Colin Craig case: Nightmare looms

Who, really, is Colin Craig? What sort of rooster are we dealing with?

Those sunken eyes, that wolverine smile — for all his many and varied but mostly crackpot views, and his standing as a singular figure in New Zealand public life, he has been hard to know, difficult to fathom.

“A dork,” offered Rachel MacGregor, giving evidence against him on Tuesday in courtroom 14 at the High Court of Auckland, where Craig and Cameron Slater are arguing that the one libelled the other.

MacGregor was subpoenaed by Slater’s lawyer Brian Henry. It can be reasonably assumed she has not come voluntarily. It would be fair to say that her appearance in court is something she is suffering as a significant imposition, which is to say a nightmare.

But there she is, and she has not been shy to express the full range of her feelings towards her former employer.

“A dork”: that was her first impression of Craig, she told the court. She was hired as his press secretary in 2011, just as Craig was making his first attempt to get into Parliament. It sounded like a memorable job interview. “He seemed a jovial chap,” she expanded.

“Badly dressed. Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. He was a little bit odd, he had his pants sort of pulled up high. Yeah.”

Beware of men with their pants sort of pulled up high.

MacGregor worked for him until her abrupt departure two days before election day in 2014. On Monday on the stand, and again yesterday, she described him thus: “Weird . . . Ridiculous . . . Awful . . . Dodgy . . . Weird . . . Untrustworthy . . . Disgusting . . . Ridiculous . . . Horrendous . . . Dodgy . . . Deluded . . . Weird.”

She was also essentially describing a kind of tyranny of sexual harassment. He sent her poems, he tried to kiss her, he touched her breast, he looked down her top. As well, according to MacGregor, he insisted they drive rather than fly to Whanganui, so they could spend more time together; he made her stay late, took off his shoes, and asked her to rub his back; he told her about his “sleep trick” — that is, he’d think of lying on top of her legs and the reverie would lull him into the land of nod.

Also, he put up curtains in her office, and closed them when they were together.

He paid her in advances of $10,000 rather than pay her a regular wage. And he bought her a necklace, and told her to get rid of her dog.

She resisted his advances, was sickened by them, and advised him to listen to a recording of The Lure of Infidelity.

Henry wanted to know more about that, and said to her, “Now, Miss MacGregor, you’ve mentioned a song.”

She said, “Where did I mention a song?”

He said, “It was in your evidence that you said you gave him a song. Some music?”

She said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The court transcript was seized. Here, said Henry, pointing at her reference to The Lure of Infidelity.

She said, “That’s not a song. It’s a recorded talk.”

“Oh,” said Henry. His face fell, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. What had he imagined when he thought MacGregor was referring to music? Did he hear it as a torch song, something brooding and gothic, by Nick Cave, say, or Leonard Cohen, its lyrics revealing some dark stain on Craig’s character?

He sifted through his notes written with one his beautiful Stabilo point 88 art pens, and his face suddenly brightened.

“Now, Miss MacGregor,” he said, “can we just clarify what it actually was that Mr Craig had said on TV3 about Americans landing on the moon?”

He had returned to the familiar land of Craig as the dorky guy with crackpot ideas.

When she finished talking to Henry, Craig requested of Justice Kit Toogood that he use the afternoon to work on his cross-examination. Very well, ordered the judge, and set the next sitting for 9.30am today. The nightmare looms.