Airborne bacon alert

We hope you're sitting comfortably, Watchers. A steadying cup of tea (or perhaps something stronger) in hand. For the easily discombobulated amongst you, maybe a defibrillator standing by. It's finally happened. Pigs are lining up awaiting take-off clearance. Because the subject of today's post is just how much we agree with the Diva.

Not about everything. Not even about most things. But when it comes to the by-election, and the standard of candidates therein, it's as though the Cave is writing his material. Or, heaven forfend, vice versa.

In his latest e-column, the Diva opines: "I can’t say that the campaigns of the by-election candidates have impressed me very much."

At that point Watchers started to get an uneasy feeling we were about to encounter the first Mayoral column with which we had no issue - but luckily the Diva comes to the rescue elsewhere in the same piece. But more on that later.

After mentioning Chandra Osborne, Allan Anderson, Margaret Campion and Rana Waitai as running campaigns that were at least noticeable, he concludes: "Although I’d like to know what they’re standing for … their actual policies. That’s still a mystery."

We share your confusion, Michael. Then cue a predictable party political broadcast on behalf of diVision’s Philippa Baker-Hogan, masquerading as a critque of her campaign for getting off to a late start. She would, he claims "certainly have the skills gap we currently lack around the council table".

Which is odd, because if there's one thing we notice about those presently sitting round the Council table, it's a positively huge skills gap.

Then it's back to true Diva form, dismissing Heather Marion Smith as a "single-issue campaigner" with a "message thirty years out of date". Another single issue nutter? Either Wanganui is positively chock full of such people, or the Diva's supply of poisonously abusive adjectives is running low after his effort of three weeks ago aimed at this blog, and he's having to recycle.

And clearly Mark Simmonds has got under the Diva's epidermis – he's scoffed at for having the temerity to suggest "that he will make a difference around the council table". The Diva has news for him: "Sorry mate, but you won't".

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it'd make a change to see someone doing something other than cower, nod at the right times or, in the case of Dotty, "giggle like a schoolgirl".

Given the spread of candidates, he predicts the winner will receive a third of the vote at best. We'd second that also. He then backs Cleopatra's Nails owner Chandra Osborne "to surprise with her result if not actually win".

While you may initially wonder what sort of herbal tea he's drinking in order to be able to see that result in the leaves, don't forget this is politics, and that it's the Diva we're talking about.

If you're getting whispers that predict your candidate might lose, you don't go out there are talk them up. You talk them down. The theory being that by this stage everyone who has a burning desire to vote for one candidate or the other has already done so. Those that are left are wavering, and many won't vote at all on the assumption that the candidate whom everyone thinks is going to win will do so without their help.

So you pick a left-field candidate and point to them and predict victory. That motivates your "soft" support base to find that voting paper underneath that pile of bills and actually fill the thing in.

Just to be sure, he then predicts "some of the other candidates will come again in 2007 – Waitai, Campion, Simmonds and Osborne... and stand good chances under the anticipated 'at large' electoral system".

Purely coincidental that three of those candidates into whose minds he has such intimate access also happen to represent the greatest threats to Baker-Hogan.

The message? Vote for Phillipa now, and you can have Rana, Margaret, Mark and heck, even Chandra, next time.

It's a masterful piece of politics. It also happens to be entirely spurious. There's no guarantee any of those people would stand. There's no guarantee that if they did, they'd win. And more importantly, by 2007 it will be too late to reverse much of the Diva's agenda.

Most of the remainder of the column is stuffed with the usual Womens Daze family trivia and modest, self-effacing stories of how he gave up his tickets to the River Queen to "ordinary ratepayers" and humbly let Dotty take the credit for the premiere despite the fact that "it might have been my idea – and my first entreaty to the film’s producer Don Reynolds in late-2004 to stage the premiere".

Not a great reader of Scripture, our Diva, or he'd be familiar with this one: "For whoever exalts himself will be abased, and he who humbles himself will be exalted." (Lk 14:11)

He does confirm, however, that Council kept a cap on expenditure at $150,000 - so kudos where it's due.

If you can keep your afternoon sherry down while wading through that dross, you'll be rewarded with an interesting little snippet on the relationship between Guyton Street and the Chron.

Tueday's edition was "disgraceful", apparently, capping a holiday season in which the paper had been "dysfunctional", "to the point where they, literally, refused a media release from Cr Nicki Higgie". The paper "also printed headlines that were wrong and exhibited a palpable anti-Vision bias over the hoarding affair".

Let's just freeze-frame the spin for a moment. The paper made an editorial decision not to print a press release. Just like the River City Press made a commercial decision not to take a LawsWatch supporter's money to run our advertisng. Turning down news releases happens a hundred times a day in any newsroom in the country. Turning down money happens a tad less often, and for less-than-explicable reasons. But it's the newspaper's right to do as it sees fit. The Chron printed headlines that weren't fawningly pro-Council, and took an editorial stance that Vision was wrong. Fairly mildly, from what we saw.

If the government received that sort of treatment from most daily newspapers it would think it was winning the PR battle. But in a town where the local newspaper behaves like an incontinent elderly poodle rather than a watchdog of democracy, we can see how it would come as a shock.

But don't panic, Watchers, things will soon return to normal.

"It was no coincidence, I think, that editor John Maslin was absent on annual leave."

That explains it, then. We'll refrain from highlighting the implications of this statement and allow Watchers to draw their own conclusions.

But towards the end we find ourselves on the same page again. After lamenting the loss of Sean Hoskins, the Diva notes that "council will get its fourth council reporter in the past 15 months. The problem is that each new one takes some months to get up to speed and often has no reference for what is happening in front of them. We’ll do our best but it can be a frustration at times".

Indeed it is. And indeed we will.

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