgson defines himself as someone who is direct, who doesn't suffer fools and is 'sharp-tongued'. File picture / Mark Mitchell

It's late on a Wednesday, and one of Parliament's angry (not so young) men is sitting in his ninth floor office, his shoes kicked off beside him, and the wreckage of someone else's political career hovering over his shoulders.

National leader Don Brash has just fled Wellington and dashed home to Auckland to repair his marriage amid a media frenzy surrounding rumours of an affair.

Ka pow! You'd think that after overseeing a week of personal attacks on Brash, Labour party strategist Pete Hodgson would be polishing his rifles and revelling in the fallout from the political king hit.

But not so. Labour MPs have backed well off. Relentlessly taunting Brash about the alleged "other woman" in Parliament is one thing, rubbing salt into the wounds of his marriage is, it seems, another.

Isn't it odd, I suggest, that you go for the jugular, then when the proverbial finally hits the fan, you instantly back off and pretend to be gentlemen?

"It's humanity," Hodgson insists. "I know it's been written up as a code of secrecy and a no-go area and so on, and in some respects that's right. It's to say that the person is a public person, and we are all public people with personal lives." And we don't like other people intruding on our personal lives. "It's not about feeling sorry for him. We all make our own beds. But there'll be grief there somewhere for him and for others. I don't know the details.

"I don't know who is aggrieved or who is feeling grief about what. But it would be unconscionable to take advantage of someone in that circumstance. It's not just politicians who say that. That's what people say."

Unconscionable? This is coming from the war tactician for the Labour Party who has overseen a litany of attacks on Brash in the past week in an attempt to deflect attention from Labour's $425,000 pledge card controversy. This is the strategist who National blames for being a crucial player in the Parliamentary hoedown that National says led to Brash's marital woes becoming public.

To be fair, a leak within the National caucus led to the "affair" word being made public.

But Hodgson is the man right wingers really love to hate, the one they call Beady Eyes, and the man National deputy leader Gerry Brownlee recently refused to debate because, he said, Hodgson was a "platitudinous f***wit".

Along with ministers Trevor Mallard and David Benson Pope, Hodgson is known as one of Labour's bully boys - the blokes set up to go on the attack in Parliament and to head up controversial issues in public. But like the issues he doggedly fronts, Hodgson is rarely that black or white. This is a man who accepts the description of himself as "fierce" but who rescues stray animals and is known, by his friends, as a bit of a mad animal whisperer.

An MP from the opposition once described Hodgson as one of Parliament's nice guys. When the MP first came to Parliament, Hodgson stood out for being helpful and caring outside the house.

"So why," the MP wanted to know, "is he so angry?"

Hodgson denies he is. "I don't well up with temper. I don't throw things. I can be very sharp tongued."

Perhaps "fierce" is a better word, I suggest, and he strokes his silver white beard, cut to exactly the same length as his silver white hair, then concedes a nod of agreement.

"If you want to say fierce, that's fine. There's going to be some truth in it somewhere. But I'd use 'direct' or 'doesn't suffer fools' or 'far too sharp' - that sort of thing."

However you describe him, Hodgson's place on the political landscape is not what you would expect of a veterinarian, with a slightly hippy bent, who lets chickens roam around his lounge and was born on the shores of Whangarei harbour in 1950.

"I had a great childhood," he says, with two teacher parents who had little money but plenty of aspirations for their two children.

"We had meat twice a week, and the rest of the time we had to eat fish, like snapper, which we would go out and catch outside our front door. It was a glorious upbringing."

By the time he was 12, Hodgson had set his sights on being a vet. But unlike the more than 50 per cent of children his age with a similar ambition, Hodgson pulled it off.

He has no idea where his fascination with animals comes from. But he spends more time telling me about raising spiny rock lobster crayfish in a 1000 litre recirculating aquarium in his lounge than about almost any other subject.

He worked as a vet till he knew how to do it blindfolded, then quit to take up teaching secondary school physics.

Was he any good? "Really good. In four years only two kids failed. Mind you, they were pretty bloody good kids."

He ran businesses, a fruit selling operation called the "Ancient and Royal Anti Scurvy League", but by 26 he was already heavily involved with the Labour Party. In 1990, he was elected MP for Dunedin North.

It's a job he says he loves. It fits in perfectly with both sides of his personality - the compassionate Labour MP and the ruthless political tactician.

"People who can't be expected to know get helped by me - that's what I do on a Saturday [in his electorate]. That's what I love doing, empowering people. People who should know better, well, they're told so, usually with no notice."

So does he like the argy bargy of the debating chamber? "Oh yes," he sighs. "I am afraid I'm a bit combative. But it can be a very funny place, it's also fairly predictable - we seem to have a cultural rut in New Zealand politics where its almost as if the choreography has been predetermined. And I just say I think the opposition is deeply in a rut in the way it manages its attacks on the Government."

He would say that. National was on fire till last week, with campaigns aimed at Labour over its pledge card spending and the Taito Philip Field affair. Facing constant accusations of corruption and theft, Hodgson fired back on Tuesday, launching another attack on the Exclusive Brethren's support of National during the last election.

Labour followed with more attacks in the House, peppered by other threats to "dish the dirt" on National. Then the taunting started, led by Trevor Mallard, about Don Brash and his alleged affair.

As a party strategist, was that something Hodgson sat down and organised? "No," he says. "The emails I leaked on Tuesday [concerning the Brethren] was planned and discussed, the 'affair' word, which happened when I wasn't even in the House, would not have been discussed. That would have been part of the jousting."

What followed was a week of chaos, with the small parties threatening to walk out, and then Brash's statement that he was having marital difficulties and had headed home to sort them out. "That wasn't organised," says Hodgson.

Wasn't it predictable after all the taunting? "I didn't predict it."

But what did he expect would be the upshot of the taunting and jousting in the house? "That they would stop calling us liars."

Even though Labour kept repeating this seething threat that they knew stuff, that they had dirt? "Let me just repeat to you, in case you think that this is entirely driven by logic or carefully taken decisions: we started to get pissed off. We don't see ourselves as corrupt. We don't see that we have misspent the money. We don't believe it. If we believed it, frankly, we'd pay it back."

Could they afford to, though? "We would have to."

But Labour won't. The party believes that the fact that it was allowed to spend hundreds of thousands on pledge cards in previous elections means it was allowed to this time, too, despite reports from the auditor-general to the contrary.

National, Hodgson keeps repeating, had exploited a loophole that allows donations to come to political parties through trusts and had actually "laundered" money through two trusts into which anonymous donors had deposited funds.

Tell Hodgson that many people don't accept that Labour innocently spent the pledge card money, and he gently starts to fume. "I don't care. Perception is not reality. I'm responding to the idea that because the perception is that we're guilty that therefore that's near enough to being guilty. It's not. There is a natural justice issue here of some consequence, and I'm standing up for it strongly."

And at this point you'd swear Pete Hodgson, animal whisperer, shoeless minister of the Crown, is looking very close to angry. Nevermind. We will settle for fierce.