Sunday, October 24, 2004
A Claytons interview for Clayton
A while ago PNN blogged on the Simon Dallow interview with Rodney Hide, where he pretty much put the boot in where ever possible.
So I watched Agenda on Saturday morning expecting some more ‘hard hitting journalism’ – what I got was nothing more than a State Funded (sorry.... "Charter Driven") Party Political Broadcast from Labour’s new trouble shooter and hard man, Clayton Cosgrove.
Susan Wood served him up the questions emailed from Level 9 earlier that day and Clayton read his part of the script. Someone try to convince me that Clayton didn’t know this one was coming:
SUSANThat was after Susan had declared her undying love for the man and said that some nasty people didn't like liars in an earlier question:
That sort of success. Now how is he personally taking this because he's looked, I mean he's a scrapper like you but he's looked wounded hasn’t he, and how is he and how are his family?
CLAYTON
Oh to be honest you know you get kicked in the guts so many times and John always you know like all of us you want to respond, you've gotta look people in the eye, but when a process like an inquiry's put in place normally it's the victim that has to say hang on I've gotta grit my teeth because I have to you know adhere to the process, but it is – I'll tell you the roughest thing, and Mr Hide I'm sure will be proud of this, you know when his wife who's a tough individual, you go to the grocer's shop with the kiddies and you know she sees another front page with another spurious allegation and she breaks down and the little ones look at her and say hey Mum why are they doing this to Dad, you know that is tough, that is tough and I'm sure Mr Hide is proud of himself with that.
SUSANThe full transcript is available here – I don’t advise it, it is as horrible to read as the programme was to watch. The JT affair has already been blogged to death and will continue to be no doubt – and thank god for that if that sort of crap is all we are going get from our 'Network' current affairs.
It seems at the moment if we can talk about John Tamahere the man that he inspires this great loyalty from someone like you who's sitting there, you’re almost – you’re holding the faith, it's almost a religious faith you’re holding for this guy. On the other hand there are those who really want to chop him down. What is it about the character or the makeup of this guy that inspires such passion?
