Review: Absolute Power, by Ian Wishart — Innuendo, smut and conspiracy, but bestseller material nonetheless

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This is another typical Ian Wishart book written in the breathless style of a 1950s American detective novel, but about current New Zealand events.

Wishart is a journalist who cut his teeth in the 1990s exposing the Winebox affair when he worked for TVNZ before setting up his own publishing house, Howling at the Moon, which published his first and most famous book, The Paradise Conspiracy, as well as many subsequent books by himself and others.

The basic hypothesis of Absolute Power will be well known to anyone who reads Wishart’s Investigate magazine. Prime Minister Helen Clark is, he claims, corrupt and is in a marriage of convenience. Many of the details he gives to support his thesis are unsubstantiated baloney and say far more about his own obsession with Helen Clark than about her.

There is a market for this kind of trash and Wishart mines it well.

Many sleazy people move through the pages of Absolute Power, but mostly they are his shadowy “informants,” not those his book sets out to destroy, who include not just Helen Clark, but also senior police officers such as commissioner Howard Broad and his offsider Rob Pope.

This is nonetheless a readable book despite the Mickey Spillane-style purple prose the author writes in. The target audience of anti-Labour diehards will enjoy it immensely, though the cast of characters in some chapters is so vast, and the detail so intricate, that it often becomes hard to keep track of who is allegedly doing what to whom.

Three whole chapters are devoted to Wishart’s obsession with the private lives of the prime minister and her husband. Other chapters are equally obsessed with attempting to destroy police commissioner Howard Broad, another Wishart target for some time now.

For some reason of Wishart’s mindset, it was allegedly disgraceful and also Clark’s fault that former commissioner Peter Doone lost his job when the car his partner was driving was stopped by a police patrol for having its lights off on election night in 1999, but Broad did not lose his job when he allegedly went through a police roadblock in 1992. Whether or not the Broad allegation happened, Labour was not the government in 1992, something Wishart overlooks. As he overlooks, exaggerates or fantasises about many things in this book’s 336 pages and 18 chapters.

Helen Clark is an elected politician and so has to live with a book like this. Wishart is on rather shakier ground in his pursuit of the personal lives of people like the police commissioner.

While Nicky Hager’s turgid, almost-as-conspiratorial Hollow Men helped to bring about the downfall of National leader Don Brash, Absolute Power is unlikely to cause similar problems for Helen Clark. Unless I missed it somewhere, it contains no smoking gun, just a restating at great length of material Wishart has canvassed before. The mainstream media’s only interest in it to date was over the 1992 claims about Howard Broad.

It is good that we live in a democracy where someone like Ian Wishart can write such conspiratorial innuendo and smut. If we lived in the kind of country Ian seems to believe we do live in, Ian would be the first in front of the firing squad. But we don’t.

Wishart has a naïveness which is somehow appealing in a journalist, all too many of whom are bitter and cynical. This doesn’t mean I believe every word he says, or even many of them. I think he lives in Fantasyland. The X Files was and may still be his favourite TV show. But this will have no effect on his blogosphere and talkbackland fans who want to believe his every conspiratorial word, and have already made Absolute Power a bestseller.

Absolute Power, The Helen Clark Years, by Ian Wishart, Howling At The Moon, $34.99. At all bookshops. **

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Tags: Absolute Power, Helen Clark, Ian Wishart