Barry Soper discusses his book on New Zealand's twelve Prime Ministers with Chelsea Daniels
Barry Soper, veteran political journalist, joins The Front Page podcast to discuss his book covering twelve New Zealand Prime Ministers from Muldoon to Luxon.
Summary
Chelsea Daniels interviews Barry Soper, one of New Zealand's most experienced political journalists, about his new book chronicling his time covering twelve Prime Ministers. Soper argues that Helen Clark was the best Prime Minister of the modern era, citing her patience, political intelligence, and ability to keep loyal allies close rather than promoting rivals — a judgment he acknowledges will surprise some given that he has been accused of being a Tory. He contends that John Key's success was substantially built on foundations laid by the Clark government, particularly the China free trade agreement. Soper also reflects on the decline of oratory in Parliament — discussing figures such as David Lange, Roger Douglas, Trevor de Cleene, and Paul East as examples of a lost art form — the changing nature of press gallery journalism, and offers a measured defence of Chris Luxon, arguing he is still learning on the job but has the intelligence to become a good Prime Minister.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
What makes a good Prime Minister
Chelsea Daniels: Barry Soper is a name, and certainly a voice, that's recognisable across New Zealand. After decades in the Beehive, Soper has put pen to paper outlining his time covering twelve Prime Ministers from Muldoon to Luxon. He blends personal stories, policy critiques, and behind-the-scenes tales — like Muldoon's drunken schnapps election call, Lange's antics in Africa, and Bolger's mimicry habits. As former PM John Key wrote in one of the book's forewords, Barry knew and still knows where the bones are buried. The other foreword is penned by Helen Clark. Today on The Front Page, Barry Soper joins us to discuss how political reporting has changed over the years and where he thinks it's headed.
Barry, first and foremost, what makes a good Prime Minister?
Barry Soper: Timing. Well, first, that makes a Prime Minister, and it is about timing. But what makes a good Prime Minister is somebody who's across everything — and not everyone intimately. David Lange, for example, people loved Lange because he was a showman. He was a bit of a show pony. And Roger Douglas was always by his side. So anything that was intricate when it came to the finance portfolio, Lange would correctly refer it over to Roger Douglas, and Roger Douglas would do the talking.
I think Prime Ministers have to realise, even though I said they have to be across everything, that they don't know everything. They haven't got a monopoly on knowledge. So if they don't know, they should say so — say, look, I'll come back to you on that, or I'm not sure. Don't try and answer something that you know nothing about. And that, as we've seen in recent times, trips up Prime Ministers and makes them look fumbling.
But my view is that we're very harsh on our Prime Ministers. The only thing that Chris Luxon's really done that's bad is fumble the answers to questions. Now, if you ask me a question, I've many times fumbled an answer — but then I'm not the Prime Minister, and it just looks so bad. But it shouldn't. I think we should be realistic about Prime Ministers. They are people like you and I. I've got to know those twelve very well — ring them up, g'day, how are you going? They're just Kiwis who've been in the right place at the right time, but they are ideologically attuned to the job that they're doing.
Chelsea: Can you be a good politician but a bad Prime Minister?
Barry: Oh yes, you can. But I can't really think of one that has been like that. You're clearly referring to Jacinda Ardern. She had been in the place for nine years and really didn't make any inroads at all, so I couldn't even describe her as a good politician. And that's not being critical — it's just that she didn't come into my sight at the time. She came in when she was suddenly being propelled through the ranks of the Labour Party. And I feel sorry for her now, that she's in a situation back in this country where people turn their backs on her.
Chelsea: Well, she's essentially been exiled.
Barry: That's right. And she wasn't a good Prime Minister. She simply wasn't ready for the job. Within the year before she became Prime Minister, she was saying it's a job she wouldn't want. So she got it, and she should have relied on her own instincts and turned it down.
Chelsea: But you say as well that secretly every politician who enters the Beehive does at some point have aspirations to become Prime Minister.
Barry: I think everybody does, yeah. It's axiomatic of being a politician. First of all, you like to get into cabinet. And that's why big caucuses have problems, like the one we've seen with the National Party — 48 members in the caucus, less than half of them with executive positions in the government. So you're going to have grumbling by those who feel they've been overlooked. And consequently, you see what happened to Chris Luxon. I think he was absolutely right going in, sitting them down, moving a vote of confidence in himself — which is unparalleled — but hopefully it shut them down.
