Source: Radio New Zealand
Grant Robertson and Dame Jacinda Ardern have both released memoirs this year. Supplied
From memoirs to biographies, autobiographies – both authorised and unauthorised – to the mid-career manifesto, the documented lives of politicians come in many forms.
This year has seen two well-received memoirs from high profile politicians – Dame Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson.
They’re among the legions of former MPs and prime ministers who’ve penned their thoughts (or had others pen for them) either mid-career or after stepping back from public life.
While history is said to be written by the victors, sometimes it’s told by the losers – and often those are much more interesting.
The Detail talks to a political history professor and a seasoned political journalist who both have voracious reading habits, when it comes to the political tome.
They talk about their favourite books, what makes a good yarn and which politicians they’d like to see a book written about.
Victoria University’s Jim McAloon has read his fair share of such works, but says there are two standout leaders who haven’t had books written about them – Sir Sid Holland, National Party Prime Minister 1949-57, and William Ferguson Massey, Reform Party Prime Minister 1912-25.
“Neither of them have had substantial biographies at all and that’s a great gap,” he says.
“Holland was instrumental in making the National Party a modern, liberal conservative party, contributed greatly to their long-term success, a very wily character, pragmatic, not regarded as an intellectual, but very, very shrewd.
“Then Massey, of course, ended that long period of liberal hegemony, really helped created the first mainstream conservative party in New Zealand, led the country through the First World War into the 1920s, very hard politician, very tough, uncompromising, firmly committed to the British Empire, a villain to the organised labour movement – but perhaps not as bad as he’s always painted to be.”
Did they have colourful personal lives that would keep a reader gripped? Not really, but the political purist would still be interested in their political lives.
McAloon says he would also look forward to reading a book on Pita Sharples and says Sir John Key deserves a more searching analysis than the book that’s already landed.
“The other person who I think in that government is really interesting is Bill English,” he says.
“Quiet, self-effacing, but very much an achiever and I think with a very coherent intellectual vision as well.
“In many respects, he’s a classic example of that farmer-politician, like Keith Holyoake, like Massey himself, like Jim Bolger, and I think it gives them a certain relatability, if you like.
“Even if you might disagree with them, it’s hard to dislike them.”
McAloon also talks about the best time to write a memoir. Listen to the podcast to find out which textbook of biographies had the cast-iron rule that “you had to be dead”.
Newsroom co-owner Tim Murphy says former Labour leader David Shearer is top of his wishlist for politicians who haven’t already been written about.
“International aid worker and leader of big humanitarian gains for civilisation, really, in the last couple of decades… not so much his initial family upbringing, but his formation and what led him that way. He was sort of an anti-politician.”
When it comes to political works, Murphy says he wants to know “stuff that only they know”.
“I want them to take us in behind the closed doors. Nothing more unsatisfying in a political biography or memoir – and Jacinda Ardern’s was a bit like this – where… at crucial parts they say ‘caucus has always had a rule that what goes on in caucus stays in caucus and I’m not about to break it now’.
“To me, you might as well turn the page, close the chapter and move on.
“Grant Robertson’s book is really good for that – he actually tells you some things, including observations from around the Cabinet table, sitting next to Winston Peters and what Peters was kind of looking at on his laptop, and the kind of moments and motivations that Peters would spring out of his stupor, and have a go about something New Zealand First-like.
“[He] described it in a way you could relate to. I want to be taken where none of us get to see.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
