Meet Rodney, the cuddly bulldog

Since Rodney Hide's pundit-defying win, everyone wants to shake his hand. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Rodney Hide is running late. When his next commitment falls due, he tells them apologetically that he'll be there in 10 minutes. "I hate being late," he says with such emphasis you'd never doubt him.

Must be the economist in him, the time and motion man driven to eliminating waste. But also fairness. He didn't want to short-change the backpage.

Such is the demand he's in since his victory in the Battle of Epsom. He was on chat show Sports Cafe during the week where it took a woman removing her top to upstage him.

"No, I didn't get any pictures," Hide wrote on his web blog.

He's become something of a pop figure since defying predictions of his and Act's demise.

Seems everyone in the cafe where we meet wants to shake his hand, and he takes time to respond to them all. He's an accomplished banterer. "Your 21st!" he quips to tipsy laughter from a table of 40-something women celebrating a birthday.

Yes, he has charm.

But when I suggest he is a rock star, he's suddenly coy. Aw no, it was just the underdog thing, he says. "Everyone knows that I was written off and they believed it. And then people felt sorry for me." He says they'd see him out campaigning and think, poor bugger, hasn't got a show.

Then he becomes the upset of the night, the feel-good story , the battler who beat the odds, the polls, the pundits and Labour, which urged supporters to vote for National's Epsom candidate to get rid of Hide and Act, leaving National without a natural coalition partner. And here we are, he's something of a cause celebre.

He seems chuffed in the way someone might be after getting married and escaping execution. "I felt a burden from the time I took over the leadership. I knew whether Act survived or not would largely rest on my shoulders. I was the founding chairman and the first president, and I didn't want to be the leader that saw Act disappear."

He has a knack of enjoying his success that's inclusive. Up close, he's cherubic, bulldoggish, cuddly, unpretentious, and he has a way of making a suit look like dressing down. On arranging to meet, he told me to look out for him. "I'll be the short bald man," he said.

There's mild consternation as he tucks into his bacon and egg bap, washed down with a Diet Coke, that I might report what he's having for lunch. I tell him I will. (It came with salad. Hide left the salad.) He grumbles mildly about the media writing Act off and says he had to give up reading the paper and watching television "or I never would have got out of bed".

Hide says he's always been a positive person, a goal-setter. I ask how he thinks the punters see him. And he says, a never-say-die type, a positive person, a happy person. "Which is all true."

One thing he isn't, is a drifter. His earliest goal was to be a truck driver like his dad. As a pre-schooler he'd accompany him on the road, taking his afternoon nap in the back of the cab. "I loved it because to have a father who was a truck driver, especially as a kid at school, was the greatest thing in the world."

At 15, or was it 14 - "I'd better be careful here" - he had a stint driving a Model S Bedford in a quarry. He liked earning money of his own. A career in the cab beckoned but for his father, who told him to get a trade because "a good job was one where you didn't get wet when it rained and truck drivers get wet". "It was the only instruction my father ever gave me."

He discovered that if he got UE it would knock a year off his apprenticeship. He passed, but a funny thing happened. "I fell in love with biology, with science. I couldn't stop studying. I was going to become a scientist and do something like crack the DNA code because I thought that would be exciting."

You can hear the awe in Hide's voice as he describes the big world Canterbury University must have seemed to the boy from Rangiora, the first in his family to get a tertiary education. 

Hide has degrees in zoology, botany, environmental science and economics. Was the last a move towards politics? No way, he says. "I blundered into politics."

He met former finance minister Sir Roger Douglas in 1993, by which time Hide had seen the world, gone from being a socialist to a liberal and was personal economist to tycoon Alan Gibbs.

"I bounded over to shake his [Sir Roger's] hand and to thank him because, as far as I was concerned, he saved New Zealand from total bankruptcy. I guess he captured for me in those dark days of Muldoon an open positive vision of a better New Zealand."

Douglas told Hide he was writing a book. Oh, said Hide, about how you did it? No, about what we should do next, replied Douglas.

"I was blown away by that. I couldn't imagine having achieved all he had, all the changes he had done, and he's talking about the future. But it's so Roger. Then he turned to me and said, 'Could you help?' "

A ginger group was set up, with Hide as chairman, to lobby for the changes advocated in Unfinished Business. With MMP, the Association of Consumers and Taxpayers became Act, the political party.

Hide has the same reverential tone for Sir Roger you imagine he had as a student for the professors. He tells me of the buzz of having Douglas on the bus helping with this election campaign and of receiving an email of congratulations.

Hide's parents, too, were "over the moon". His dad told him he never doubted he'd win Epsom. You sense that's special, that Hide wants to do them proud. No doubt his wife of 22 years and his 16-year-old son were thrilled, but Hide's tone alters and a protective wall goes up. He doesn't talk family, doesn't involve them in politics. "I don't worry about what they [people] think of me. I do worry about what they think of my wife and son. You won't see pictures of my wife and son ... won't see me walking up to the stage [with them]. It's me that's the politician."

This is probably admirable but no doubt frustrating for his campaign planners, who wanted him photographed with his wife to soften his image.

"Being a politician and publicity was a tough step for me. I can remember going on radio and being petrified and then going on TV and being scared witless."

Interviews are old hat to him these days but there were nerves on polling day. With campaigning banned, he felt like a helpless passenger in a speeding car.

Did he think, "What if this doesn't work out? What then?"

"Never, not once, and do you know why? If you do, you're not giving the campaign your best shot."

Hide reckons he does have a life outside politics, but you wonder.

To relax after a long day hunting votes, he would watch 20 minutes of his favourite movie, Casablanca.

Then he'd tuck up in bed with Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. "Epistemology, philosophy ... just great because it took your mind off politics," he says.

Popper was a professor at the London School of Economics and a defender of liberal democracy. Oh well, it's a bit much to expect the son of truck driver to find escape in a Mills and Boon novel.