Twas very heaven in 2024 to write as a satirist. Credit where credit is due: Christopher Luxon just got funnier and funnier, more determinedly ridiculous, a David Brent for our times, the embarrassing boss who is at once inept and bombastic. Stuff writer Verity Johnson came up with a widely quoted description: “He’s our 1am tuna sachet PM.
” He’s the Prime Minister you have when you’ve run out of viable alternative Prime Ministers – and that most certainly includes Labour’s lacklustre leader. At least Luxon is hilarious; Chris Hipkins is just sad. A senior minister for the Crown got in touch earlier this year saying how much he enjoyed a secret diary I wrote of Hipkins.
I sidled back into my favourite genre – the cowboy saga – and presented Hipkins as Lonesome Cowboy Chip, a quiet, remote figure on a limping horse, ignored and avoided by the good people of Dodge. There was something crowing about the minister’s praise, a serving of schadenfreude, but I will accept a compliment from just about anyone and looked forward to his good-humoured response when I featured him in a Secret Diary. I texted a link to make sure he read it.
There was no response. National are inherently funny. They cling to terrible ideas.
Politics is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; the 2024 model was the farce of bootcamps. I really ought to get around to setting a Secret Diary as a bootcamp caper, with camp leader Luxon walking around the dormit.
