Michele Hewitson Interview: Bob Harvey

In his office, Bob Harvey has a picture of himself in a small pair of blue togs from a time when he went swimming at the Tepid Baths. Photo / Greg Bowker

"I don't know what to make of that," said Bob Harvey, the Mayor of Waitakere City, at the end of our hour. That made two of us. He has, as he reminded both of us, successfully avoided talking to me for almost 10 years, so I ought to have been able to come up with a few questions.

I had, obviously. I just didn't get to ask more than a couple.

We started off cheerily enough. He took us on one of those tours of the council offices that mayors love to give. This is usually a sort of showing off. Mayor Bob, as he is known out west, sells his tour as a sort of anti-showing off. He likes to tell you that there are no plaques to him in his city. His picture doesn't hang in his building. "By decree!" he said, regally.

We met him in front of the wooden board in the foyer which lists the names of the mayors. There are two for Waitakere City: Assid Corban, Bob Harvey. Underneath Harvey's name is space enough for a couple of dozen more mayors, but of course there won't be any. When the Super City comes into being, that's it. Harvey is the last mayor of Waitakere. Perhaps he could take the board home as a memento, I suggested. He snorted and said his wife would chop it up.

We looked at portraits of writers and artists. I said, "What will happen to them?" He said, "They'll be gone with the westerly wind".

This was about as cheery as accompanying the Queen on the final inspection of the royal yacht. I looked at his face and said, "Are you in mourning?" He said, "I am. I am. I'm in mourning."

We went to his office and looked at his pictures. There's one of a man swimming at the Tepid Baths. It is a picture of the pre-mayoral bum, clad - thank goodness, given his penchant for nudity - in a small pair of blue togs. Why has he got that on his wall? "It's a bloody great picture." He reached into a cupboard and hauled out a feathered cloak. He said, "John Tamihere gave me this". I said something rude about what he might look like in it and he said, "Right! That's it," and shoved it back in the cupboard. Feathers flew everywhere.

"You've got the moth!" I said. He gave me a look, but he has got the moth, really. Or the moth has got him.

He said, "I'm grieving. I've never had a divorce but this is like a divorce. I'm not leaving her; but she's leaving me."

Then he talked for a long time about "the end of civilisation as we know it". This is not about the Super City but it is, in his state of mind, an entirely natural progression of thought. I don't need to quote him extensively because he's been working - obsessively, because that's the way he always works - on a paper about global warming which he'll release next week. A preview: By 2020, rises in sea levels will mean "goodbye half of Wellington, half of Auckland ..." By 2030, New Zealand will be re-colonised by millions of refugees from global warming.

He appeared deeply, anxiously gloomy. "Yeah." All the time? "No, of course not. I'm looking for glimmers of hope and I want to tell you, I don't think it's all over, but ... You've got to shake people out of the age of stupid."

He really believes this. He said, a trifle sniffily, "a number of us, globally, do. We're not some secret sect."

His great mate Warwick Roger once launched one of his books by saying: "'Sir' Robert is, I think, a little mad. He's the only mayor of a major New Zealand city I know who ... wants to be fired out of a cannon, who has been photographed wearing high-heeled shoes and who swims nude on the shortest day of the year."

He also used to be a very successful ad man, responsible for partly creating the public images of two prime ministers: Norman Kirk and David Lange. So that list - the cannon, the heels - sounds more like stunts to me.

I was thinking about another mayor, Boris Johnson, who is sometimes mistaken for mad. The phrase crazy like a fox seems more apt, for both mayors. "Yeah, that makes sense. I'm not mad. I'm hugely sane."

He has believed some things that might sound a bit mad. He believed that Kirk was killed by the CIA (and was ticked off by the then PM, Helen Clark, for saying it when he was president of the Labour Party.) He has been obsessed with this for years but you'll have to wait to hear what he thinks now. He is planning a revelation. "I think it's more complex. I'm like one of those famous detectives that never give up. I'm very close now."

He's been mayor for 17 years and seems much loved and respected. I was trying to figure out what had happened, because he can't have had, to pinch his assessment, "a brilliant career" as an adman, by being one of the nice guys.

