Do you know who the Mayor of Wellington is? We all do now.
The mayor, Tory Whanau, who will henceforth be known as “Tipsy Tory”, went out for a Friday-night dinner with a friend in the capital and arrived, according to the restaurant manager, looking like she’d had a few. She and her mate shared another bottle of wine and ate some kai.
A waiter insists she said: “Do you know who I am?” She insists she didn’t. Then she and her mate left without paying the bill.
She was still suffering the effects of her big night out the following Monday when she awoke to find her mayoral mug splashed over the front page of the Post. That’s what you call one hell of a hangover.
It is not being tipsy that is the real problem. Anyone who has ever been to the Green Parrot restaurant in Wellington late at night has witnessed politicians, and journos for that matter, tipsy, if not tottering.
It is that accusation of, “Do you know who I am?” that is problematic. You can see why she desperately wants to have not said it. Because what it really says is, “I’m a very important person and you are but a bit of dog poo on the sole of my shoe.”
It is within the realms of possibility that, if she did say it, she was joking. It is the sort of thing a tipsy person might think was funny. At the time.
Her deputy, Laurie Foon, stood up for her. “Tory is a very real person who loves to enjoy what Wellington has to offer,” she said. Phew. What a relief to learn that she is a real person and not a robot, or whatever is the opposite of a real person. Can a robot get drunk? Or demand, “Do you know who I am?”
A councillor, Rebecca Matthews, said, “We shouldn’t expect anyone, because they are in public life, to be a complete saint all the time.” We do, of course, expect our public figures to at least pretend to be a saint all of the time. But we know it’s at least partly a pretence. There’s also an element of schadenfreude when people in public life are caught acting like a dick. Because who hasn’t acted like a dick from time to time? Usually after the taking of drink.
Aaron who?
The Whanau storm in a wine glass is hardly up there with former National Party MP Aaron Gilmore who, at a boozed-up dinner at a restaurant in 2013, really did ask the waiter, “Do you know who I am?”
He then called the waiter a “dickhead” and threatened that he would have him sacked by the then-prime minister, John Key. Gilmore was subsequently forced to resign for misleading the prime minister. There was only one dickhead in that sorry story.
If there’s any local-body politician who could be excused for taking to the bottle it must be Gore’s Mayor Ben Bell. After months of very grown-up no-speaks between him and district council chief executive Stephen Parry, an apology has been made to Parry. It would have been more fun if, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, they had challenged each other to a cage fight, perhaps after a few drinks.
It might have been fun, but politicians aren’t allowed to have fun. Just ask one-term Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin, who was snapped dancing and, gasp, drinking. Later, more pictures were leaked, taken at another party at her official residence, of a couple kissing while “partially topless”.
What Marin and Whanau have in common is that they are women who, in terms of political careers, are relatively young. They also like to have fun. The question is: are they being held to a higher standard because of that?
Mice will play
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins will by now be on his way to a Nato conference in Lithuania. He should really consider getting off the plane. Right. Now. Leaving the country, or his office even, is just asking for something to go further awry in his Mickey Mouse Club, otherwise known as cabinet.
He goes to Britain for King Charlie’s coronation and Meka Whaitiri defects to Te Pāti Māori. He goes to China and outcome allegations of shouty behaviour by Justice Minister Kiri Allan. He pops down to Bellamy’s for a sausage roll and returns to the hoo-ha over Michael Wood and his shares in Auckland Airport. He pops down to the dairy for a litre of milk and comes back to learn that Education Minister Jan Tinetti was found by the privileges committee to have had a “high degree of negligence” in misleading Parliament.
Hipkins has dealt with the Allan saga by shutting it, and her, down. She’s now on leave. What we don’t know is whether the PM has banned her from using her phone as well. There is an allegation by an anonymous senior public servant that, in a telephone call to them, Allan yelled and screamed so loudly that the tirade could be heard by others in the room. Hipkins’ explanation for this phenomenon was that it depended “on the volume of the phone”. Eh? Surely it depends on the volume of the tirade.
Allan denies being shouty. “I don’t think so, nah. I think I can be a fair bit of fun, I can be pretty passionate and I’m definitely not a Wellington politician … I’m from the regions; we do things a little bit differently.” Perhaps they still have party lines where she’s from because, as many of us remember, on party lines you used to have to shout Very Bloody Loudly into the telephone receiver to be heard.
In further good news for Hipkins, Taieri MP Ingrid Leary “accidentally” turned up at a Mongrel Mob hui in Dunedin, mistaking it for an Electoral Commission meeting. The colour scheme of the Electoral Commission is orange. The Mongrel Mob’s is black and red. When this was pointed out to the PM, he said, “Yeah … but anyway, I certainly accept that’s how she ended up being there.” He should have said she’s colour-blind, which as explanations go is no more ridiculous than the one given.
You begin to see why a jaunt to far-flung Lithuania might seem attractive. It’s surely better than sitting in your office on the ninth floor of the Beehive waiting for another minister to make your job of winning October’s election more difficult. He could be excused for taking to the drink.
