Operation Benson-Pope

David Benson-Pope's body language belies the bully image. Picture / Mark Mitchell

Judith Collins is wearing the look of the cat that's got the cream. But she can't help lapsing into a schoolgirl giggle.

It's Question Time in the Colosseum - Parliament's debating chamber - and National's welfare spokeswoman is rephrasing a question ruled out of order by Speaker Margaret Wilson.

In allowing Collins a second stab, the Speaker has done Labour no favours. As Collins queries the hapless David Benson-Pope's credibility, colleague Maurice Williamson gets a second chance to display blown-up cartoons lampooning the Minister for Social Development.

Herald cartoonist Rod Emmerson has the lugubrious former school-teacher as a butterfly in denial that he was once a grub. The Dominion Post's Tom Scott has Prime Minister Helen Clark cringing in the shower as Benson-Pope lurks behind the curtain saying: "Relax, Prime Minister. It's nothing I haven't seen before."

Website Generation-XY rips off a poster from the movie Bachelor Party, with a lascivious Benson-Pope bursting in on a female in stockings and suspenders.

It's Wednesday afternoon, midway through a week-long roasting of a lame-duck minister. For spectators, public and press, looking down on the cavernous, wood-panelled chamber is like attending a rugby or cricket match. "It's never the same 'less you're there at the game" ...

Radio and television provide a watered-down version, the roar of the crowd suppressed, the power shifts less palpable.

On this day the spectacle is reminiscent of a British football match where the visiting team is 5-nil up and the supporters are goading the home fans. From the back row, Tau Henare even tries to get a chant going: "The grub party. The grubby party."

But he's drowned out by Rodney Hide's sneering laugh. Hide brands Benson-Pope a pathological bully, liar and pervert. The "pervert" tag is adopted by Collins as Williamson brandishes the humiliating cartoons.

It must be tempting for the former "unorthodox" schoolteacher to pick up his bonker (the tennis ball on the end of an arrow he used for classroom discipline), stroll across the floor and dong Collins on the head.

But Benson-Pope's body language belies the bully image painted by some former pupils. His head is hunched in his shoulders, left hand covering his mouth, fingers training the walrus moustache.

Slumped in his chair, he no doubt wishes it would swallow him up.

Even team captain Helen Clark gives him a dressing-down and his colleagues offer scant support as the Opposition scores hit after hit.

Since last May it's been a steep descent from a stellar political career for the former Bayfield High School social studies and languages teacher and head of outdoor education.

Student politics, teacher, unionist and city councillor - he bore the quintessential Labour CV and, with powerful friends in the Government, was seen as a future education minister.

But Benson-Pope is a complex character who polarises, as the conflicting memories of former pupils suggests. It's not the allegations themselves, but his inability to extricate himself from them, the suggestion that he misled Parliament, and the implications for a Government with a knife-edge majority.

From the start, Labour's handling of Operation Benson-Pope has been a study in mismanagement - and a curious departure from usual form.

The Beehive's ninth floor (the Prime Minister's office) has a reputation for running a tight ship, for being quick to jettison liabilities. Short and long-term casualties include Dover Samuels, Ruth Dyson, Marian Hobbs, Lianne Dalziel, John Tamihere and Taito Philip Field.

Last May, when Hide and Collins raised the allegations - that Benson-Pope had made a student's nose bleed and taped another's hands to his desk and stuffed a tennis ball in his mouth - Benson-Pope went out on a limb.

"I have not been guilty of, or involved in, any inappropriate behaviour in my 24 years as a secondary school teacher. Nor am I aware of any complaint of any kind."

Not much room for manoeuvre there - and the Prime Minister took him at his word and branded Hide a "smear merchant".

Days later she was forced to refer the allegations to the police after TV3 unearthed five former students who backed the claims.

There was more egg on faces in December when Benson-Pope tried to "spin" the outcome of the police inquiry. After the Herald on Sunday ran selective excerpts of the findings, his office denied being the source of the leaks.

Clark referred his press secretary, Pete Coleman, for disciplinary action.

The bigger mystery was why the management of the conclusion of a potentially damaging inquiry was left to the office of the implicated minister, given the ninth floor's fearsome reputation for efficiency.

