That faint, far-off rumbling you can hear is Wellington’s rumour mill grinding away gleefully as usual. This mill puts you in mind of those pretend telephones primary-school kids would cobble together with tin cans and bits of string. They were used to pass on rumours. That, say, your teacher, Miss Tweed-Taylor, and the headmaster, Mr Brown-Corduroy Trousers, had been spotted up a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. Or that she was plotting to toss him out of said tree. When confronted with this salacious rumour, Miss Tweed-Taylor crisply responded: “I am not going to indulge this.”
National’s deputy leader, Nicola Willis, gave short shrift to questions about plots to toss her headmaster out of the tree. Had Auckland business figures approached her with concerns about whether her
