by Tom Scott
He beamed even wider and nodded violently. ‘Sierra, Charlie, Oscar, Tango, Tango!’
‘No,’ I replied, slowly and loudly. ‘SCOTT!’
He replied in kind, shouting in frustration. ‘SIERRA! CHARLIE! OSCAR! TANGO! TANGO!’
We continued back and forth in this fashion for quite some time, but I eventually got to my palatial room. It had dark drapes, dark walls and dark carpet so badly laid it rippled like waves. It smelled deliciously of sandalwood and incense.
I had barely settled in when there was a knock on the door. It was a big, loud, brash, broad-shouldered, lantern-jawed Australian reporter, Bill Darcy from 2UE, working out of Canberra.
‘So you’re the joker the Pig didn’t want?’ he said after he had introduced himself. ‘I’m going to do a report straight down the pipe to Australia.’ He started bellowing into a microphone. ‘Today, Piggy Muldoon flew into Delhi and, metaphorically speaking, stamped his cigarette out in Indira Gandhi’s carpet!’ It didn’t matter that our Prime Minister didn’t smoke. Speaking metaphorically allowed Bill to speak colourfully and forcefully about anything without the need for a factual basis. He was a man after my own heart.
Bob Jones has always maintained that in India there is a Booker Prize-winning novel waiting to be written every four hundred paces in any direction you care to walk. In Delhi, life in all its sordid glory abounds on every spare patch of ground. The air is thick with the heady aroma of incense, spices, wood smoke, diesel fumes and human faeces. On our first morning I accompanied Dennis Grant and his stringer crew to film Muldoon being driven through the grand gates of 7 Lok Kalyan Marg, the official residence of the Indian Prime Minister, for a private audience with Indira Gandhi. Dennis’s man on the ground recommended a beater, very cheap, very good. Dennis had no idea what he was talking about, shook his head and indicated to the cameraman where to place the tripod. Denny would stand before it in his khaki safari suit and do one of his authoritative pieces to camera as Muldoon’s convoy swept into the magnificent grounds. But no sooner had the camera been set up when an excited crowd about a thousand strong materialised out of nowhere, blocking all view of the gates.
Dennis’s man on the ground pushed some burly men forward, armed with long batons. ‘Beaters, sahib. Fifty rupee.’
‘I’ll take two,’ hissed Dennis. Flailing wildly, they waded into the crowd, who didn’t seem to mind unduly and parted like the Dead Sea with just seconds to spare.
Back at The Ashok I had early evening drinks with a man who I had long admired as a rugby fan, but had never met before: Chris Laidlaw, the former All Black, Rhodes Scholar, author and personal assistant to the Commonwealth Secretary, Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal. After downing three quick beers, Chris abandoned his professional guard and began pouring his heart out about the nightmare of dealing with Muldoon and confided that one day he hoped to return to New Zealand and become a Labour Party Prime Minister.
Muldoon wasn’t the only problematic leader in attendance. Singapore’s stern and domineering Harry Lee Kuan Yew sent organisers into a spin with his strict stipulation of no smells—an impossible request in India. He was staying on the same floor as me. Half a dozen soldiers, sweating in heavy khaki uniforms and armed with old Lee-Enfield rifles, were guarding his door. Those not squatting on their haunches lay full stretch on the carpet. They had taken off their boots and socks.
The smell was something else. Back in my room I got a call from Jim Kebbell. His boss Tupuola Efi wanted to know if I felt like a nightcap. We sat outside on a wide balcony overlooking the Lodi Gardens with the great temples and the sprawling city beyond, knocking back industrial quantities of gin and tonic. On the flight up from Singapore Jim had been entrusted with Muldoon’s reading glasses, which he’d accidentally left behind in the airport VIP lounge. My advice was to smash the fucking things and reduce Muldoon to a stumbling Mr Magoo figure at the conference table. Efi demurred. He liked Muldoon. Our Prime Minister was kind and respectful to leaders from small Pacific Island states. This warmth did not extend to the towering Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, or Sonny Ramphal, of whom Muldoon would bark that where he came from, secretaries kept the minutes. Off the record I was told about deep hostility and blazing rows.
Well after midnight I tottered through the dimly lit foyer of The Ashok only to have NZPA’s nuggety Bruce Kohn come hurtling out of the shadows, asking, ‘What’s the guts? What have you heard?’
‘Nothing,’ I lied, and kept going.
When the leaders went off to their traditional retreat, Bill Darcy invited Richard Griffin, Dennis and me to join the Aussie media and the crew of Malcolm Fraser’s Australian Air Force VIP jet on a bus trip to Agra, 204 kilometres south, to visit one of the wonders of the modern world, the Taj Mahal. The flight crew organised a packed lunch and bottled water for everyone and the Aussie press organised the alcohol—chilly-bins running the length of the aisle filled with cans of Foster’s. The hired bus came with a guide and a crackling, hissing sound system. The guide started gabbling at great speed with great pride every time we passed a temple or ruin, which unfortunately was every few minutes. Imagine the home straight of the Melbourne Cup with an Indian race caller and the lead constantly changing between horses with names like Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and Ganapati. The three Kiwis nodded politely at every incomprehensible thing he said, but behind us the Aussies started complaining loudly, which forced us to nod even more furiously by way of compensation.
