Bob Jones, Sitiveni Rabuka and me

The Newsroom website this morning has a long, affectionate tribute to Bob Jones, written by Tom Scott. One great character writing about another. It’s very entertaining. How could it not be?

It also served as a reminder of an era when Wellington was a far livelier and more stimulating place than it is now – a city full of rumbustious, larger-than-life individualists who lived life at 100 miles an hour and didn't bother with seat belts, metaphorically speaking.

I can’t claim to have known Jones well, but our orbits overlapped from time to time. I only once went to his big house on the hills overlooking the Hutt Valley, but I drank with him in his office on several occasions and lunched with him a couple of times. All a long time ago, I should add, and always at his invitation.

I also recall quite a few phone conversations. It was always him ringing me, never the other way around, and it was usually at a time when I had more important things to get on with, like getting a paper out. Jones loved to talk.

I remember reading years ago about a court case he was involved in. He was often caught up in litigation of one sort or another and I think this one involved a property purchase that had turned sour in a big way.

At one point Jones was in the witness box being questioned by counsel for the other side. He was challenged for supposedly not knowing about some detail that was in contention and replied to the effect that he was far too busy to be on top of every little thing relating to his property investments.

I remember thinking, “Yeah, right”. During the period under consideration by the court, he was often on the phone to me, at some length and never about anything important. In other words he gave the impression of having plenty of time on his hands. I suspect the truth was that the finicky minutiae of business bored him. Media and political gossip was far more interesting.

Jones had a love-hate relationship with journalists. He was endlessly, acerbically critical of them, but enjoyed their company – or at least those he respected, or saw as being potentially useful to know. I think he phoned them when he was bored or felt like an argument.

“Useful to know” ... I think that was central to Jones’ personality. He liked to cultivate people he perceived as being influential. These included politicians (especially politicians), sporting names, columnists and editors. They appeared to fall in and out of favour at Jones’ whim, and in line with their perceived importance at any given time.

Political compatibility wasn’t a requirement. He was as close to some left-wing politicians as he was to those on the right. He befriended leftie journalists too, such as the Stuff columnist Virginia Fallon, who wrote a generous tribute to him after his death. He would phone her and bait her, she recalled, but she couldn’t help liking him, despite Jones embodying many of the things she raged against.

Jones was also a name-dropper. He liked to remind you of all the important people he was in touch with. I found it odd that someone so famous seemed to find it necessary to do this, but he was not the only prominent person I’ve known with this quirk.

He could sometimes be seriously unpleasant to deal with – a bully, not to put too fine a point on it. Someone close to Jones once explained to me that his famous displays of irascibility were attributable to Addison’s disease, a hormone disorder for which he took medication. His staff recognised the warning signs and would keep their distance when his mood changed.

The flip side was that when he turned on the charm, he was affable, amusing and hard not to like. He was also extremely generous toward worthy causes and not the least bit interested in grandstanding about it or earning public applause.

I saw Jones’ less appealing side when he contributed columns to two papers I was involved with (first the Dominion, later the Evening Post). Jones was a columnist for various papers at different times and it always ended badly. Either Jones would spit the dummy or editors would decide that publishing his column wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly arguing with him.

He regarded his words as sacrosanct; so impeccably crafted that no ignorant and impertinent sub-editor had any right to touch them. Even a minor change to bring his punctuation into line with the paper’s house style – the sort of intervention all other columnists accepted without a murmur – would cause him to erupt with rage.

The truth is, he wasn’t quite the writer he thought he was. At his best he was witty, perceptive, outrageously provocative and totally original in the way he saw things. He was a contrarian through and through, but his syntax – the way he constructed his sentences – was highly idiosyncratic and often clumsily tortuous.

He also bristled at any restraints placed on him for legal reasons. Several times he offered to indemnify the paper against any legal action that might result from his columns. If he was prepared to pick up the costs of court proceedings and pay any resulting damages, he reasoned, what possible problem could there be? He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see that giving him a free hand would hopelessly compromise the editor’s autonomy and independence.

His offer of indemnity illustrated what I believe was a crucial point about Jones. He could afford to take risks that other people could never contemplate. His wealth made him bullet-proof.

As it happened, he was the cause of the only big defamation case in my journalism career that directly involved me as a named party. In essence it arose from a column Jones wrote for the Dominion claiming that Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, the leader of the coup that deposed the legitimate Fijian government in 1987, had repeatedly failed his School Certificate examinations while at Wellington College.

It was classic Bob Jones mischief – mischief was one of the defining qualities of his public life – but it obviously stung Rabuka. He sued for defamation (as I recall, the amount claimed was $1 million) and as editor of the Dom at the time, I was named as second respondent.

The proceedings dragged on for years and descended into pure farce. The case turned on whether the Fijian High Court had jurisdiction, which in turn hinged on whether the offending edition of the paper was available in Fiji. When it turned out that the only copy they could find was in the library at the New Zealand High Commission in Suva, Rabuka’s lawyers sent someone to sit in the library all day and see whether anyone looked at it. Four people did – so if Rabuka was defamed at all, it was only to those four visitors to the High Commission library. With its languid tropical setting, it was the stuff of comic novels.

I think the case eventually fizzled out for lack of interest. Certainly no one ever clapped a hand on my shoulder, and Jones' disparaging reference to Rabuka's scholastic record appears to have done no lasting harm. When I last checked, he was Major-General the Honourable Sitiveni Rabuka, CF, OBE, MSD, prime minister of Fiji.