As for the police inquiry, which recommended no action despite prima facie evidence that the events had occurred, Clark believed that was the end of the matter. But within the statements of former pupils interviewed by police lurked more skeletons - and last week Investigate magazine published them.

The claims - that Benson-Pope had forced pupils on school camps to stand outside in their nightwear - were dismissed as nothing new but were enough to launch a wave of chatter on the old friends' website, with claims that he walked in on female dormitories and showers while girls were undressed at a 1997 school camp.

Investigate's version of the latest claims was "a nonsense", said Benson-Pope.

Clark stood by him on Monday morning. "If other people have complaints they did not bother airing in months and months of investigation they should put up or shut up, by going to the authorities."

But by that afternoon she had received a copy of a letter of complaint to the school over the 1997 shower-block incident. Where did this leave Benson-Pope's statement of last May - that he was not aware of any complaints in his 24-year career?

Clark tried to draw a distinction between the new complaint and the bullying allegations. "You need to put that question to him. I can't go into every in and out of something that happened eight years ago."

But Benson-Pope wasn't talking to the media. "He needs to go, and Prime Minister Helen Clark needs to show some leadership and get him out," said a gleeful Collins.

The question by midweek was: Why is Benson-Pope still here? This was not Clark's usual political style.

Nigel Roberts, associate professor of political science at Victoria University, says it reinforces the view that when faced with a scandal it's best to act quickly and decisively.

"I think if you had said to the Government in May last year this would still be going in February 2006, they would have looked at you and said 'you are bonkers'. It's death by a thousand cuts."

Labour is banking on the allegations not being serious enough to inflict lasting political damage.

Clark's line is that there is such a thing as natural justice.

"For a man to be hounded from a job for matters that were not considered anything like serious enough to be raised as disciplinary matters with a school board, is quite wrong," she told Parliament.

There's more to it than that, says Herald political correspondent John Armstrong.

The political climate has changed and, with her bare working majority of 61 in a 120-seat Parliament, Clark no longer has the freedom to drop errant ministers or backbenchers.

Her worst fear is a byelection. And the Government does not want to give the Opposition a scalp only three weeks into the parliamentary year.

The Administration is now in its third term and showing signs of weariness. Given the myriad accusations that fly around MPs, the ability to pluck the poisoned dart from the harmless arrows may have waned.

Benson-Pope has a powerful supporter in Michael Cullen, his predecessor in the Dunedin South seat. Other heavyweights, Phil Goff and Steve Maharey, have run the defence in the House this week.

It suits Goff, on the right of the caucus, to be seen to be helping out someone from the left, given his future leadership aspirations.

Parliament is in recess next week. The strategy seems to be to tough it out and hope those beyond the parliamentary gates lose interest.

But semantics and memory lapses keep coming back to haunt Benson-Pope.

As the hellish week wore on, the ninth floor finally took over Operation Benson-Pope. Pete Coleman, the minister's press secretary, has taken leave and David Lewis, the Prime Minister's senior press secretary, is in his place.

Advice would also have come from chief of staff Heather Simpson and senior advisers Tony Timms and Grant Robertson.

Lewis put himself about in the press gallery, drawing a distinction between the allegations surrounding Benson-Pope and the "much more serious" historic allegations that led to Dover Samuels' dismissal.

But the Administration's annoyance was clear.

The Government was helped by a strangely muted Opposition effort in Tuesday's Question Time.

When Hide, Collins, Brash and English did get their ducks in a row on Wednesday, Labour threatened to fight innuendo with innuendo, warning of "people in glass houses" and singling out another former teacher, Gerry Brownlee.

On Thursday, Benson-Pope - who had refused to respond to media inquiries all week - was finally talking, and in detail. After the Herald is ushered into his fourth-floor office, he winds the clock back through his time as a Dunedin city councillor in the 1990s to his early teaching career.

Bayfield in the early 1980s was not as affluent as today but still a mix of "rich kids from the [Otago Peninsula] hills and tougher kids from the flats".

He had disciplinary and pastoral responsibilities and was "really very unorthodox" in the classroom.

"I was tough and I don't make any apology for that. But I think I was fair."

He presents neither as bully nor arrogant, but as chastened and reflective. A twitching right eye betrays the pressure of the past week.

He appears genuinely aggrieved that his wife and teenage children have been exposed to Investigate's unsubstantiated claims that "he watched naked schoolgirls while they showered" and that those claims have been picked up and used in the House.

