Hide trips on the light fantastic

BY ROSEMARY MCLEOD

OPINION: Let this be a lesson to Rodney Hide - he should have stayed fat, and out of trouble.

There's nothing as daft as a middle-aged man sucking his tummy in to run about with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and no good can come of protein shakes and egg white omelettes when you're over 50.

There's an age gap of 21 years between Mr Hide and girlfriend Louise Crome, who was first toddling into the infant room with her juice bottle the year he married his first wife. Watching telly, while nibbling her teddy's ear, she wouldn't have seen much difference at that time between Mr Hide and Barney the purple dinosaur, and she'd have had a point.

Times change. Ms Crome grew up to become both a squash player, all muscle and bounce, and the recipient of the taxpayers' generosity as she accompanied Mr Hide around the world.

The minister has now repaid the cost of that, having, as he put it, lost sight of his awareness that every dollar the Government spends comes out of the pocket of a New Zealander.

He has also apologised, though the damage to his reputation is done.

Love must do strange things to the mind since Mr Hide, in a previous life, worked as an economist who knew very well where money comes from and where it ought to go. As an ACT politician, he has also had much to say about the likes of solo mothers who rort welfare for an extra pair of knickers, though as he discovered, it's different when you're "entitled".

In this he's a typical New Zealander, though this happens to be the part of our nature that he previously most deplored.

But to return to the fat, without which no meat is really tasty: it's a subject that I feel binds Mr Hide and me together, since we share the same birthday.

As a chubby fellow Mr Hide was harmless and safely married, a position from which he could confidently hold forth about the morality of spending, but that changed the fateful day he accepted the challenge of competing on Dancing With the Stars and began to lose weight.

Surely it's no coincidence that TVNZ, having seen the damage it did to this former rabid perk- buster, has just announced it's terminating the programme. Even broadcasters must feel shame.

Nervous that the audience would find him ridiculous - he weighed 132 kilograms - Mr Hide began dieting in advance and continued to lose weight throughout the show.

The next thing we knew, there were alarming photographs of his newly excavated musculature while he gave advice on how to live on 2400 calories a day. I note here that age droops all sorts of things on men and women, including musculature, and even Arnie's famous torso now looks like melted beeswax.

That year, 2007, Mr Hide also published his rather awful book, My Year of Living Dangerously, and left his wife.

Some reward she got for staying with him through the fat years, only to be abandoned in the thin. But then of course weight loss, it's well known, addles the brain.

We must not be deceived by the words of personal trainers and dieticians. Mr Hide is not alone in his quest for revisited youth. We see such older men wherever there are younger women, more usually on Harleys, believing that with their helmets on they pass for 30, and sticking loyally to wearing jeans though they don't have bottoms any more.

Politicians don't usually have to work that hard - their illusory power is invariably enough to impress young women at a loose end, and in need of dinner.

Perhaps it was his yellow ACT jacket that impressed Ms Crome, since I'm sure she could afford to buy her own kai, or maybe it was his tango. A man in a cummerbund can have that effect, I'm told, especially while twiddling castanets.

Whatever her reasons, if I were Ms Crome I'd swiftly take to Mr Hide with my Prince 03 Speedport black squash racquet and give him a solid right-handed biff on the jacksy.

The one thing an older bloke must never do is cause a girl public embarrassment, and he went way too far this time.

- © Fairfax NZ News