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Shock! Horror! Wife defends husband!!!!

Brian Edwards
Thu, 02 Oct 2014

OPINION

In recent posts I’ve made some fairly trenchant comments about David Cunliffe, primarily about his media performance. Others, including some of his Caucus colleagues, have gone even further. The now resigned Leader of the Opposition has been under sustained and often vitriolic attack from friend and foe alike since Labour’s catastrophic showing in the General Election just over a fortnight ago. The media have feasted on his downfall.

Political survival and the retention of one’s self-respect require stoic denial from a political leader in these circumstances. To reveal hurt will  be taken as a sign of weakness. The response to Helen Clark’s tears at Waitangi in 1998 when Titewhai Harawira angrily challenged her right to speak on the marae is evidence enough of that.

But no politician can be totally indifferent to personal attack. David Cunliffe has admitted to being ‘close to tears’ following the 7-hour Caucus bloodletting after the election. That admission took courage and  should be admired rather than derided. A politician without feelings would be a dangerous creature indeed.

But what of the politician’s family, whose hurt or rage can be aired only in private, who must literally suffer in silence. For such  is the convention. So it was for Ruth Kirk and Thea Muldoon who kept just such a dignified silence in the face of the abuse, rumours and scuttlebutt that attended their husbands’ public and private lives. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Tough call!    

On a couple of occasions male colleagues have criticised me to or in front of Judy. They will no doubt remember those occasions. Taking me to task is regarded by my wife as her prerogative. And no-one else’s! The gentlemen concerned were fortunate to depart with their genitals still attached.

I know Karen Price reasonably well. She is, in my submission, an absolutely marvellous woman. TV3 viewers got a glimpse of her qualities when John Campbell visited the Cunliffes at their Herne Bay home. (It’s not ‘a mansion’ by the way.) Not to put too fine a point on it, Karen stole the show.

I suspect that she’d rather not be the wife of a politician. But the wife of a politician she is and he happens to be the newly resigned Leader of the Opposition and his party and much of the country has turned its face against him. And much of what is being said about Karen Price’s husband really isn’t very nice. Tough call!

Well, her method of attacking those who were attacking her husband might not have been well-advised and might have been lacking in Machiavellian subtlety, but you really have to admire it. “Good on you, Karen!” I say. “Well done!” “No apology required.” Those people are assholes anyway.

And a footnote: One of our regular walks takes us past the Cunliffes’ drive. I increase my stride a little as we go past and not just because David almost killed me reversing at speed over the footpath some years ago. Suffice to say that I’m less fearful today of a repeat performance from the Member for New Lynn, than from his wife, quite possibly armed with a meat cleaver.

Now that’s my kind of woman!

(I’m off to play a few Helen Reddy tracks now. )

Media trainer and commentator Dr Brian Edwards posts at Brian Edwards Media.

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Brian Edwards
Thu, 02 Oct 2014
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Shock! Horror! Wife defends husband!!!!
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