There were some late and complicated developments in the increasingly deranged world of Planet Key politics yesterday. I’ve been trying to make sense of it all. (ht to Bunji, I pinched some material from a draft.)
The first point is that it is clear that PM John Key lies reflexively and repeatedly. (This isn’t new, what is new is that more and more people are being forced to acknowledge it.) This week Key twice denied discussing the Gwyn / IGIS report with Cameron Slater, once to the media (on Tuesday), and once in response to a question in Parliament (yesterday). However, late yesterday an extraordinary record contradicting this denial came to light:
…a screenshot of messages between Slater and an unnamed other person which took place on Monday night emerged where Slater said he knew that Ms Collins would be exonerated in by the Chisholm report. Slater said he knew that because he had been texting Ms Collins and Mr Key that night. Slater confirmed to OneNews the screenshot was authentic.
Here is the screenshot (click on it for larger version):
The text reads – Slater: “Key is also releasing the Collins report tomorrow, she is exonerated, Herald gets slammed for working with me”. “How do you know this in advance”. Slater: “I have been texting key and Collins tonight.”
Points to note – (1) Slater is still in the loop with Key and Collins. (2) They are leaking the contents of reports to Slater while attacking Goff for leaking breaking embargo to media. (3) Someone released this material to damage Key (notice how “perfect” it is) – who and why? More of the this question below but for now let’s stick with Key.
With Slater confirming the email in the screenshot Key has been caught out lying to Parliament. He quickly heads back to the chamber to make a personal statement “correcting” his earlier denial. The timing is important:
Mr Key’s admission came shortly after a screenshot of messages between Slater and an unnamed other person…
Key tried to spin his “correction” as just noticing his own mistake (audio) but it is clearly a response to the Salter email / screenshot. He only admitted his lies because he was caught out. Here’s some of the reaction that followed:
It gets stranger. Key’s office then released (some of?) the texts between Key and Slater:
Note that the PMs texts are helpfully labelled “PM” so that we know which hat Key had on at the time. There are worlds of strangeness in this exchange that I find pretty disturbing. I’m not the only one:
Labour Leader Andrew Little said there was “an air of unreality” about the texts. “Some of them look somewhat delusional.” … “Now the Inspector-General’s inquiry into the alleged leak of the report has to be widened and I expect the Prime Minister to co-operate fully with [her].”
Key lies repeatedly and reflexively. It is all catching up with him.
And that brings us to the question of who released the Slater email / screenshot and why? Allegedly it is (the other party to the exchange?) a blogger called Josh Forman. Forman is a protege of Slater’s who briefly ran (or appeared to run) a blog called SlightlyLeftOfCentre. The blog seemed to be pretty much a front for Slater:
If you look through his posts Forman doesn’t seem all that left-wing though. His views seem pretty right-wing. And his targets aren’t the usual left-wing targets. He really dislikes National Party president Peter Goodfellow. And Bomber. And Kim Dotcom. And muslims. And the New Zealand Herald’s investigative editor David Fisher. You might say he happens to hate everyone Cameron Slater hates.
The similarities don’t stop there. Forman’s style seems very familiar. Politicians are troughers. If they lie they tell porkies. There are loads of breathless exclusives. He’s very sympathetic to the Whale, as we see in the cached copy of this post that Forman has deleted. And the Whale loved Forman and promoted him heavily. You might even say it looks like Slater has set up a fake left-wing blog to disseminate his smears from, which is such a typically Slateresque thing to do I can’t believe he’s only just gotten around to it.
There is plenty more in Danyl’s excellent analysis of Forman and his blog, go read the whole thing. Note especially the quoted (now inaccessible but it’s all cached) post that attacks and threatens John Key. The conclusions drawn by Danyl (I think) and others are that Slater / Forman is using this blog to attack Key, and as a “false flag” operation to try and claim that Labour has its own dirty politics attack blog (see Slater on this – laughable).
So it appears that while Key is still lying to us and chatting happily to his favourite blogger, said blogger is working covertly to undermine him (why else did he so promptly confirm the authenticity of the perfectly crafted email / screenshot?). The Collins faction is back, and giving back double. Lovely people all of them.
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