Michele Hewitson Interview: Maggie Barry

Maggie Barry says she'd been thinking about getting into politics for about 10 years. Picture / Greg Bowker

Maggie Barry ought to be a breeze to interview, and in many ways she is, because she is bright and, yes, breezy and she chats away and is friendly and slightly mocking, which is obviously a welcome stop to that lovely gardening lady persona - and works so well for a soon to be National MP.

She is an accomplished interviewee then, as well she might be; she has spent a few years interviewing other people. She says she thinks this will be a help in her new career, because she knows what questions will be asked. She said, unnecessarily, "I'm not naive. I would hope I wouldn't get into profoundly dangerous territory whereby I'd endanger my political career from naive utterances."

She hasn't put a foot wrong yet (though the above might be just a little smug) but it is early days and being, sort of, one of us (she never really has been a hack: too posh, too rich, too famous) she will understand that journalistic hope for schadenfreude. She said she didn't expect "an easy ride. Probably the opposite as time goes on."

But she must have regretted that ouchy, "there are some lovely seats that are coming up", line she gifted her detractors after she failed to win the Botany nomination.

That she has detractors might have come as a bit of a shock, because surely she's used to being loved. She says not at all, because she did current affairs and news before she was that lovely, floaty garden lady, and people certainly used to send her snippy letters.

Still, but I'd say nobody could help but get used to all the flowery stuff, and that's how she's best known, although she left the garden show and went back to current affairs in 2004.

Will she stick with politics, is one question. She says she plans a political career of ten or 15 years. But why she suddenly decided she wanted to become a politician is another.

She says it wasn't sudden; she started thinking about it ten years ago but waited until her son Joe was older. I asked whether she'd waited until the Nats were the winners, which she denied, of course.

She has pictures of her with Key on her fridge. What a funny thing to do, as though he was a pop star. "Well, certainly people like him. There's no doubt about it." She is a stranger to the concept of abashment, but she muttered something about how she's going to take them down and how they were only there so she could work out how they could be photo-shopped for her brochures.

Pictures with the PM are all very nice to have, I'm sure, but she never has had views on things, publicly. She says she was told never to have a political view when she was on National Radio. That seems reasonable, but I think it's odd that she has always said she has never told her partners how she votes.

She lived with Paddy Marron, who has always been known as The Irishman, because, she says, he "was always repelled by the limelight", for 21 years, and she never told him. She's been with her current partner, the semi-retired lawyer Grant Kerr, for three years - he obviously has no such abhorrence; he is pictured with her in a North Shore nominee flyer - and he, a National voter, didn't know she was a secret Tory until she "decided to go into politics".

Well, don't you think that's weird? I do. She says, about Grant, "Oh, he worked it out, I think", but why couldn't she just tell him then?

"I didn't feel that I wanted everybody to know what my politics were." Everybody is not your partner. She said, by way of a non-answer, "Paddy didn't always vote, which I thought was an abomination ..." So I still don't know why she didn't tell.

But not telling and not having opinions does make it appear as though she didn't have any opinions and now, voila! She suddenly does.

"I haven't taken a public stand ... which is the central point and that's not contradictory, that's pretty much consistent because I wouldn't, on Morning Report."

She doesn't, either, have public regrets so she doesn't regret the "lovely seats" line. She said, "What could they be? What could be lovelier than the North Shore?"

She lives in Pt Chevalier, in a slightly messy townhouse (vaguely boho cushions that have seen better days, a bottle of worm tea on the dining room table) with a million-dollar sea view. What does she care about the North Shore? "It's my electorate and I care about it deeply." As of? "As of three weeks ago."

She lives here with her 13-year-old son, Joseph, when he's not boarding at King's. Despite having been a "despotic" mother about such things, and looking at local, public schools, she says he chose to go to King's, and to be a boarder. I did wonder why she was telling me this, about the local schools. I hadn't asked, and I wouldn't have thought it was such a bad look for a Tory MP to have a son at King's.

