Todd, if the cap fits, hide it
Politics is in the optics. That’s why Todd Muller hid his bright red MAGA cap – too late mate – and why I laughed. Saying you have invisible Hillary Clinton pins somewhere isn’t all that convincing. What you’re left with this week is a new top Nat with terrible taste in caps, and two small blonde female sidekicks.
Nikki Kaye (now deputy) and Amy Adams (now No 3) are capable and have suitable track records, but the setup looks so very like the tired old management ploy of having people immediately under you who won’t be first up to replace you if you fall.
He left that for substantial Judith Collins, also blonde, who he placed in fourth position, just out of arm’s reach. Keep potential rivals close, especially when they’re sharp as a syringe.
I’m not a Collins hater. I enjoy big personalities, especially when they have a wicked, Jack Nicholson grin. If she’s heartless, at least she’s upfront about it.
Kaye’s nerves showed. Rising to defend the lack of racial diversity in the new caucus she said that Paul Goldsmith was Ma¯ ori. He’s not. He only claims a forebear with both Ma¯ ori and Pakeha wives who must have been a busy fellow.
Amy Adams kept a wary eye on Muller, I thought. Possibly she and Collins retreated to the ladies’ loos later to sing, ‘‘It Should Have Been Me’’. I would have.
Paula Bennett, who really has Ma¯ ori genes, slid 11 rungs down Muller’s ladder, either because she’s a bad brunette, as in old romance movies, or because Muller fears her sharp dress sense.
There wouldn’t be a trillion admirers for the MAGA cap, as in President Trump’s call to Make America Great Again. I’d rate the optics of that with a signed and framed photo of the appalling Dominic Cummings smeared with your own lipstick.
What is it with men who collect political junk like the MAGA cap, felt pennants recording daft conferences attended, coffee mugs emblazoned with political witticisms, branded pencil sharpeners, souvenir ballpoint pens, and silly hats?
I once had a weird experience with such a man, a chief executive I needed to interview. I noted that he shut the door behind me firmly as I entered his office, lined floor to ceiling with international junk like a small boy’s bedroom. He’d been around a while, and everywhere he’d been was recorded there. Which was rather sad.
That thing with the door is never a good sign, especially when the person can block the exit. It wasn’t long before he began asking me inappropriate questions of a – let’s say personal – nature. The dreck around the walls was one sign of immaturity. The questions were another.
He had issues. I needed facts. It was a creepy situation. Oddly enough you never want to hurt the feelings of men like this because they’re so pathetic, and somehow you negotiate your way out of there.
My advice to men in top jobs is to always leave the door a bit open, and confine questions to a woman’s preferred style of coffee, with a passing mention of the weather.
Muller seems affable, but the MAGA cap will be an albatross round his neck for years to come, like Don Brash’s attempt to fit into a kids’ car. Lapses, as Freud would intone darkly, are revealing.
In Muller’s job the junk on his desk, a mismatched sock, any half-chewed chocolate biscuit, will now be observed and noted. As much as he now has his team of blondes to work with, he needs an optics minder to put incriminating evidence out of sight. A man might be useful.