Not so much confessional priest as hollow man

OPINION: Bollocks! That's probably the strongest word we have had from the mild-mannered John Key.

The prime minister used this description last week to squelch claims that the emails of former National Party leader Don Brash were leaked by disaffected party members, rather than being hacked from the  parliamentary computer.

This Watergate-style conspiracy, which finally sealed the end of Dr Brash's leadership, is still no closer to resolution, in spite of a second police inquiry.

The inquiry found no evidence of hacking (but then a hacker would not leave his calling card, would he?), a finding then used by activist author Nicky Hager to support his claim of leaks by disaffected Nats. Bollocks was not a bad rejoinder.

Before this goes down in history as a grand slam to Hager there are a few facts that should go on the record. The bulk of the 300-odd leaked emails had to have been hacked because they were available only to Dr Brash or a select few, such as the strategy committee, which would not have leaked them.

Some indeed were one-on-one emails to Dr Brash. Others were a dialogue between two senior staffers,  meaning one of their computers would have been hacked as well.

This email traffic was not available to most MPs and therefore not available for leaking, even supposing there were MPs disloyal enough to do so.

Mr Key himself would not have been aware at the time of most of these emails and accordingly knows they would not have been available for leaking. They had to have been hoovered from the computer system.

After winning the leadership, he would have been briefed on the views of some computer experts that the parliamentary system in those pre-2005 election days was ''wide open'' to hacking. Security has since been tightened.

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What Hager rather cleverly did is mix up this hacked email traffic with a selection of material collected by  more orthodox means. There is always a swag of this flying about Parliament: left on copying machines, in  Bellamy's cafeteria, in rubbish tins, on desks. He uses the inclusion of this material to try to discredit the  hacking case.

Two tiny examples of hacked emails illustrate that Hager was not acting, as he likes to paint himself, in the  role of a confessional priest for distressed Nat MPs.

One is an email from Bill English to Dr Brash which is personal and extremely critical of two of his colleagues. If we accept Hager's argument, that would have had to have been leaked by Dr Brash or Mr English himself, which is clearly absurd.

There are many such examples. Another is the publication of what was claimed to be Dr Brash's speech, in the leadership challenge against Mr English, which Hager said was presented to the caucus. In fact, the caucus went straight to the vote, without speeches.

All MPs were present, so those whom Hager portrays as lining up to his confessional with their boxes of leaked documents would not have had the speech. It was not delivered or distributed. It had to have been hacked from Dr Brash's computer.

Then, of course, there are the political overtones. Long before Hager's book, Labour was making gleeful reference in Parliament to a looming National Party crisis of leaked emails.

The prime minister at the time, Helen Clark, deputy prime minister Michael Cullen and NZ First leader Winston Peters all referred to a telephone book of Dr Brash emails about to be published. How did they know? Were the results of this political hacking operation initially given to Labour and then passed on to  Hager, or did the traffic flow in the other direction?

Hager passed on selected emails to the Sunday Star-Times during the 2005 election campaign. He must have been delighted with the paper's misleading attribution that they came from National Party sources. Then there is the coincidence of the title of Hager's book The Hollow Men. This was also the title of Dr Cullen's  keynote speech to the 2004 Labour Party conference.

Perhaps both men admire the T S Eliot poem. But if situations were reversed, wouldn't Hager see it as a conspiracy?

Richard Long was chief of staff for Bill English and Don Brash.

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