Paul Henry: Cometh the hour, cometh the showman

Roll up, roll up for Act's new prince of populism

Act’s new Captain Fantastic and some other guy.

I’ve had several encounters with Paul Henry over the years. Three stand out.

Many years ago, when I was editor of Metro magazine, we organised a celebrity photo shoot at Soul in the Viaduct. The idea was to run a single photo over several spreads, Vanity Fair style. It was a massive undertaking, with cables and equipment everywhere, technical crew, makeup and hair, more than 30 celebrities and several hangers-on. As you might imagine, there was a little bit of ego in the room.

Paul Holmes was there. That sweetest of men, he behaved that day like a dreadful prima donna. Helicoptered in from Hawke’s Bay, arrived late, got in the way, made ridiculous random demands and kept saying, “Who are all these people? I don’t know these people.” We coped, as you do.

Paul Henry was there, too. A man who often seems to revel in being obnoxious, on this day he was courteous and professional, making no silly demands, doing what he was asked, showing no displeasure at the inevitable waiting around. He put up with the Holmes show without once trying to compete, although they were at the time fierce rivals.

So the bad guy was great and the nice guy was a shocker. People are complex. Perhaps especially when they’re celebrities.

On the second occasion, memorable to me although I’m sure to no one else, I was a guest panellist on Henry’s breakfast TV show when the topic of a classic Kiwi sweet getting a new wrapper came up. He asked me which wrapper I preferred. I said I didn’t care, because I’m a dullard and I wanted to talk about something a little more substantial. But no. He repeated the question, I repeated my answer, he got annoyed and showed it, and that was the last time I was asked onto the show. Fair enough. I was being stupid: you’re supposed to play the Yes game in those moments and it was his show.

But for a man who rails all the time against the stupidity and triviality he finds everywhere he looks, it did seem a little thin-skinned.

The third occasion was Henry’s keynote speech to the Act Party rally in Auckland in 2024. Henry has told us he decided quite suddenly that he wanted to be an Act MP, which may be true, but his relationship with the party goes back some time. His appointment to the TVNZ board had Act’s fingerprints all over it.

I wrote about that speech for the Herald, calling it “long, entertaining and superbly well crafted”. Henry’s a great showman and, I said, “he knows how to hold a staunchly right-wing crowd”.

He railed against all sorts of stupidity, as he saw it. The Labour government, which had lit matches “to incinerate more of New Zealand”. Queen St, which was a “disaster zone” and “we can’t fix it because it is politically incorrect to hoover the streets of the antisocial”. The whole of New Zealand, which was “a sad little country squabbling amongst ourselves”.

He thought Act might be that sad country’s “last hope”, but “it’s possible it’s beyond repair, in which case I’ll relocate”. Which is exactly what he did.

I wrote then that it was “a masterful mash-up: grievance, superiority over the ‘sad little squabblers’ and a smug acknowledgment of the privilege of wealth. He got a standing ovation.” Paul Henry is a maestro at flattering a like-minded audience.

If you like him, you really like him.

He’s announced his candidacy at a critical time for the coalition, with all three parties locked in a fierce battle to steal each other’s voters. He may not attract many from the other side, but Act hopes he will be irresistible to disaffected National and NZ First supporters.

Already, we know National won’t get near the 48 seats and 38.1% of the party vote it won in 2023. It might improve on the <30% showing it’s been getting almost all year, but probably not by much. That means if National does get to form a new government, it will have an even weaker role in it than it has now.

In this context, Henry must fancy his chances. Even though, as someone who hates this “sad little country squabbling amongst ourselves”, he won’t naturally fall in love with parliament.

But he isn’t doing this just to breathe through his nose on the backbenches. He’ll demand a cabinet role, soon as, and the precedent has been set. In the last coalition talks, Christopher Luxon gave both Andrew Hoggard (Act) and Casey Costello (NZ First) ministerial roles, despite neither having previously been MPs.

Henry will expect to be minister of broadcasting, for starters, and incumbent Paul Goldsmith may be very happy to leave it to him. And pretty soon he’ll want more than that.

But even if he rises quickly, will Paul Henry like being in parliament? And despite his affinity with Act philosophy, will he like being an Act MP?

Newsroom’s Mark Jennings, who was Henry’s boss at TV3, has told us he’s a team player and a professional. That aligns with my experience of him in that photo shoot. It’s not always about him.

But often it is. The hard-right broadcaster Peter Williams says, “I can … vouch that if he’s not the centre of attention he tends to lose interest pretty quickly.” Goodness. I wonder what a politician with a malicious streak and a superiority complex might do when he gets bored.

Jennings described “politically incorrect humour” as “a big part of Henry’s on-air persona”. But it’s not an on-air persona: it’s him. When Henry insulted Indian politician Sheila Dikshit on TV in 2010, repeatedly mispronouncing and laughing at her name and saying his insults were “appropriate because she’s Indian”, it wasn’t just an off-colour joke. He was being racist. He was celebrating racism.

Being professional when he wants to be does not make Paul Henry a good person to have in politics. He’s not the first politician to stir up racial hatred or want to “hoover the streets” of people he finds undesirable, but his professional skills might make him dangerously good at it. Especially if he thinks it’s funny.

The fact Henry can be considerate and helpful, as he was on that photo shoot, and the fact he can laugh at trivial things, like the sweet wrappers: these things don’t define him. Every good populist knows how to be a nice guy, and Paul Henry has the makings of an outrageously good populist. He’s a super smart and gleefully gifted speechmaker, but those “gifts” include cynicism, impatience and narcissism, and he seems to love abusing and hurting people for laughs.

In Britain, Australia and elsewhere, the hard right has risen fast in the polls. Act hopes Henry will be their new prince of populism, casting shade on Winston Peters and helping them assume the mantle of Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson here. Henry’s doing this to make a difference, and not in a good way.

And he’s not even the party leader …

God knows, from their point of view, Act needs to do something. As mentioned, National’s vote has fallen, but the main beneficiaries of that have been NZ First on one side and Labour on the other. Act’s own poll numbers are resolutely stuck a little below the 8.64% it achieved in 2023.

Some commentators say this is because party leader David Seymour is being more ministerially collaborative than his rival Winston Peters, but I think his problem lies elsewhere. The simple fact is that Act in government has been a disaster.

From pay equity to school lunches, boot camps to climate denialism, the party disgusts and dismays many voters. Including, surely, Paul Henry. Seymour’s signature school-lunch policy has exposed exactly the kind of incompetence Henry scoffs at all the time.

No matter. Cometh the hour, cometh the showman: the entertaining bully who cannot hide his superiority and does not try. The ultimate flash harry.

Henry has conducted many probing interviews in his time, but his trademark was always to sneer at people he doesn’t like. It’s hard to know if he has any serious interest in policy, or governing for the greater good, and he does not appear to have even a shred of the compassion we should hope for in all our politicians.

“New Zealand is in the sh*t” say the new Act billboards, with a grinning photo of Paul Henry. If politicians had to wear their core values branded on their foreheads, “You’re all shits” would be on his.

The stakes were already high for this election. The prospect of Paul Henry in cabinet raises them a whole lot higher.

Hopetown: where there are different ways to do things. Here’s Marlon Williams, an infinitely better kind of showman, with “The first time ever I saw your face”, a song written in 1957 by British singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger and turned into a smash hit in 1969 by the great Roberta Flack.