The right stuff
National’s Chris Bishop, who backed the short-lived Todd Muller leadership coup, is an ambitious 37-year-old making his mark.
National’s Chris Bishop, who backed the short-lived Todd Muller leadership coup, is an ambitious 37-year-old making his mark.
Chris Bishop, the Opposition’s Covid spokesperson, is, according to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Government’s chief wise-cracker, Grant Robertson, “a shiver looking for a spine to run up”. So, how could you not look forward to meeting a shiver?
We met in Petone; the shiver arrived looking like a history teacher at a posh boys’ school. He goes for the preppy look, which sits slightly incongruously with his square-jawed face. We were going to have lunch. He wouldn’t have a glass of wine – “it’s dangerous” – and he wouldn’t have pizza because he’s “trying to stay off the carbs”. I grumbled: what a fun lunch guest he was turning out to be. He had a glass of wine and his crumbed chicken came with a big pile of mashed potato. He drank all the wine, but ate only half the mash. We shared an apple shortcake.
He was a pretty good fun lunch guest. HeHe’ss smart, but not in a show-offy way.
And the shiver line? “Ha, ha. It’s a great line. It’s a shame he stole it from [Paul] Keating. The moment he started it, I knew it was a Keating line, because I’m a Keatingphile.” He is a great admirer of the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating partnership, which saw them hold power in Australia for 13 years. They were Labor. Hawke was a trade unionist. Bishop is not a lefty.
“We definitely dodged a bullet. We still don’t know how and why the ship was allowed to dock and then have workers go on board.”
“Australian trade unionists are different from New Zealand trade unionists. Keating talks about that ‘hard head, soft heart’ stuff, you know?”
Bishop has a samoyed dog named Ladyhawke, after Bob Hawke. He has a soft heart for Ladyhawke; his wife, Jenna Raeburn; meat, pictures of which feature prominently on his Instagram page; cricket and rugby – not necessarily in that order. He also has a pretty hard head. He doesn’t mind a scrap. He told former Labour Party member and now political commentator Shane Te Pou, in a Twitter skirmish over the Todd Muller affair, to “piss off ”. He told an Australian senator, whose remarks about the Christchurch mosque massacre he found vile, also via Twitter, to “f--- off ”.
Fair enough, but possibly not terribly dignified. “Oh well.” He has wide shoulders, useful for shrugging things off. But he is also, he says, “probably a bit sensitive to criticism. I would say I wear my heart on my sleeve a bit. Oh, I think you beat yourself up over whether you gave a bad interview or got the line wrong on something.”
He’s for the Government’s Covid “get the jab or get the sack” policy for border workers, but says it should have had much more urgency. The recent near-debacle at the Port of Tauranga, when unvaccinated port workers came in close contact with a container ship laden with crew infected with the Delta variant, put him on the front foot.
His is a tricky job. Normally, Opposition MPs want a government to stuff up, so that they can crow about the stuff-up. But these are not normal times and nobody wants to see stuff-ups or crowing.
He can, though, express qualms. “Frontline workers were meant to have
been vaccinated months ago,” he told media. “We have a glaring hole in our border.” His comments about the high percentage of workers who were still unvaccinated were widely reported.
He maintains it’s deeply worrying. “We definitely dodged a bullet,” he says. “We still don’t know how and why the ship was allowed to dock and then have workers go on board.”
Among the many critics of the Ministry of Health’s handling of the pandemic is Government adviser Sir Brian Roche, who has renewed his call for a standalone agency. Bishop agrees, and points out that National campaigned on having a dedicated border agency to provide “a world-class defence against Covid-19”.
“The ministry has done its best, but we have been let down on too many occasions.”
He has had his jab. “Chippy [Chris Hipkins] wrote to me and asked me to go and get one.”
The Muller business will likely always come back to jab him. Bishop was in the thick of the ill-fated scheme to roll Simon Bridges as National Party leader in May 2020; he is known as Muller’s “numbers man”.
Setting aside, for now, the catastrophe that was the fallout of the coup, he must have enjoyed the intrigue. If he did, he’s not about to admit it.
“Well, I think the intrigue bit would be overrated. At the end of the day, the caucus made a decision to change the leader.” On being the “numbers man”. Again, “overrated”.
Perception matters; he might be forever perceived as ruthless as a consequence. Robertson has done his bit in portraying Bishop as such. Is he? I asked, hopefully. “I don’t know. It’s a bit rich coming from Grant. He has been involved in more Machiavellian plotting than I’ve had hot dinners.”
You can see why he would want to play down his role. At the very least, he might have made a miscalculation of character.
“Well, look, you try to do what you think is the right thing at the right time, right? And obviously it didn’t work out that well.” He says he has no idea whether his involvement has damaged him politically. “Others will potentially have a view.” He is possibly not much given to self-reflection. “No. I reflect all the time. I just don’t necessarily want to share it with you. Ha, ha.”
Bishop’s entry into politics, in 2014, when he was 31, had an element of the unfortunate about it. In his previous life, he was a lobbyist for a purveyor of tobacco, where he had worked to oppose National Party plans to increase tobacco taxes and bring in plain packaging. Once his selection was announced, he decreed he was in favour of both policies.
“Well, that’s the party position, right? That’s the thing about signing up to a political party. You sign up to party positions. You campaign for the party and the party’s positions.” That’s the deal, otherwise known as sometimes having to swallow dead rats.
