THE JONES BOY
New Zealand First’s master of the orotund and gnomic utterance insists he’s just an ordinary bloke.
Iam not a vaudevillian act,” declaimed Shane Jones, the Regional Economic Development Minister, with the flourish, and at the volume, of a vaudevillian act. We were in a small private dining room, which was coincidentally but appropriately like a stage set, at a gastropub in Wellington. The New Zealand First minister or the Jones Boy, as he has been known to call himself, had arrived looking dignified and statesmanlike in his fine herringbone coat with a black velvet collar. Beneath this he was wearing a new suit. It is a Savile Row suit. He had not done the jacket buttons up. Can he do the buttons up? “Ah, the acuity of women,” he says. Actually, he never just says anything, but I can’t go on writing “declaimed”.
That he can’t do up his suit-jacket buttons is the point. His wife, Dot Pumipi, bought him the suit. “And she said: ‘Now, come on, Shane. You’re running around telling everyone how you used to play Golden Oldie rugby and you don’t look like anyone who’s in any state to do anything approaching fitness’.”
So his wife bought him a suit jacket two sizes too small in the hope that one day he’d be able to do it up? “You already know the truth, don’t you? Hey! You just asked me about dignity and you’re asking me: ‘Can you fit the buttons around your puku?’ The acuity of women gets us blokes every time.”
“Someone did tell me, ‘We don’t need any more kabuki political theatre, Mr Jones’.”
He ordered fish, no batter: “112kg have put paid to that. I’ll have some greens and other sort of tokenistic things.” I ordered fish, with lashings of batter, and chips. There was a battered prawn. Would he like it? He would. Would he like some chips? Why not? A bit of battered fish? I put it on his plate without waiting for the reply. I hope I never run into Dot.
I had asked him about dignity because he sometimes has it but, like many of his many faces, it is fleeting. “I find that dignity is not something that you can contrive and you shouldn’t force it. Some people just naturally bring with them a certain gait, a certain … what’s that term? Mien.” He helpfully spelt mien for me. “And they come across as being dignified. Other people try and ham it up and they aren’t that way inclined and so they get caught out.”
His faces are legion and legendary. I wonder if he had got a slap from the Deputy Prime Minister (and his party leader), Winston Peters, over the faces he pulled during the press conference in April when Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced an end to the issuing of
offshore oil- and gas-exploration permits. He looked like a man being force-fed tokenistic greens.
Luckily for him, he says Peters was overseas at the time. He has a phone. “Ha, ha. Someone did communicate to me,
‘We don’t need any more kabuki political theatre, Mr Jones.’”
He says he is pro-industry. In February, he announced, to the displeasure of coalition partner the Greens, that former New Zealand Oil & Gas chairman Rodger Finlay would chair the Provincial Growth Fund. Finlay donated money to Jones’ failed bid for the Labour leadership in 2013. Hence the kabuki? “Nah. What was it? Four or five grand.” He should have given it back. “Oh, bugger off!”
He is capable of constructing beautiful, almost courtly sentences and equally capable of sounding like a bloke after a pint too many at the after-match at a provincial rugby club.
He called the waitress “dear”, he called me “mate” and, once, in a mildly ticking-off way, “missy”. He also called me “darling”, as in, “You opened the door, darling.” I suppose I did.
THE MOVIE BUFF
I didn’t want to because I really didn’t want to know but one had to ask: does he still watch porn? In 2007, when he was a Labour MP, he used his ministerial credit card to rent adult movies to watch in his hotel room. “I’ve moved on from that now, with the beautiful beauty queen, Dorothy, at my side,” he replied. Oh dear. That is probably not quite the appropriate answer. For an acclaimed orator, he does talk some nonsense. He had, I remind him, a beautiful wife at the time. “Yeah, Ngareta was a beautiful woman but then Dotty’s a beautiful woman as well.”
He and Ngareta had seven children. He and Dot were both married to other people when they met. Ngareta died in 2015 and Jones says he had made his peace with her. His children all speak to him, and that is the main thing, he says. He is lucky and he knows it. He gets away with things, often by the skin of his teeth. He has charm and it is hard not to be persuaded by it – as he well knows.
Now 58, Jones says he would not dare watch porn. “No. I’m not boxing out of the ring in any manner or form, I can bloody well assure you. In fact, I’m feeling nervous even talking about it.”
He is not nervous about punching hard.
He’s taken swipes at bureaucrats (dealing with them is like “wading through treacle”), The Warehouse, Air New Zealand. But it is hard to take him entirely seriously and this is his own fault. He says: “We are made of earth and fire. Although, in my case, a fair bit of wind.”
Minutes after protesting at what he felt were my attempts to portray him as a vaudevillian, he says, about the offer of the battered prawn: “It’s fatally close to the word porn, but I’ll take it anyway.” You could not get more vaudevillian.
“Oh, you’re being like Goldfinger. You’re reading too much into this language.”
Goldfinger is National MP Paul Goldsmith, with whom he scraps in the House. A sample exchange: Goldsmith: “Is he aware that there is a fine line between being a bit of a character and being a joke, and which side of the line is he?” Jones: “I could not describe it better than the New Zealand Herald, which has described me as part jester, part genius, and in 2020 they’ll see the latter and not the former.”
He insists he is an ordinary bloke. He is not much given to soul-searching – he has most certainly never seen any sort of therapist except “a physiotherapist” – but he is too smart and self-aware not to have given his public image some analysis.
He says that politics is “always a little bit of theatre, you know. I have to be careful that that theatre doesn’t have the effect of turning myself into a form of parody. But, hey, you’re in the business of generating visibility and attention, as a retail politician.
“A lot of blokes, they need to, yeah, move out from that classic kind of Kiwi sullen non-communicative phase. I’ve been there myself. You wouldn’t think so from my public persona.”
BUT WHO’S THE REAL JONES?
He says, of my earlier interview with Simon Bridges – “no doubt a soft touch” – that I asked the wrong questions. “The question you should have been asking is, ‘who are you, really?’”
What a very good question. Who, really, is Jones? I didn’t have to ask the question because he tells me – even if the answer changes with the wind. I did ask what his politics are, because I don’t have a clue. He says he was never “a leftie”.
He was a Labour MP. The Labour Party he joined was a “form of mutation. The Labour Party I got to know was Koro Wetere, Prebble, Palmer, Douglas …”
He stood for leader in 2013, got 15% of the vote, and lost to David Cunliffe. He left the party in 2014 and took up the newly created role of Pacific economic ambassador, a post offered by the National-led Government. That ought to have been the end of his political career, but in 2017, he joined New Zealand First.
So what does he believe in? What are his politics? “Who? Me personally?” Well, yes. Is he a right-winger? “Aah, no. I swing a little to the left; I swing a little to the right.” This sounds like a song in a political version of the Rocky Horror Show, but I’m not about to say so. I don’t want to risk hearing any jokes about fishnet stockings.
What is he doing in New Zealand First? He has unfinished business, he says. Suspicion about his allegiances is legitimate given that he has said, “I will never admit to having joined the wrong party. But I admit to the fact that I have sounded consistently like a guy who doesn’t belong to the modern Labour Party.”
Is he a right-winger? “Aah, no. I swinga little to the left; I swing a littleto the right.”