‘For fuck’s sake! Will you bastards stop it!’ yelled Bill Darcy. ‘You’re only encouraging the prick!’
Bill had a point, but we didn’t want to hurt the guide’s feelings —he was already on the verge of tears. He stoically refused to leave his post when they started throwing empty Foster’s cans in his direction. When a full can glanced off his temple he sensibly called it quits and retreated to the front of the bus, convulsing with sobs.
The driver’s seat was actually in a separate open-air compartment outside the main body of the bus. The driver sat at the wheel behind a low windscreen exposed to the elements like a rider on a motorbike. Our broken guide climbed out and squeezed in behind him, clinging to his shoulders like a baby koala as bugs, dust and all manner of flying debris whipped past.
It was terrifying enough inside the bus. They don’t drive on the left-hand side of the road so much as favour it slightly. When two vehicles approach each other from opposite directions they both stay in the centre of the road, blasting their horns in a game of chicken, until at the very last second one of them loses their nerve. The side of the road was littered with scorched, crumpled wrecks.
Halfway to Agra there was a comfort stop. In the middle of a wide, turning circle was a toilet block sitting in a small lake of raw sewage. If you were desperate you had to take off your shoes and socks, roll your trousers up to your knees and wade through a moat of shit. None of us were that desperate. A local approached with a threadbare bear and prodded it with a stick. It rose up on its hind legs and shuffled listlessly in a tragic approximation of Mr Bojangles while its master held out his hand for money. We all duly parted with our loose change.
Appetites blunted by the smell of the toilet block, some of the Australians began feeding their unfinished lunches to the bear over the shrill protestations and manic gesticulations of the keeper. The bear knew what was happening and gobbled them up ravenously. His envious keeper gave the bear a tongue-lashing in a tongue I didn’t recognise, but I’d put money on the gist of it being ‘Save some for me, you bastard!’ As we drove off, the keeper was lashing the bear with the stick. I’m no David Attenborough but, eyes closed, head lifted towards the warm rays of the sun, the bear had a post-coital, I-don’t-give-a-shit look of utter contentment on his face.
When we finally got there, the Taj Mahal exceeded all expectations. It was breathtakingly beautiful and brought a curious moisture to my eyelids—but then again that could have just been air pollution so toxic it is eating into the majestic white marble mausoleum. B
ill Darcy was moved to bellow, ‘Any nation who can build this is a great nation.’ People selling ganja swarmed around us. ‘Is that dak? Can I smell dak?’ he asked, even more excited.
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 was newsworthy, but I was taken with the line of one Indian economist talking about the urgent need to bridge the gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor: ‘You cannot take two steps across an abyss!’ This applies equally to climate change today.
WE ALL FLEW OUT TO Bombay, the Muldoon party flying on to Beijing and me flying alone to Sydney and on to Canberra to cover Australian politics. The first indication that Muldoon had changed my public profile exponentially came in King’s Cross. I was loitering in the doorway of a dirty bookshop trying to pluck up the courage to go in when a bunch of teenage girls from New Zealand on a school trip started yelling, ‘OOOH! TOM SCOTT! THAT’S DISGUSTING! YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF!’ I protested feebly that I was trying to purchase a copy of Newsweek but my flaming cheeks gave me away.
Then I ran into a National Party dominion councillor and soon into party president, the lovely Sue Wood, and her husband, getting away from the East Coast Bays madness and recrimination. Sue insisted on taking me to lunch and gave me the inside story on the defeat. Muldoon blamed it on their candidate—the tall, gaunt, bespectacled economist, merchant banker and less than effervescent Dr Don Brash. Certainly, on the hustings he was no match for Social Credit’s complete unknown, Garry Knapp, handsome in a poor man’s Elvis way and more charming than a Mississippi paddle steamer card-shark. Sue said the government’s raising of the tolls on the Auckland Harbour Bridge hadn’t helped either, and their own polling showed that Muldoon’s heavy-handed treatment of me coupled with his bullying insistence that only he knew how to run the economy was losing its charm both within and outside the government.
Further proof of my new status came when I sneaked back into Wellington and my good mate Barry Soper was waiting at the airport to thrust a microphone in my direction, asking for my thoughts. Helen had brought our toddler with her when coming to pick me up. Jiggling gorgeous wee Sammy on my hip, I just kept walking, telling Bazza I was going home to play with my kids.
