At home with the Keys

By NICK VENTER - The Dominion Post

Not enough sleep, shadowed by bodyguards, and running a country while juggling and a family with two teenagers. John Key speaks candidly of the pressures of being prime minister - and why he's dubbed wife Bronagh a "solo mother".

I'm standing on the footpath of one of Auckland's more exclusive streets when a small gate opens.

Out comes a burly man dressed in jeans, tee shirt and a hoodie.

"Could you tell me your name sir," he asks. Not satisfied with the answer, he asks for identification.

Things have changed in Parnell since the suburb's most famous resident became prime minister. Today marks John Key's 259th day in the top job.

The burly man is a member of the diplomatic protection squad, one of the specially-trained police officers assigned to protect the prime minister.

They are with him 24 hours a day, shadowing him at official functions and during holidays. When Mr Key attends events at the schools of his children Stephie, 16, and Max, 14, the bodyguards are there too.

Last weekend he and Bronagh popped out to Newmarket to buy a new tea pot and spur of the moment splurges on some new oven gloves and a grater. The police minders came too.

The level of security is no different to that afforded his predecessor Helen Clark - but it is something Mr Key is still coming to terms with.

"I guess it's constitutionally necessary, but it's suffocating," he says after opening the door to the two-storey mansion he and wife Bronagh had built when they returned from London in 2002.

"They're great people and they do a fantastic job, but everything you do involves other people or a logistical arrangement. You can't just get up and say 'I'm going to walk down to the shops to get the paper'. You actually have to tell them you are going."

It's nearly five years since I last sat down for an extended interview with Mr Key. Then he was a boyishly enthusiastic newcomer to Parliament, just beginning to make a name for himself in politics. Today he holds the country's top job after completing a meteoric rise from rookie MP to prime minister in just six years - the fastest promotion to prime minister in this country's history.

Other things have changed too. His face is thinner, his brown hair is greying at the sides and members of the press gallery report that some Mondays his eyes are rimmed with red when he holds his post-Cabinet press conferences.

Mr Key, 47, doubts he can blame the job for the greying hair, but it is the cause of the red eyes.

"You get a lot less sleep (as prime minister)," he says.

In Wellington where he typically spends Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, he seldom gets more than five hours sleep: "Six is a luxury."

If he's not attending Cabinet or Cabinet committee meetings he's attending official functions or participating in meetings. But it's the mountain of paperwork that really takes its toll.

Every night he receives a briefcase full of documents. If he is to stay on top of things he needs to read it before morning because the next briefcase is on its way.

For our interview New Zealand's richest prime minister is seated in a spacious, airy room filled with expensive looking paintings and artworks. It is one of seven living areas in a home that occupies what was once three adjoining sites.

He is wearing grey, pin-striped trousers and a light blue shirt, open at the neck. Wife Bronagh is seated next to him wearing jeans and a summery tunic over a long-sleeved black top. The tunic is the product of Hong Kong fashion house Tibi. I know because when I ask, the prime minister leans behind his wife and peers at the label.

Mrs Key, who rarely participates in interviews, patiently puts up with her husband's grapplings. She's used to his can-do attitude.

It's one of the qualities that enabled him to amass a fortune, estimated a few years ago at $50 million, working as a currency trader in New Zealand, Singapore and London, and to rise rapidly through National's depleted ranks after the disastrous 2002 election.

The Keys, married for 24 years, clearly enjoy each other's company. She dabs at a spot on his trousers when she sits down, they kid each other and finish each other's sentences, but they're also used to spending time apart. Mr Key was frequently away when he headed the global currency operations of US investment bank Merrill Lynch in London and he spent even more time away from home as a National MP, then as the party's leader.

But being prime minister places even more stress and strain on family life. "It is just relentless," says Mr Key.

"It just never stops. Whatever crisis or challenge that you have dealt with, as soon as that is dealt with, there is something else that comes along."