“The reality is Cabinet will have a discussion about something. There won’t be unanimity in the Cabinet on a particular issue, but people will put on a united front and go out and campaign or advance a policy one way or the other. You keep those discussions, with the exception of conscience issues, behind closed doors.”
Which might make all politicians guilty of hypocrisy. “Well, it’s for the greater good. I mean you’re part of a team. [Keith] Holyoake used to say he didn’t even agree with 80% of what his own government did, and he was the Prime Minister.”
Bishop says, by the way, he used to smoke but that he doesn’t now, although he does sneak the odd one. “It makes you smell, doesn’t it? And it’s not that good for you, apparently.” He also used to smoke a bit of dope when he was at Victoria University of Wellington from which, despite being occasionally stoned, he graduated with first-class honours in law and a bachelor of arts in history and politics.
He was a champion debater, as was his now wife – they married in 2019 after 10 years together. She is the general manager of corporate affairs at Wellington Airport and previously worked for Gerry Brownlee and Chris Tremain. Of course she’s a National voter – she is a member of the party and managed Bishop’s winning 2017 campaign in Hutt South – but you won’t hear it from her husband. “I don’t speak for my wife. She’s very firm on that.”
“Grant Robertson has been involved in more Machiavellian plotting than I’ve had hot dinners.”
He says she is the better debater, at least in their domestic life, and is “smarter than me”. He once, with the aid of hair extensions, sported a mullet for a charity fundraiser. He wrote, on Twitter, that if National won the last election, the mullet would return. His wife responded on her Twitter account: “If National wins, at least one MP is getting divorced.”
The couple live in Petone. He grew up in Lower Hutt. His father is former political journalist John Bishop; his mother, Rosemary Dixon, is an environmental lawyer. His mother’s side of the family were “very strong reforming Methodists”. Her father was a Methodist minister. Her mother was arrested for taking part in a protest on the Hutt motorway to stop the Springbok tour bus from getting to Wellington’s Athletic Park for a training session. She got 100 hours’ community service, to be served painting the Barnardo’s early learning centre. “I think they just made cups of tea all day.”
His father’s family were farmers in Southland. “They’d have been Muldoonists. That post-war conservative generation.” He is scathing about
Muldoon. “His grand theory was to leave New Zealand no worse than he found it. What sort of political ambition is that? It’s a definition of mediocrity, that’s what it is.”
He is a political history nerd who loves hard rock music: Shihad, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam. He has been known to play air guitar. He no longer smokes dope. Duh. “’Cos I’m an MP and it’s illegal.” He voted against legalising recreational cannabis in the 2020 referendum. Now that, surely, is hypocritical. “Why?” Because he liked a smoke of dope. “Well, the National Party position was that we were opposed to it, so I voted against it.”
You could debate whether this is hypocritical until your tongue turns blue, but there’s little point. He is, remember, the champion debater. But, idiotically no doubt, I persist in challenging his perfectly reasoned argument. We know this is the way politics is played. He says New Zealanders “appreciate consistency from their MPs” and, unlike in the UK, we have no history of MPs absenting themselves from votes.
“Maybe it should. But we’d have to increase the number of MPs, which I don’t think would be popular, so it’s just not likely to happen.” All of which is valid, but my argument with his argument is that he’s selling following party lines as selflessness when in fact, in the real world, it would be classed as hypocrisy. “That it’s craven? Well, I think it is consistent with what New Zealanders expect. Ultimately, people just have to figure out how important a particular issue is for them. For
Tariana Turia, for example, the Foreshore and Seabed was not something she could wear … so she left Labour.” Nanaia Mahuta and Parekura Horomia wobbled, but stayed within the fold. He respects both stances, but leans slightly towards thinking Turia’s was the right call. Although, “I also have respect for the view that you can accomplish more through having influence in a mainstream political party.”
Which is why he is not in Act. You might think he ought to be in Act. He leans towards being a Libertarian. More accurately, he leans toward being a pragmatic Libertarian. He believes in “freedom”. Freedom is “to be who you want to be, the freedom to be who you are, unconstrained from government action”. The best place to be free is to be in a major political party.
This is complicated, then, because he wants to be in government. What he doesn’t want to be is the leader of the National Party. He is, he insists, not interested in plotting another leadership coup. National’s leader Judith Collins promoted him to shadow Covid spokesperson after the Muller affair.
That, I suggest, is good politics: keeping your enemies close. He pooh-poohs this. He likes Collins; she’s “doing a good job”. The polls are abysmal. Former National Cabinet minister Chris Finlayson recently decreed National a disaster. Polls bounce, Bishop says. Finlayson “is entitled to his view. There are plenty of people saying the same thing.”
Bishop’s glass of wine arrived. It was received with some relief. “Thank you very much. Good timing,” said the man who will never be prime minister. “I just want to be a senior minister in a chunky portfolio.”
He said “never, ever” about the prospect of one day being the prime minister. He’s only 37, so that “never, ever” may seem premature. But perhaps even an ambitious youngish politician is smart enough to know that in his business, it pays to develop a flexible spine. l
“Muldoon’s grand theory was to leave New Zealand no worse than he found it. What sort of political ambition is that? It’s a definition of mediocrity.”