Late November 2008

INTERIOR. NIGHT. Ninth floor of the beehive, a DPMC meeting room. RODNEY HIDE and JOHN KEY are seated across the table from one another.

HIDE: ACT is the party of principle. We could not in good conscience support a National government unless it were willing to adopt at least some key ACT policies. Sir Roger Douglas MUST be made Minister of Finance, the National Party MUST introduce a school voucher system in the first budget. For us to concede anything less would be a betrayal of our voters and our own souls.

KEY: How does this sound? We give you nothing. You do everything we tell you to do and in return we’ll let you keep Epsom and won’t effortlessly destroy your party.

HIDE: Throw in another tray of those sugar-free muffins and you’ve got a deal!

There was a weird bolsheviks v mensheviks vibe to the Rodney Hide appearance on Agenda this morning. The two ‘commentators’ were National activist David Farrar and media village idiot Deborah Hill-Cone, both of whom are sympathetic to ACT ideology (if not the party itself). They grilled Hide aggressively over his failure to grow the party – much more so than any independent or left-wing analysts would have done.

Indeed, I almost felt sorry for Hide – then I remembered that his solution for how to organize an intensely complex modern nation-state is to simply dismantle the government. It disturbs me that even 0.5% of the population thinks this is a good idea.

And the fix appears to be in in regards to the Agenda book club, with the book on Jim Bolger being won by former Bolger staffer and Agenda commentator David Farrar! Highly suspicious!