Some weeks he is away six and a half days, returning home only on Sunday afternoon. He estimates he averages only two nights at home a week. He and Bronagh stay in touch by texting and telephoning, often when he is in the car between engagements. They talk several times a day.

Responsibility for raising Stephie and Max falls largely on Bronagh's shoulders - Mr Key calls her a "solo mother".

Bronagh, pronounced Bro as in Bro-town rather than bro as in brolley I am discretely informed by the prime minister's office before the interview, is the daughter of Irish parents who migrated to New Zealand in 1959.

She and Mr Key met while both were still at school in Christchurch. She was a fifth former who had just failed an economics exam and wanted to commiserate with a friend. He was tutoring the friend's older sister.

Mrs Key recalls: "I was standing on the doorstep at my friend's house in my school uniform. I had just biked around on my orange Lowline bike, a pretty ugly bike. John opened the door."

What was her first impression? Before she can answer, her husband interrupts: "Stunning. All of my (her) dreams come true."

"Really?", I ask.

"Actually I don't know that I really took much notice of you at that point," she tells her husband apologetically.

What was his first impression?

"She needed a bit of tutoring in economics ... I thought she was very attractive."

The courtship began when Mr Key took her to a function organised by a sporting goods manufacturer after bumping into her at the Russley Hotel, where he'd taken his mother for dinner. Bronagh was waitressing there.

Legend has it that over dinner Mr Key told his mother Ruth: "See that girl, I am going to marry her". However, he has no recollection of the conversation and suspects his mother, who died in 2000, imagined it.

But what is true is that he told Bronagh on their first date of his ambition to be prime minister.

Her reaction? "Whatever".

It wasn't till the couple considered returning to New Zealand from London that the subject of his boyhood ambition came up again.

Mr Key was brought up in a state house by his mother, an Austrian Jew who had fled her homeland as a teenager to escape Nazi persecution. His father George died when he was seven. Ruth Key was a devoted mother and "strong personality" and John says he only occasionally felt the lack of a father.

But he and Bronagh are acutely aware of the impact on their children of his job.

The kids now see a lot less of their father - and because of his position come under increased scrutiny.

"That's kind of not cool at 14 and 16," says Mrs Key. "More than anything probably they want to duck under the radar rather than stick out."

Stephie attends the exclusive Auckland girls school St Cuthbert's College. She works part-time at a hair salon - and full-time keeping a close eye on her father's pronouncements.

"Sometimes if I'm talking to Stephie about what she's doing with her future life she quotes my speeches back to me in a rather annoying way," her father says.

Max, who attends the equally exclusive Kings College, plays football and baseball.

"What's difficult for them," says Mr Key, "is that there is no off switch when you are prime minister. Even if you go out to a cafe on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon people will come and talk to you, or you are on show to a certain degree, and they (Stephie and Max) are aware of that. So a lot of the best family time now is at home."

There are compensations, however.

Mr Key has on occasion tinkered with the time of Monday afternoon's post-Cabinet press conference when he needs to get home to make a family commitment.

He makes a particular effort to get to things that are important to his children - he attends about half of Max's soccer and baseball games, often in a suit, so he can leap into a Crown limo to head for his next engagement - and he takes them along when he is doing things they are interested in.

Max, and usually a friend, accompany him to All Black and Warriors matches; Stephie to the World of Wearable Arts and cultural events. Both travelled with their parents to China in April.

"We took them along to the Great Hall of the People when I was inspecting the guard because they will never get that opportunity again."

Would the kids prefer him not to be prime minister?

Mrs Key answers before her husband can: "I think it's one of those mixed bags where on one hand they are really proud of him and really proud of what he is doing, but it's hard for them at times."

Mr Key: "They notice it first day back at school for the term and then after a couple of days it goes away. Max quite often says to me people come up to him every day and say to him `I saw your Dad on TV last night'. He goes 'Wow'."

Then with the candour that is one of his trademarks Mr Key gives the real version of what his son says. "Well, the exact line is 'No shit Sherlock'."

