If memory serves . . .
Saturday, April 6, 2013
KLike whether they are truthful. nuckleheads that we are, John Key has put the news media and the Opposition on notice not to come to him seeking quick answers on what he’s done in the past. He wants time to get his story str . . . sorry, to prepare the sort of detailed and researched replies that would satisfy the excruciatingly close examinations that are then applied to them.
Mr Key’s professions of forgetfulness are themselves becoming damagingly memorable, but this latest move is a bad tactical error.
He contends that talk of his most recent brain fade, over his role in the appointment of spy boss Ian Fletcher, resulted from the rest of us examining, at our own leisure, an answer he was expected to give in 15 seconds, with no warning, about a process that happened 18 months ago.
Put like that it might fleetingly sound a reasonable piece of self-preservation to take his time in answering. But the greater issue is the plausibility, rather than the frequency, of his memory failings.
In this latest example, after initially insisting that the recruitment of Mr Fletcher as boss of the Government Communications Security Bureau was ‘‘fully done’’ by the commission, it later came to mind that, come to think of it, he had picked up a phone and invited a guy he knew, and who had no experience in the field, to apply for the job.
But this, he says, was a ‘‘nothing call’’.
No it wasn’t. When the prime minister invites you to apply for a job, it’s seen as a benediction. And an inappropriate one. It is a considered and sensible practice, or it should be, for ministers to stand back and let the State Services Commissioner Iain Rennie do his job rustling up this upperlevel talent for the public service.
Mr Rennie, while defending the essential integrity of the process, admits he regrets that he was not the one who made the phone call. That’s as near as we’re likely to get to him saying that Mr Key had no business taking it upon himself to do a little recruitment.
Not that Mr Key has any regrets. In fact, in the interests of disclosure he reveals he has approached people about other senior jobs within the public service. Perhaps he was just proud of having remembered that. Granted, Mr Key has a lot to think about on any given day. But the cerebral spillages are starting to look more sneakily protective than accidental.
It slipped his mind when, or even whether, our spies briefed him on what proved to be the illegal operation against Kim Dotcom. How inattentive do you have to be at these briefings to forget whether they even occurred?
His Tranz Rail shares ownership? Well, yes, it’s coming back to him now, he did have a bunch of them. How did he vote on the drinking age? Erm . . . Had he been for or against the 1981 Springbok Tour? Search him.
That’s an invitation people will increasingly be minded to take up. He is developing a track record of needing to have the truth forced out of him. Taking his time with answers, to the extent signalled, will not work. It gives the questions longer to linger unanswered, and then invites ever more suspicious scrutiny of the artfulness of the replies.