There’s a strange story in the Sunday Star-Times today. The premise is rumours that Don Brash has a love child but that seems to be baseless. The real point of the story is the Brash-ists trying to kill off Rodney Hide now, rather than wait until the election. I wouldn’t be surprised they’re behind the love-child story.
When you look at the story, it’s one long litany of Brash’s people (apart from flat-footed David Farrar, who is brought in for ‘balance’) all attacking Hide for supposedly slipping to a “new low in New Zealand politics” by spreading stories that Brash has a love-child. Except there’s no proof these rumours come from Hide or that they’re even really real.
The first time I heard of the love-child story was from one of the Brash-ists, Matthew Hooton. He dropped it into a Kiwiblog thread back before Brash rolled Hide, which was then reported by one of our commentators:
Matthew Hooton (14) Says:
April 26th, 2011 at 4:42 pm
You are so right that Key and Goff would want to stay away from this. Otherwise they might be involved in something where anything could happen on live TV, something as appalling as one of those mentioned above, say, accusing another of, say, having a love child, which might mean that that person could then be forced to accuse the other of something as equally untrue, like – god knows? – something like sending texts to his girlfriend when his wife was in labour. False and disgusting accusations like these are the last thing NZ politics needs.
Ipredict, which Hooton does the PR for, launched a stock yesterday on Hide losing his ministerial portfolios by June 1. Cameron Slater, who was very much in the camp of the Nats who launched the takeover of ACT, was pumping this stock and the story last night before it went up on SST with the angle that Hide must go for spreading these terrible rumours.
It looks very much like this is an attempt to create ‘facts on the ground’ that make Hide’s position as a minister for ACT untenable.
But it doesn’t answer one question: what does Hide really have over Brash that allowed him to keep his portfolios? It clearly isn’t this love-child story.
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