This morning I received the following email from David Garrett:

Dear Dr. Edwards,

I watched your interview with Cam Slater on Sunday. During it, you could not resist denigrating me, and dredging up the “dead baby” issue yet again. The rest of the MSM have pretty well shaken all they could out of  the issue, but you attempted to breathe fresh life into it.

I wonder how long you think I should be punished for something I did 28 years ago – obtaining a false passport which was never used for any purpose? Something for which I apologised in writing to the family when the sorry business was unearthed in 2005, and for which I apologised publicly again at the time I left parliament.

Should I hide in shame for the rest of my life? Should I cease to voice an opinion publicly, even if asked to?  Should I perhaps do away with myself? Do tell.

Sincerely,

David Garrett SC

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On Sunday on The Nation Bill Ralston, Rachel Smalley and I had the pleasure of interviewing Cameron Slater of ‘Whale Oil’ fame. I hadn’t expected it to be a pleasure. Slater’s politics are at the opposite end of the spectrum from my own and his and his Whale Oil followers’ perpetual use of gratuitously offensive language had merely served to persuade me of their intellectual poverty.

Meeting Slater did not change my view of the morons who have made his blog the most widely read in the country.  (Nothing attracts a following like intemperance of thought and expression.) But it did change my view of him.

Cameron is highly intelligent, has a great sense of humour and is… well, I’m reluctant to use the word ‘charming’ so I’ll tone it down a bit and say ‘extremely engaging’.

And I didn’t get where I am today by not being able to penetrate all that ‘don’t give a fuck’ bluster to recognise a capacity for being wounded that, needless to say, will never be confessed.

But what I really wanted to say is that I found Slater hugely interesting and entertaining. He is a character and we are woefully short of characters in New Zealand politics at the moment. In fact, in terms of personality,  politics in this country has never been duller.    Read the rest of this entry »