On this month's visit to Niue Mr Key quipped, after sampling noni, the pungent local brew, that he would empty out his liquor bottles at home and fill them with the drink to put Max off experimenting with booze.

That was not, however, an admission that the his son is a teenage alcoholic. Instead he was casting his mind back to his own experience as a 16-year-old, experience that included an encounter with rum so unpleasant that he has not knowingly touched the spirit since. The one plus was that his misery occurred in private.

That is not something that can be guaranteed his children in an age of increased media scrutiny and cellphones that contain cameras.

Mrs Key says the couple have talked to their children about the extra scrutiny they face because of their father's position - not for fear of embarrassment to him, but "because you don't want them to end up in a humiliating situation which teenage kids can often get themselves into".

Mr Key: "We do talk to them about the fact that they are a form of public property and they will come under greater scrutiny than other kids. We don't do that to intimidate them, but just to educate them and make them aware of it.

"At the end of the day, touch wood, we have actually been very lucky so far. They are good kids, but all teenagers make mistakes and our kids will as well."

IN HIS OWN WORDS

Juggling family and work: "There'll be inevitable criticism when I take four of five days off in September. Why am I taking a holiday? I'm a prime minister that's got a young family. I signed up for the job and I want to do it ... but I'm also a father and there's got to be a bit of time carved out for the kids."

Skills as a handyman: "The long and short of it is I am bloody hopeless. Generally after things sit around for a year from the Ikea store Bronagh puts them together."

Boyhood ambitions: "A lot of children want to be prime minister. I get an endless stream of letters and a lot of those letters say to me they would like to have my job.

"I take some comfort from the fact that they are only 11."

How long he wants the top job: "I don't have a timeframe set in my mind, so therefore as long as the party wants me to be there and I think I can make a difference. In a practical sense you need more than one term to complete the changes that any government or prime minister wants to make. But that's in the hands of the public. You have just got to take it one election at a time."

His personal style: "The main thing is I try and be who I am. I have learnt things from Helen Clark and I have learnt things from other leaders I have looked at, but I don't try and be Helen Clark because everyone has got a different personality and mine is a bit more casual. Sometimes it gets me in trouble but largely it works for me."

'I'M A FRIENDLY PERSON, BUT I'M A LITTLE MORE BACKWARD IN COMING FORWARD'

Her husband had only been prime minister a matter of days when Bronagh Key attracted her first negative headline.

An Auckland newspaper reported that she had worn the same purple Adrienne Winkelmann jacket to her husband's swearing-in ceremony that she wore to the party campaign launch. This, the paper claimed breathlessly, was a "first lady faux pas".

Well, here is what Bronagh Key thinks of that advice - when she accompanied her husband on this month's South Pacific trip she wore the jacket again, in Samoa. She wore it because she likes it.

There's a touch of steel to the prime minister's wife, although it's rarely seen in public. There's also a strong dose of common sense.

"The reality is people in the real world don't buy something and wear it once," she says.

"That isn't the way it works. We are in a recession. I don't think you score any points for going out there and changing your outfit every time you go out."

Mrs Key, 45, who describes herself as a "jeans and tee shirt wearer" has bought some new outfits since her husband's election.

Jeans "don't do" at state lunches, but at home she sticks to what she's always worn. "That's me. That's what I feel comfortable with."

She only visited Wellington three or four times during his first three-year term as an MP. These days she is in the Capital more regularly to support her husband.

But her preference is stay out of the limelight: "I've never made a secret of the fact that I find the public side of things a challenge. John will walk into a room filled with people and it's very easy for him to engage and chat away.

"I'm a friendly person, but I'm a little more backward in coming forward."

Mrs Key hasn't worked fulltime since daughter Stephie was born, but she is actively involved in fundraising activities to support of Auckland's Starship children's hospital and other charities.

"I have have always done those things so nothing's changed. I get asked to do a few more things now and if they are are during the day in Auckland and they fit and, to be honest, if I can help without it being a hugely public thing, that suits me fine," she says.