He once wrote, about a mentor, that "he taught me how to scheme to be successful".

When I remind him of this he says, "I think I've changed from scheming to be successful. I was a young man. I was ambitious."

And then, at 50, he found out he'd been adopted. "I never saw my skin until I was 50. I believed I was somebody. I had a different name. My name is not Bob Harvey." He was first named Anthony Regis, after two nuns at the Home of Compassion orphanage. He says, of his adoptive parents, "I was the chosen one and I respect that, but it was like putting a hedgehog into a sparrow's nest."

He had a daughter when he was 21 who was also adopted and found him when she was 35. (He and his wife Barbara have five children.) He says, about being the mayor, "That's why I'm good at this, because I'm damaged."

Once he discovered this "wrenching thing" about himself, he seems to have become a different person. A nicer person? "Yeah, I think so. I'll take calls from people in the middle of the night. I'll go and see a dead child whose father has run him over in the driveway ... Oh, shit."

This was the bit neither of us knew what to make of. He wept. "I'm sorry. Oh, f***. It gets a bit close. It's the enormity of it, the enormity of the job ..." He cried some more and apologised some more and I apologised for starting it by asking if he was in mourning. And then we sat there and I tried to think of a question.

He'd just given me the answer to a clumsy one about how the public image of the image-maker might differ from the private person. "It's the person I am in this room. That person mightn't be the person they see during a council meeting. But to be honest, I didn't realise my emotions were so close to the surface. You disarmed me."

I don't think I did at all, but it is, in an odd way, very kind of him to say it. He said, "I could have given you the mayoral PR bullshit. But I thought, no. I really want someone that is bloody brave to understand what I tried to do and what I am as a person."

Now that was too flattering by far (he was the brave one; I just belatedly offered a tissue). But this was beginning to feel like his retirement interview. "Yeah. Maybe you're not wrong."

He's not going to stand for Super Mayor. He might not even support Len Brown. "I think I might not even do that." Of course his idea of retirement is to go on with his obsessions. He has always been exhaustingly energetic. He disapproves of laziness. "Yeah. I've been working since I was 10. I was an icecream boy at the Cameo Theatre."

He plans to train his dog to sniff out ambergris. "By the time I'm 70, I'll be a millionaire. Ha, ha." His dog is called Chester. All of his dogs have been called Chester and all of his children's dogs are called Chester. "We think it's quite a good name." I say I think it's appalling to name dogs after previous dogs. "The dog doesn't know," he says, soothingly.

Then, "you ask good questions", which really means I ask idiotic questions but, never mind, he'll answer the question I should have asked, which is about his next book. "I'm going to do a seriously big book about the west coast." I venture that I think he's already written that book, because he's always writing about the west coast, but no, this is "fact and fiction and the past and the present and the future".

He reads two books, obsessively, obviously. They are Moby Dick (he kindly informs me that this is not a book about whaling, but about wisdom and gravitas) and the works of Marcus Aurelius. "Because he is such a good man."

He believes in God "whoever he or she might be. And we've been having some serious dialogue right now. Why has God abandoned the planet? Because we're stupid."

I'd long forgotten the reason for coming to see him. And he'd forgotten the reason he'd, finally, agreed to see me. He said, "This was the last thing I thought I'd talk about, to be honest. This morning, I had a swim and I thought I'd like to talk about Byron. Warwick called me Byron ..."

Byron! So it's more than likely I wouldn't have got very far with my questions anyway. But his topics are bound to be more interesting.

Why Byron? "I admired Byron so much that I even swam the Dardanelles." Byron swam across the sound that separates Europe from Asia in 1809. To replicate the swim was a romantic homage to one of his romantic heroes.

The real point of the story is: "And the bloody prick beat me! And I couldn't believe that. Well, he swam naked of course and he had a cloven foot ... I was so angry! He swam across the strait in one hour and 40 minutes." Harvey did it in two hours, but "I had to wait for a massive tanker to go past".

What to make of that? I'm not going to even attempt it.