She once said she was born with a silver spoon. I'm sure she said it in that mocking way she has, with one eyebrow raised. She was the only child of a florist mother and accountant father, so they were reasonably well off, but not rolling in it. Not a huge silver spoon then.

Now she is more than comfortably off, presumably. I don't know what she spends her money on, obviously not interior decorating or landscaping. She does her own gardening which is mostly lots of pots, a bit weedy. We went out on to the deck to look at the rest of it and at her "wall" which she is very proud of. It is a wooden rack of many tiered planter boxes and looks as though it was made by a not very competent third former in woodwork class. I said, "What's that tiered thing with dead things in it?"

"Well, it means you can grow 120 plants in a very small space." It's not the most attractive thing in the world. "Well, it has been at other times. It's looked pretty damn good. I can see you're sceptical about it." She is completely, complacently unruffled by rudeness, which should serve her well as a politician. But all I'll say about her taste in gardens is that she grows coleus, which may or may not be the ugliest plants in the world but they were the first plants she ever grew, as a child, so I suppose you have to give her points for stickability.

An attachment to an ugly plant is about as sentimental as she gets. She gave Grant a boot camp session (she went too) for Valentine's Day. How lovely of her. "Yes. It is so romantic." He gave her, "the usual old dinner out, and red roses". She doesn't live with him; she and Paddy never married. "I don't see the reason, particularly if you don't necessarily believe in God. It all seemed a bit silly to me."

I wondered whether her celebrity and The Irishman's hatred of the attention led to the end of that relationship. They broke up six months after the birth of their son. But she says no.

"I didn't realise the extent to which having a child would change me. And, in fact, I wanted to spend time with the child and that was a feeling that was so strong I couldn't overcome it. I hadn't actually thought that would be the case. I just thought that Paddy would be the one to look after the baby because, you know, he's the guy who cooks, he's the home fires burning side of things and I brought in the dough."

She surprised herself, (she still sounds surprised), by not being as tough and career-minded as she thought she was; at being knocked sideways by emotion. She is still pretty tough and career-minded though. She is what you might call brisk about emotional matters.

She told me when I interviewed her in 2004 that she didn't "do empathy". She meant that when she did Outward Bound she refused to do the "touchy feely stuff". I thought you had to do what you were told on Outward Bound and that bonding was a big part of it, but good luck to anyone trying to force her to do anything. So of course I thought, before going to see her,"Aha, that's a bad look for a politician. How's she going to get around that?"

Of course she had remembered (or looked it up, most likely) and saw that one coming a mile off. I said, "Are you working on that empathy now?" She said, "no, I don't think so. You did remember that line. Of course you did."

But is it true? "Well, I empathise with people who are in genuine difficulty. But I can't be bothered with too much of the, 'oh poor you. You're scared of heights, you can't walk across that bridge.' If they choose not to, that's their business. I don't feel like I need to sit there and hold their hand and tell them how sad it is that they can't cross over a bridge."

That's not a bad Tory line. "With individual choice comes responsibility. Yeah, the mantra!"

She says she "doesn't know" if she is going to be one of those tough Nat ladies. I do know that anyone who thinks she is going to be that lovely gardening lady is deluded. She did a grand job of selling that character and will no doubt do just as good a job as selling herself as an MP, once she's worked out which sort she'll be.

Here's a clue. She told me that, years ago, when she heard Sonja Davies was going into politics, she thought she'd make a great MP, but that it turned out she was too nice for politics. "She was such a genuinely lovely person."

She then, must not be a genuinely lovely person. "I am somebody who can, of course, be genuinely lovely and who at heart is genuinely lovely."

I told her I thought she was slightly aloof, which on reflection I think is not quite right, but she can give that impression. It is her supreme self-confidence that sets her apart. She admits to no skeletons, or to ever having done anything she regrets, she has never had a crisis of confidence.

So other than her liking for coleus, and that little empathy thing, she's pretty much perfect, which may or may not be desirable in an MP. It worked, I found myself thinking, for one Helen Clark.