I spy a murky morass of political plotting

NOW I REMEMBER: John Key - Prime Minister between 8am and 5pm. PHOTO/FILE

The first spy said: "I spy with my little eye something called a conflict of conspiracies" and started monitoring text and emails.

The second spy spotted this and emailed a blogger to tell what was afoot.

The third spy hacked into the ensuing flurry of emails and sent them to another conspirator.

The spies spied on the bloggers who talked to other bloggers who, in turn, talked to other spies and government officials and the whole thing became a complete farce as the scale and shading of the conspiracy matched the colourful language being used by those trying to implicate everyone but themselves in the ensuing scandal.

On the one hand, this demonstrates the reassuring fact that a government that could not organise a coherent response to a senior official being found to have been acting inappropriately with female staff, could not actually manage to organise a proper conspiracy of any substance that would remain a secret.

This is good for a healthy democracy because invariably secrets do come to light, but it is bad for morale as it becomes apparent that the matter of ethics seems to have been mislaid along with any sense of responsibility.

Prime Minister John Key made a bid to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune a few weeks back by declaring that he may have done things that were questionable but this was when he was not acting as a prime minister.

This introduced a whole new concept - being a prime minister was apparently only his day job and when he was not being prime ministerish he could have all sorts of exchanges with people as plain old Mr John Key which did not count.

This came across as an escape clause worthy of Houdini. The difficulty with this idea is that people assume he is a prime minister all the time because that is how he acts. The notion he was only being prime ministerish between 8am and 5pm but could say and do all manner of ethically questionable things outside this role is a bit difficult to understand as he does not stop using the prime ministerial taxpayer-funded travel, limousine, police protection, visiting overseas leaders and the calling of press conferences outside office hours.

Despite this obvious flaw in his argument, he contended he had not spoken with bloggers, nor intrigued with the government spying agency, while somehow being an off-duty prime minister at the time.

Now he has allowed that some of these things did happen but this is only because the facts have emerged, not because he suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to be frank. In doing so, he has affirmed that universal political truth - that there will be no truth unless the truth is about to be found out and hit the headlines.

When that happens, the sudden clarity around murky events is astonishing to behold. Memories are recovered, conversations recalled, convenient excuses found and considerable energy devoted to finding others to blame.

I saw the perfect word for this type of political plotting the other day - "plotical", perhaps originally a typing or spelling error but, nevertheless, a word that has found its time and place.

-Terry Sarten is a writer, musician and political analyst - feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz