Mickey lies; the camera doesn't

When Palmerston North pollsters Competitive Edge ring in the middle of Sunday dinner preparations to ask Watchers who they’d vote for, they’re naturally reluctant to reveal who’s buying their services beyond saying it’s a private company. But dollars to donuts the answer is either Vision, mayoral mystery-man Michael Laws or mayoral wannabe Dot McKinnon … or any combination of the above.

Which has us wondering why the pollsters list of Wanganui mayoral possibilities includes none other than Michael Laws, who’s been riding a wave of spin since announcing last November that he wouldn’t be standing again because his work in Wanganui was done and because, as he whispered to the women’s mags, his latest offspring were entitled to the kind of parenting he notably failed to provide for his first batch.

More recently Dot McKinnon has leapt into the fray and announced she’ll be “seeking the Vision nomination”. The chattering classes were quick to pick trouble at (Vision) mill amid the resounding silence from Mickey and his hired gun Bob Walker. So much for Mickey’s promise to Dotty that she was his chosen one, his anointed successor. Looks like the bridesmaid has been left standing at the altar while her fickle fiancé plans another fling with the voters of Wanganui.

But it’s been quite a roller coaster few weeks for Mickey, who doesn’t really need Competitive Edge, or even his favourite pollster Antoinette Beck, to tell him his honeymoon with long-suffering Wanganui is over. By the end of his dancing nightmare it was clear that he was a white dwarf on the way to becoming a black hole. Not even his frantic publicity campaign or the Cancer Society’s need for funds could persuade people to txt for the desperate non-celeb who proved in his short, doomed run that the camera never lies.

While he managed to provide Woman’s Day readers and Wanganui District Council website surfers with carefully staged happy family images, the judges and viewers of the dancing disaster saw, as one judge pointed out, an over-excited smutty schoolboy alternating with a frustrated and angry loser hurling insults at a visiting judge. Worse, the stills provided by the show’s promoters ensured readers of the country’s main dailies and visitors to the TVNZ website saw the truth about the man.

Then he woke to the news that his Radio Live stablemate Marcus Lush had taken the big prize at the radio awards, and scored the breakfast slot that Mickey has coveted as a possible path out of the 2% ratings doldrums.

We can only presume that by last Saturday night he was dreaming of salvation from his ongoing ratings slide and publicity nightmare. By Monday morning he was telling National Radio that: “Not in my wildest dr …. nightmares” could he have expected a toddler to be slain in an outbreak of gang violence on his patch. After that oh-so-Freudian slip he spent the week making sure his dream of a speedy return to the Six O’Clock News came true. By midweek he was unable to help himself seizing upon the Chron(ic) editor’s rally plans and even snatching her own “scoop” from her.

Now was HIS time to play the statesman. The masterplan: Grab a kid – any kid, even one with the kind of name that’s reduced him in the past to advocating eugenics – and take the high moral ground. Be seen smoking the peace pipe with the kaumatua who’d carpeted him for his racist holiday season headline grabber about third world conditions on River Road. Throw in a good dose of the warm fuzzies. Show up those Watchers who predicted he’d turn Majestic Square into Wanganui’s own Nuremberg stadium. Talk warm … caring … compassionate. Unlike those awful unguarded moments of madness captured by the TV cameras over the past few years, he’d be in control. But as the DominionPost showed its readers the next day, the camera (unless of course its wielded by the photographer to the court of Michael Laws’ ) never lies.