The golden age of New Zealand Prime Ministers
Chelsea: You say that between 1999 and 2016 we lived through a golden age of New Zealand Prime Ministers. Tell me about that.
Barry: I think, in fairness, John Key was set up to be fairly comfortable in the job thanks to Labour, because they had negotiated the free trade agreement with China. I went up to Beijing with Helen Clark — interestingly, Winston Peters was the Foreign Minister then but was a no-show, and I've got to say the Chinese were quite surprised, though it didn't come as a great surprise to me. So she signed it, and Phil Goff signed it, and John Key benefited from it because he was facing the global financial crisis, which wasn't as bad as what we see at the moment but was pretty bad. You'll remember during the first three years of his term he was dubbed the Prime Minister of the Rockstar Economy. So New Zealand did pretty well, thanks to China, thanks to Labour at that time, and thanks to John Key having an ability to capitalise on that.
Prior to that, of course, Helen Clark was a class act of her own. I knew Helen when she came into Parliament as a fresh-faced early-thirty-year-old. She was idealistic, driven by Labour, and was in the Princess Street branch of the Labour Party here in Auckland, which is known as the breeding ground for Labour politicians. And she waited and saw how to govern, in my view. She saw the Lange-Douglas fallout. She just waited her time. And even when she became leader of the opposition, she couldn't find any popularity out there in the public arena — 3%. She was being waited on to move on by the people who ended up closest to her: Michael Cullen and Ed King. You couldn't say Jim Anderton was close to her. And what did she do? Very bright — she embraced them when she had a position of power and promoted them to the front bench. And they remained loyal.
Chelsea: I've read your book, Barry. I read it — how many hours do you think it took me? Maybe about five?
Barry: Well, I hoped it would be an easy read.
Chelsea: Oh yeah, I couldn't put it down. And what struck me is that you separate the significant from the non-significant and rank the significant Prime Ministers. What struck me about the top of the pack was their key relationships with those around them. The John Key and Bill English relationship, for example — could there have been a John Key as successful as he was without a Bill English?
Barry: That's actually a very good point. Could there have been a successful Helen Clark without a Michael Cullen? No. The deputy is very much the cement that holds everything together. And Bill English — you couldn't have wished for a better deputy. And he wasn't a bad Prime Minister either, even though he had a short time of it. He won the election in 2017 — people tend to forget — with about 7 or 8% above Labour, but Winston decided otherwise.
Bill English was a good Finance Minister because he's a bit of a wonk. He's from my part of the country — I called him the Dipton Drawler, I'm the Goreite from Gore, so I had an affinity with Bill. Our kids got on very well together, and I would see him in a social sense, dropping off kids and picking them up. But John Key, you're right, was as successful as he was because of somebody like Bill English.
Similarly, Helen Clark — I think she was an act unto herself. She knew how to, I guess, not necessarily engage as closely with the public as other Prime Ministers, but she was the boss. And I admired her greatly for many of the things that Labour government did that really go unnoticed — like the Cullen Fund, which is now worth $70 billion for superannuation, and KiwiBank, which Michael Cullen disliked vehemently because it was thought up by Jim Anderton. That's been relatively successful. There are so many things the Clark government did well, and did well because she was always in control.
Chelsea: Do you think people would find it surprising that you've ranked Helen Clark as the best of the best?
Barry: In this business, I've been accused of being a Tory, I've been accused of being a Labour lackey, I've been accused of all sorts of things — and fortunately it's across the political spectrum. I mention in the book that Rob Muldoon suggested I stand for a seat down south. And Bill Rowling also suggested I stand for Wellington Central. So for those detractors, I had offers on both sides. But having seen up front the way politicians have to carry out their work in a goldfish bowl, that wasn't for me.
Chelsea: What will the legacy of Helen Clark be to politics?
Barry: That's for others to judge. But obviously people will look at the first woman to lead a political party to victory in New Zealand, and I think they'll reflect that from 1999 to 2008, New Zealand became a rather different and, I think, a better country in many respects.
How political journalism has changed
Chelsea: Since stepping foot into the press gallery decades ago, a lot has changed. The technology portion — you do forget about file time. Here at ZB or the Herald, the file time is now. It's two minutes ago. Whereas back then the file time was when you got back to the hotel. How have things changed, and do you think there are pros and cons in how journalism has changed since you began?
