I put up with last night’s fireside chat as much as was tolerable, then swapped the television for my book. At my age time is of the essence and I don’t have it to waste.
The problem of course is there’s basically no substantial difference policy-wise between Labour and National, thus so-called debates are reduced to trivia.
My sympathies went out to our political journalists with the impossible task of writing something interesting about all of this.
That said, I was staggered to read Mike Hosking’s report, specifically his criticism of the moderator John Campbell.
Hosking wrote, “If John Campbell learned to stop thanking people over and over – and over again, if he trimmed his question from a lengthy tedious dissertation and stopped summing up each section with a lot of “this is a good debate,” “gosh it’s good to have you here…” they could have saved 22 minutes”.
Mike must have been drunk when he wrote that. It was the equivalent advice to asking Campbell, who has developed unctuousness to an art form, to pull out a knife and hack his legs off.