Paul Holmes: Where have those years gone?

A 60-year-old needs kind words. Photo / Norrie Montgomery

I turned 60 this week. Once upon a time someone aged 60 seemed ancient.

In fact, when I was a child someone who was 60 had been through the Great Depression and World War II and probably looked ancient. It does not feel so with me.

On Thursday morning, I woke up at about 7am and looked across to rolling hills awash in golden light on a cloudless morning and within seconds remembered that I had completed my journey through the 50s and was now 60 and you know what? I felt great.

Truly, I felt great. I had made it. Against all the odds, after a serious car accident in my 20s that caused a bad head injury and cost me the sight of an eye, after a frightful helicopter crash at dusk in a storm and an exhausting swim to shore, which I only just survived and one man did not, after aircraft crashes and prostate cancer, I had made it.

The day was beautifully sunny in Hawke's Bay and it was the same in Auckland when I arrived. The afternoon stretched out gorgeously, then came dusk and in the sky rose a wondrously large moon.

So I had the sun and the moon on my 60th birthday. Not bad. Then, we had the pleasure of warm and generous friends until late into the night.

Earlier in the day, someone phoned and asked if I expected a lot of presents. I replied a 60-year-old does not need presents. A 60-year-old needs kind words.

And, indeed, many kind words were offered. Simon Dallow showed up and mentioned that I had been kind to him when he first started broadcasting.

And my old mate Mark Sainsbury organised a few impromptu speeches later on that warmed my heart.

My God, where have the years gone? I was not quite 37 when I first came to Auckland to do the Newstalk breakfast programme on what was then called 1ZB, the historic, iconic Auckland radio station.

Surviving those first two years was the greatest battle of my life and I did not run away from it. The first year was a disaster but management stuck with me. Then we began to turn it round.

Within two years, we were number one in a market of radio station proliferation. Twenty years later, we were still number one. But where did the years go?

Then, in 1989, when I was 38, Holmes started on TV One. Now that was a baptism by fire.

Nothing could have prepared me for the controversy over the Dennis Conner interview and the uproar it caused remains as fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

Now all of that has gone. All the sound and the fury of those years has gone. And I am a happy man for having done it all and having lasted.

But in the end there remains the most valuable gift of all: friendship.

FOR THE British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the sound and fury will also all be gone by the end of this coming week.

Brown is a goner. By the end of the week, David Cameron, the Conservative leader, will either be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom or Prime Minister-in-waiting.

Unless something dramatic happens between now and Friday, New Zealand time, I think that is what's going to happen.

This week, Brown committed a disastrous gaffe that showed his true nature.

Brown showed he is contemptuous of the people, or the great unwashed, as we used to say. He was trying to connect with the "real people" and was approached by Gillian Duffy in Rochdale.

She banged on to him about the pension and about the massive immigration from continental Europe, which disturbs not only her but a large section of the British people.

There is a transcript available of their conversation. She said nothing extreme or mad and told him she had always voted Labour, as had her whole family.

Brown, wearing a Sky News microphone, weathered the encounter well enough, said goodbye, hopped in his car and started mouthing off, the microphone on his lapel still live.

He then did two things that will cost him his job.

He called Mrs Duffy a bigoted woman. She was not, actually. She was just a normal person who voiced her honest concerns. But Brown found her bigoted. The remark in the car showed him to be a hypocrite.

It showed him to be anything but a man of the people. It revealed him as part of that snobbish intellectual left. Remote. A fool, frankly.

How I loathe people like that. I think, actually, that I have spent my life detesting this type of person.

In all my years of broadcasting, out meeting the public, I have never later described people to colleagues as bigoted. I just accepted everyone is different and we all have different levels of education and fears and hopes.

It is the joy of meeting people, frankly. I

considered it my job to get on to other people's wavelengths, not theirs to get on to mine. I was no more special than anyone else.

We are all special, we are all our own people, we all have an honestly held view. Politicians who cannot see this are foolish and doomed.

The other sin Brown committed while the microphone was on was immediately to blame a staff member. Whose idea was that encounter? he asks.

It was Susan's, he says. Well, it wasn't Susan's fault, actually. It was his alone. It was his fault for not being able to speak to an "ordinary" person.

Normally, I never use the word "ordinary" in relation to people. No one is ordinary.

But it was Brown's fault for not simply putting his arm round Mrs Duffy's shoulders and reassuring her, connecting with her, loving her for who she is.

Simple, I would have thought, the easiest thing in the world. He is a cold, remote creature, Brown.

The wonder of this British election has been Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats.

He turned on a blinder in the first of the televised leaders' debates.

He is young, good-looking, and not in awe either of Brown or Cameron.

He is 43 years old, a long way from 60, I have to say, with a little twinge in the heart. He goes into this, the final week of the election campaign, with his party ahead of Labour. Who would have thought it possible?

Of course, it might be what people tell the pollsters and what they do in the privacy of the polling booth are quite different things, but his party is experiencing steady approval.

I've no idea what they stand for, really, the Lib-Dems, and in the end it does not matter because whichever party or parties form the next government in the UK, the numbers stay the same on the balance sheet.

And they are dire. If there is no money, nothing can happen. Nothing radical will happen.

But such is likely to be the strength of Clegg's position in the House of Commons he might be able to command some serious positions from Cameron, including Chancellor of the Exchequer for his colleague Vince Cable, who is on Q+A this morning.

Clegg wants electoral reform, an end to the first-past-the-post system. That will be top of his agenda in any dealings with Cameron. Clegg says he will not deal with Brown.

Gordon Brown is in for a change of career path. I note he is not 60 until next February but he is close enough to the magic age to entertain a new direction.

I doubt if he has the ability to do so. But I see that I am developing something of a pre-occupation with age. And the number 60.