Barry: Both, actually. I think there's more pressure now on journalists to meet an unknown deadline because it's always there. When I began, we had all sorts of things to deal with before we filed copy. In my case, you had to have a screw-mouthpiece phone to put crocodile clips on, and feed with a mutter box — we called it — to plug your tape recorder into and feed audio. And if you checked into a hotel that had push-button phones, which were coming into style then, you had to change rooms because you couldn't do it with a push-button phone. Now you do it by computer, sit down there. So whilst there's more pressure on journalists, it's easier. You can file copy with great ease and the quality of the audio will be perfect.
I've filed from India before with old technology and it's bloody awful because the phones took several hours to get a connection through to New Zealand. And when you got the connection, you lived in hope that it would be a good one, and it wasn't always the case. And there's one point I make in the book — I remember it vividly — standing on the West Lawn of the White House with a brick phone, being interviewed back home, and thinking, this is unbelievable. Here I am standing, no wires, no mutter boxes, and I'm talking and the people of New Zealand are hearing it. That to me epitomised what technology was like for a Luddite.
The lost art of parliamentary oratory
Chelsea: You mentioned that in the Muldoon and Lange era, Parliament was full of characters you just don't get now, and that unlike today there were a number of fantastic debaters. Do you think politicians today have lost that art form?
Barry: Absolutely. There used to be an unwritten rule in Parliament that if you took part in the Wednesday debate — Private Members' Day — you were not allowed to speak with notes. You had to stand up and be a good orator. You could have subheadings, but notes — people were pulled up in my early days and told, you're speaking from notes, you're not allowed to do that. It was harder, but the oratory was so much more superior than what you get today.
Lange was brilliant. Muldoon was brilliant. Trevor de Cleene, who had to sell the welfare cuts for being removed from sheep around the country for Roger Douglas — he was brilliant, quoting the Bible all the time. And most of us who are not that familiar with the Bible had to go and look up passages to see exactly what Trevor was trying to say. Paul East was another one — very good on his feet. There were so many standouts.
Lange in particular — his voice would rise to a crescendo and then he would drop it down to almost a whisper, and the whole audience would be silent and taken with him. It was like being in an opera. Whether he said anything that was particularly newsworthy is another matter, but it's the art and the flair of it.
And that surprises me, that politicians haven't carried that on, because there is so much opportunity now for that — and that need for a viral moment. You would think it would be the same now.
Chelsea: Yeah, well, why is it different?
Barry: We've got social media and everything's out there. But Grant Robertson — he was good. I think humour goes so far in politics. If you can stand up and deliver a good humorous address — might be cutting, but nevertheless it's clever — that's an ability that hasn't been totally lost, but has been largely lost in the debating chamber these days.
Chris Luxon and the media
Chelsea: You mentioned that one of Jenny Shipley's shortcomings was her distrust of the media — she wasn't capable of handling the media and didn't have a broad understanding of anything she hadn't been briefed on beforehand. Do you see history repeating itself with Luxon?
Barry: No, I don't. I think personally Luxon is extraordinarily intelligent, and he's got a good feel for most things. A lot of people go, oh yeah, we see him on television, he's no bloody good. But the thing is, I see these people up front all the time. I talk to them. And when you talk to them, you understand. Chris Luxon, before he came into Parliament, I knew him when he was out here in New Zealand. At any party I was at, he'd make a beeline to sit with me and have a yarn — always a yarn about politics. And I thought, I know this guy, I know what his future will be, not necessarily as a Prime Minister, but certainly as a politician. And he studied politics. He looked at all the cabinets in New Zealand back 80 years, saw the shakers and movers, how they would position themselves.
The economy this National government took over was in a dreadful state, and I don't think even Labour people would argue that it wasn't. And it takes a long time — as we've learnt in the Gulf of Hormuz — to turn around an oil tanker. It takes a long time to turn around an economy. I think when things start looking better, and they inevitably will, then if he's still in the job, Chris Luxon will be one of the good Prime Ministers that New Zealand's seen. I won't say the greatest because he hasn't risen quite to those heights yet.
The relationship between press gallery journalists and politicians
Chelsea: Explain to us the relationship between a press gallery journalist and a politician, because people may not understand everything that goes on behind the scenes. Most of the Prime Ministers you write about in the book you've shared a scotch with. How integral is getting to know a person that you are then going to report on? And I guess it would be quite a tricky line — going from actually liking someone to having to report on them without mincing your words.