He agrees that his May 12 statement was an error of judgment and "I regret that I put my colleagues through this".

He offers sound explanations for entering the dorms. He apologises if banging on the shower block walls to hurry people up made them feel uncomfortable. He cannot recall a specific complaint about the showers in 1997 but remembers the principal raising issues around supervision.

"If I had been really sensible a year ago, I would not have added 'I'm not aware of any complaint of any kind'."

But for someone who cannot remember complaints, his recall of the camps is photographic.

"We developed one of the best outdoor education programmes in the country. We took them snow-caving, whitewater rafting - quite hazardous things."

He disputes former pupil Geanna Earl's claim that he slapped her on the thigh during an abseiling incident in 1997.

The Tautuku Bay camp is near Bluff and the abseiling venue "looks straight down to Antarctica from a serious cliff.

"That is one of the reasons I find what is going on so deeply offensive. I have always been really focused on student safety."

He says he can't remember much about the abseiling incident - then explains in detail what happened after Geanna "freaked".

He says teaching colleague Jill Armstrong was there to confirm he did not slap her.

Later, he will re-enact the charm offensive for television and radio, his voice quivering each time he mentions the impact on his family.

Why, asks John Armstrong, did he not do this on Monday, following the Investigate and Herald on Sunday stories? He concedes another error of judgment.

Barely an hour later, it's question time again. Bill English is leading the charge but this time Benson-Pope has stronger support from Goff, Maharey and Cullen.

Maharey points to the Dunedin South electorate's uninterest in the allegations.

Cullen says the school had replied to Geanna Earl's complaint, citing "evidence from the accompanying female schoolteacher that no slap was observed to have occurred".

But the next morning, the former colleague, now Jill Armstrong-Sagvari, tells the Otago Daily Times she could not give assurances Benson-Pope did not strike the student.

"I was not in a position to see a slap if it had occurred," she said.

The semantic shift was another surprise for Clark's office.

Asked if he's learned any salutary lessons, Benson-Pope replies: "If I could get in a space capsule and nip back to May 11 - that would be good." 
 

The David Benson-Pope files

Born: February 23, 1950, Dunedin.
Married: Jan; two children.
Educated: Kings High, Dunedin, Otago University and Christchurch Teachers' College.
Teaching career: Bayfield High School, HOD languages and outdoor education.

Allegations against him:
* Stuffed a tennis ball in a student's mouth in 1982 (says he doesn't recall this or doesn't believe it).
* Hit a student in the face.
* Slapped a teenage girl on the thigh (denies it happened).
* Kneed a male student in the groin.
* Entered a changing room while girls were showering in 1997 (says he's sorry if they felt uncomfortable).
* Entered a dormitory while girls were getting dressed in 1997 and 1998 (says he did it only when appropriate and always gave a warning).
* Accused of bullying and harassing another teacher.
* Misled Parliament when he said he was not aware of any complaints (says he made a mistake).


Slip-sliding away

Benson-Pope:

May 12: "I have not been guilty of, or involved in, any inappropriate behaviour in my 24 years as a secondary school teacher. Nor am I aware of any complaint of any kind."

Tuesday: "When I answered the question on 12 May 2005, I answered in respect of my knowledge at the time.
"I remain convinced that my conduct as a teacher was not inappropriate. I do accept, however, that the concerns of some former students were genuinely held and to them I offer an apology for any upset."

Thursday: "Like any member of this House, I am human and sometimes make mistakes." 


Clark: 

May 12: "[I] accept Mr Benson-Pope's word that they are unfounded and that they continue a series of scurrilous accusations from the Act leader." (Via a spokesman.) 

Monday: "Well my clear understanding to this time is that he answered the question to the best of his recollection. I regard David Benson-Pope as an honest person ... I defy anyone to relate in great detail much that happened eight years ago." 

Wednesday: "I accept that to most people, including to me, a letter from a parent raising such issues would be seen as a complaint. It is clear that because the issues raised did not breach school policy, and were not dealt with as a disciplinary issue, Mr Benson-Pope did not see that as a complaint when he made his statement to the House on 12 May. In my view, that was an error of judgment, but I do not consider it sufficient reason to dismiss a minister. That is my judgment."