There is a very fine line in New Zealand between being an accidental centre of attention and wallowing in it. After scoring a try under the posts, our All Blacks back then knew better than to celebrate wildly—instead they trudged back to halfway as if they had done something they were deeply ashamed of, much like an old dog that knows it shouldn’t have pissed on a rug.
Additional confirmation came on our way to a wedding in Waikanae. I pulled into a service station at the bottom of the Ngaio Gorge and filled up the van.
‘Sorry mate, no cheques or credit cards,’ said the owner when I went to pay him. I assured him the cheque wouldn’t bounce. ‘Oh yeah, well, I’ve heard that before.’ I produced a wad of ID cards and press passes that left him unmoved. He seemed quite prepared to siphon the petrol back out, should the need arise. I started to get desperate. ‘I was the guy Muldoon tried to have banned from India.’
He grinned and patted me on the shoulder. ‘No worries, mate.’ Then, turning to the kids, he added, ‘Help yourself to some drinks from the fridge.’
AS IS OFTEN THE CASE, simmering discontent with Muldoon’s leadership came to a head when he was absent overseas. If you could plot caucus bravery on a graph it would confirm that fearless courage soars exponentially in direct proportion to any leader’s distance from Wellington. It eventually spilled over into what the plotters themselves proudly called the ‘Colonels’ Coup’, after Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who toppled the Egyptian monarchy in 1952. Rob Muldoon found himself flying home to face an unprecedented leadership challenge.
Shocked and stunned by the vehemence of the criticism and the suddenness of it all, a jet-lagged Muldoon began fighting back on pure instinct alone. He went on television, appealing directly down the barrel of camera lenses to members of the National Party who supported him to put pressure on openly disloyal or wavering electorate MPs. It helped him that the Colonels’ preferred leader, Brian Talboys, was overseas.
When he should have been full of steely resolve like Lady Macbeth, Talboys turned into a hand-wringing Hamlet. On flights between European capitals he poured his tormented heart out to my chum, Phil Melchior from Reuters, the only reporter covering his lobbying for continued access for New Zealand agricultural products to the EEC. Mindful of the need for future headlines, Phil did what any responsible journalist would have done in his position—he urged Talboys into battle. Of his own volition he even wrote a press release and short acceptance speech for Brian to help tip the scales.
The scenes in the back corridors of the second floor of Parliament the morning Muldoon attended his first caucus on his return were quite amazing. I hadn’t witnessed anything like it since the Labour caucus met six years earlier to pick a successor to Norm Kirk. There was the same sense of dramatic possibility in the air. Every journalist, television cameraman and newspaper photographer in the building milled about, feeding off and contributing to the tension and excitement. For some of them it was too much. Thrusting tape recorders at others to hold, they shot off to the toilets, demanding they should be called immediately if anything happened. It soon became obvio
us that many in caucus felt the same way. Assorted members emerged to race into the same toilets, unbuckling their belts. Muldoon had that effect on people’s bowels.
Speculation and those strange jokes journalists make at these times ripped through the throng. When Hugh Templeton dashed past carrying a plastic lunchbox one wag observed that the crusts had been cut off all the sandwiches and they were pre-masticated—surely a bad sign for the Brian Talboys lobby. There were suggestions that Muldoon was planning yet another television address to the nation and his staff had been dispatched to find a puppy or some kittens he could cuddle live on air.
The caucus ran way beyond its normal length and it was a very subdued Muldoon who emerged and told a crowded press conference that he was still Prime Minister. The challenges to his leadership were far from over and he no longer enjoyed the full confidence of caucus, but he thought he could still lead National to victory in 1981. ‘I really do think I can,’ he added wistfully, sounding for the first time in his long career diffident and insecure.
He was saved when news came through that his deputy wasn’t running and the coup wilted for want of a challenger. The conspicuously decent Talboys had no stomach for what he knew would have been total war and announced that he would be retiring at the next election.
One deeply cynical senior MP told me later that the Prime Minister’s humility and contrition in caucus was an acting performance worthy of an Academy Award. He said Muldoon never absorbed criticism willingly and sooner or later, unable to help himself, he would go back to his rogue elephant ways. At his press conference Muldoon likened himself to another wild animal from the plains of Africa—he doubted that a leopard could change its spots but he would give it a try.
I decided to put this to the test and went along to his next press conference. I had been banned previously on the grounds that they were for daily-accredited journalists only. Muldoon looked up when he saw me seated near the back of the Beehive theatre and in a gravelly voice intoned solemnly, ‘Oh no, Mr Scott.’ Then asked one of his staff to escort me out. His junior press officer, Sue Elliott, barely in her twenties, looked sick at the prospect of having to manhandle me to the door. Being held in a headlock by Sue was a tempting proposition, but to spare her that indignity I rose from my seat and walked—asking plaintively as I went if this was an example of the Prime Minister’s turned-over new leaf.