The prime minister, the rugby and the speeding motorcade
The opposition was quick to criticise the Prime Minster’s high-speed motorcade – till their own leader had one of his own.
Helen Clark roared through the expanses of the Canterbury Plains. She flashed through Temuka and steamed through Templeton.
She was the Prime Minister of New Zealand and she had an All Blacks Bledisloe Cup rugby match to get to in the capital.
The case of the PM and the racing motorcade in July, 2004, began when her Timaru-to-Wellington flight was cancelled, prompting a decision to drive to Christchurch to catch a 4.50pm flight in time for the Bledisloe Cup rugby test in Wellington.
It would have its culmination 11 years ago this month. On August 19, 2005, two police officers and a civilian driver were convicted on driving charges, though Clark – who said she was busy reading papers in the back of the car – was controversially not charged. The charges were later quashed.
The 195km from Waimate to the outskirts of Christchurch was covered in 80 minutes, equalling an average speed of 147kmh, Fairfax records show. By some accounts, the motorcade reached up to 170kmh.
The day was already laced with danger. Former undercover cop Frank Louis Miessen had claimed he would travel to Waimate, where Clark was attending a celebration, use a friend’s help to gain access to the prime minister, then strangle her and break her neck.
But he was in custody – and would later be found guilty of threatening to strangle Clark – when the motorcade set off.
Raymond Mitchell, of Timaru, would tell the Holmes Show the motorcade ‘‘flashed past’’ him in a 50km zone on the outskirts of Temuka at 140kmh-150kmh.
‘‘They were dangerous. I was bloody horrified,’’ his wife Debbie said.
Warwick Wright, of Christchurch, said he tried to lodge a complaint on the police hotline when the motorcade ‘‘steamed’’ past him at Templeton.
He was told he could not – because the car was the prime minister’s.
Wright this week refused to revisit the day because, he said, it was ‘‘history’’.
National Party police spokesman Tony Ryall was apocalyptic, accusing Clark of accepting police help to ‘‘meet her recreational engagements’’.
‘‘She is taking the public for fools,’’ Ryall said. ‘‘Who does she think she is – Vladimir Putin speeding to the Kremlin?’’
But the Opposition was very soon red-faced when it was revealed their leader, Don Brash, was swept to the Wellington match in his own motorcade. Witnesses described it as driving on the wrong side of the road, during torrential rain, with sirens blaring and horns honking ‘‘like in China’’.
‘‘People were scattering to get out of the way,’’ a witness said.
To rub salt into wounds, Brash’s convoy, while on the way home, reportedly swept past Speaker of the House Jonathan Hunt, arguably a much more senior member of Parliament, who was queuing to leave the stadium with everyone else.
In the wake of the prime ministerial motorcade neither Clark nor Trade Minister Jim Sutton – also in the motorcade – were called to be witnesses in the court case and publicly the prime minister gave little away other than to say she had no idea how fast the cars were travelling.
It was not till after the court case – when talking would no longer be sub judice – that she finally expanded.
‘‘I would not have asked for urgent travel to go to rugby,’’ she told Newstalk ZB.
‘‘They [her drivers] advised my press secretary what plane could be caught. I accepted that advice, I got in the car.’’
In Wellington’s Westpac Stadium that wintry night in 2004, there was no hint of the high-speed motorcades that had rushed their VIP passengers to the game.
The rain hosed down and there was a vicious southerly blowing as a crowd of 37,000 or more huddled into the stadium.
Plastic bags became rain covers as the temperature dropped to just 4 degrees Celsius at the ground.
But it didn’t matter. The All Blacks won the match that day 16-7 over Australia.
It is unclear whether Clark’s – or, indeed, Brash’s – cold faces in the crowd had anything to do with that.