Drawn Out by Tom Scott

Author:Tom Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

ON THE LAST NIGHT OF the conference, Sonny Ramphal hosted a farewell cocktail party for everyone in an impossibly grand ballroom of an impossibly grand hotel. On hearing that I had been invited, Muldoon boycotted proceedings. A Commonwealth leader came up and asked, ‘Are you the guy Muldoon doesn’t like?’ I said I was. He grinned. ‘Can I shake your hand?’

The Australian Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock wanted to shake my hand also. Resplendent in a safari suit so iridescent a white you could feel it bleaching your retinas, silver-haired and tanned like an orange, continuously threading worry beads through his hands and scanning the room for more important people to talk to, Peacock filled in time telling Dennis and me about the time he was in bed with Shirl in the Waldorf Astoria and there was knocking on the door, and it was Hank. It was clearly meant to be an amusing tale so we laughed dutifully. Then it dawned on us that he was boasting to journalists that he’d only just met about bonking the actress Shirley MacLaine and being interrupted by Henry Kissinger. Spotting other strangers he hadn’t told yet he moved off.

Dennis and I were chatting to some Indian officials when we got the gob-smacking news about the East Coast Bays by-election back in New Zealand—National had just lost the safe, blue-ribbon seat and it was partly my fault. Muldoon’s treatment of me was the last straw for many disaffected National voters. While I was digesting the shock result, an Indian official beamed with delight. ‘It couldn’t happen to a nicer chap.’

The by-election, which National could have done without, was made necessary by the resignation of Frank Gill and Muldoon appointing the well-past-his-use-by-date old warrior to the post of New Zealand ambassador to the United States. Both major parties are guilty of treating diplomatic postings as halfway houses between the chamber and retirement villages for politicians they want to reward, or in some cases get well out of the way. Former Prime Ministers Bill Rowling and Jim Bolger fell into the latter category and were exemplary in the execution of their duties in Washington. The witty and engaging Paul East and the more dour and diligent Russell Marshall fell into the reward category, and both did their country proud in Westminster. The portly Jonathan Hunt not so much. Fondly referred to as the Minister for Wine and Cheese by both sides of the House, he famously refused to get out of his chauffeur-driven limousine at a Remembrance Day ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall because it had started to rain and he wasn’t dressed for it. Interviewed about the embarrassing incident by The New Zealand Herald, his boss, Helen Clark, tartly advised him to buy a coat. Mind you, in Jonathan’s defence, if all armies refused pointblank to fight in inclement weather the world would be a much safer place and there would be less need for cenotaphs.

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting produced very little that

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