Barry: What you've got to remember — and I won't tell you the story because it's too long — is the one about Winston Peters in the Senate seeing John McCain. Winston Peters and I have shared many scotches together over the years. We've had what I'd describe as a love-hate relationship. We're getting on really well at the moment, although he's annoying me a bit the way he always performs in the lead-up to an election, regardless of whether he's in a coalition. The first time I ever met the man, we had an argument. And then I got to know him better.
I think what journalists have to understand is that when they report on politicians, you can have a drink with them, you can have a yarn with them, but always remember there's a point where you may have to criticise them. I'm a commentator — that's what I do. You may have to do something that you personally would find a bit unpalatable for a person you shared a scotch with last night. But that's the nature of the business. They know the business mostly, and those of us who are experienced know the business as well. They may take you into their confidence, but you've got to remember you're being used as well.
A person who was brilliant at that, of course, was Helen Clark. She would get on the blower and go, oh, how are you going, Baz? A bit of a yarn. And then she'd drop something just in terms of the conversation. And I'd think, I know what she's doing here. Then it would be dropped. And then I'd go out and talk around the track and see if Labour was thinking of doing that. And when I had established that this could be policy in the future, I'd run a story on it. If it got a bad reaction, of course, Helen could say, well, I don't know where he got that from. And that's the nature of the relationship between politicians, Prime Ministers, and journalists.
Chelsea: Do you think, though, with the animosity after that caucus vote — with Christopher Luxon and the animosity he showed towards the media in that two-minute stand-up afterwards, refusing to take questions, and now a week later saying he won't appear on Breakfast — is he going down a slippery slope of having that kind of distrust with the media?
Barry: No. I think it was wise not to say anything after the caucus vote because everybody wants to know what size vote he won by. Well, he wouldn't know, would he? No one knows, because it is a rule of leadership confidence votes that they destroy the ballot after it's been held and simply declare the winner. In this case, it was Chris Luxon. So he wanted to avoid that, because he'd been answering questions for well over two weeks about his leadership, and it was being stirred — I could name them but I won't, because I rely on my contacts. Hopefully it's shut it down now until the election.
Chelsea: By some backbenchers.
Barry: Yeah, they sit somewhere.
And him refusing to appear on Breakfast — I personally think that's a bit of a mistake. The way he could have handled that question he was asked — how many Māori do you have in your cabinet — would have been quite simple: say, I don't know, I don't look at the ethnicities in my cabinet, you tell me, how many Māori do I have in my cabinet? And I guess that comes with the art of being a good politician. Unfortunately for Luxon, he had a brief apprenticeship — not as a backbencher, but as a frontbencher, then leader, then Prime Minister. His time has been truncated compared to anyone else. Even Ardern had those years in Parliament before she became Prime Minister. So he's still learning on the job. But given the circumstances, he's not doing it terribly badly.
Could Winston Peters have been Prime Minister?
Chelsea: Just lastly, Barry — if Peters had played the game and stayed the course, and perhaps if Bolger had actually liked him, could there possibly have been thirteen Prime Ministers in your book?
Barry: I've always said that Winston Peters had the material to be a Prime Minister.
Chelsea: Do you think he still does? Because I did see — he's interviewed fairly often on Ryan Bridge's show in the mornings — and I saw a conversation where they were talking about the possibility of a Prime Minister coming from a smaller coalition partner. And Winston did a Winston chuckle and said something along the lines of, well, it's not unheard of — back in the 1930s.
Barry: No, it's true. The thing is, Winston turned 81 this month. He's no spring chicken, but he's a politician extraordinaire. And it would be a natural conclusion. Don't forget that in the last coalition discussions, both David Seymour and Winston Peters became deputy. And Peters was wise, as he always is in politics, to take the second turn at being the right-hand man of Chris Luxon. And now he's doing what he always does — out there campaigning.
To get back to your original question: if Winston had been a team player within the National Party, yes, he certainly could have been a Prime Minister. I remember the time we had to sort of talk to Bolger — Winston's rating was about 17% as preferred Prime Minister, and it was higher than Bolger's when Bolger was about to form his first cabinet. And Bolger had to be talked into having Winston even within his cabinet. And he got him into the cabinet and gave him Māori Affairs. Can you imagine it? Although Winston did hold all the Māori seats in 1996, but it was sort of a slap in the face. And Winston made the most of it — having hui up at Government House, having mattresses on the floor. It was totally unconventional.
But of all the politicians I've talked about in the book, the most consummate in terms of being a politician — if you look at the definition of the word — Winston Peters is one.
Chelsea: Thanks for joining us, Barry.
Barry: It's my pleasure.