Where there's smoke ...

Speculation has been mounting about where Michael Laws may seek further fame and fortune after he gets the big thumbs down by Wanganui’s increasingly disgusted voters next year, and gets the flick from his various media slush funds.

As one Watcher has pointed out, Touchdown bossette Julie Christie, who controls the purse strings for great big dollops of Creative New Zealand money - and hasn’t been slow to funnel lots of it Mickey’s way - isn’t going to be at all happy with his poisoning of the Pacific well that she draws on for her trashy Treasure Island ventures.

No one gave a toss while Michael Laws was boring the people of Wanganui with complaints of how he’d picked up hives during his short-lived visit to Tonga in February 2005 with Christie’s ill-fated Celebrity Treasure Island expedition (though his fellow celebs had decided with alacrity that Laws himself was a source of intense irritation and put him on the boat at the first opportunity).

But now that he’s well and truly bitten the hands that feed him, Christie and her crew, with or without Mickey, will be about as welcome on any Pacific island as David Irving would be at a Passover in Jerusalem.

Over at Radio Slide, desperate Mickey still has three weeks of the current radio ratings survey period to go and that means more of the same offensive racist ageist diatribes in hopes of rescuing himself from death by ratings. No sooner had the media started to lose interest in his war on Tonga than he opened up a new front by proposing extermination of dementia sufferers in hopes of provoking sufficient outrage to get him back in the New Zealand Herald.

Just another step, apparently, in the eugenics and cleansing policies he’s cribbed from his study of Germany circa 1944.

Interestingly, the current six-week survey period ends on Friday October 13 and we’re predicting that will indeed be a Black Friday for Mickey. By the unhappiest of coincidences that’s also exactly one year ... 12 months ... 365 days till the voters of Wanganui get to tick the only box that matters.

Which brings us, back, dear Watchers to idle speculation about life after Wanganui for Michael Brian Laws. We wouldn’t be the first to wonder if he’s spent the last year cultivating the National Front and other bottom-feeders as a prelude to launching a new political party in the mad hope of making his way back to Wellington and completing his unfinished business at the heart of the body politic. But that wouldn’t come cheap and at the very least he’d need a filthy rich backer with a penchant for Mickey’s style and his politics.

Coincidentally, the fax machine at The Cave chugged to life and out popped a copy of the love letter from the master of the offensive bon mot, Sir Bob Jones, that was excerpted in the Chron at Mickey’s urging. While the Chron was happy to quote Jones’s views on where Wanganui’s flag should fly, it apparently was rightly squeamish about what followed. In deference to the sensibilities of Watchers everywhere we’ll just say that Jones’s speculation on the predilections of Tonga’s new king would not have been appropriate for the front page of a family newspaper.

Reminded about the way Jones bankrolled the short-lived New Zealand Party in an attempt to oust Muldoon in 1984, The Cave's resident francophiles wondered if Jones’s billet doux to his man in Wanganui could be the start of a new roman politique.

Given Jones is now enjoying a minor bout of television celebrity of his own, on Touchdown’s home-grown version of Dragon’s Den, we even wondered if Mickey might be preparing to line up before the dragons to make a pitch for some of Jones’s millions:

MICHAEL LAWS: I’m not going to waste my time introducing myself, Dragons, because you all know what an absolute fascist bastard I am. I just want money, loads of it ... millions in fact, for another assault on Wellington. In return you’ll receive absolutely nothing but I’ll get my rocks off sticking it to Clark and her PC nancy boys and girls in the dirtiest erection election campaign the world has seen.

BOB JONES: This one is mine, Dragons, all mine. Michael, you are absolutely right in showing clear-thinking on this matter (reaches for huge wad of cash). Dragons, this boy and I are going to make sweet music together. (unaware of the irony, they embrace in a clinch that would make Ian Wishart’s day - and Investigate’s front page - and stroll off the set hand in hand).

Update (6 pm): Over at Mirage Media, a certain irony has been noted:

Laws - who I heard say earlier this year on his Radio Live talkback show that Tonga is a nation of inbreds - believes King Tupou is a despot and for that reason has ordered his city council staff not to lower the New Zealand flag to half-mast to mark his death. A despot - isn't that a man in power whose rulings, no matter how arcane, are permitted on the strength of his celebrity and the fear he invokes in his subordinates?

Mirage also notes several examples of incompetence and foolishness at Radio Slide. Can they be long for this world?