Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week.
One of the rapidly emerging features of the 2026 election is the announcement of candidates carrying a profile from another sphere of activity.
New Zealand First started the trend in April with former All Black captain Taine Randell announced as the candidate for Tukituki. He won’t win the seat but will surely be in the top ten on the NZF list and take his place in the House of Representatives after November 7th.
The came Labour with the high ranking police superintendent Rakesh Naidoo named at number 13 on the party list, meaning an almost certain parliamentary career.
Now ACT are in the act with my old TV colleague Paul Henry (born Paul Henry Hopes) standing list-only, but certain to be given a place which will also get him to Wellington.
I don’t regard Michael Laws as really a part of this trend because at heart he’s a serial politician who happens to share his public service with life as a media animal as well.
Henry’s move is hardly unexpected. He was a thoroughly engaging and popular keynote speaker at the ACT annual conference a couple of years ago. Although he stood for National in Wairarapa in 1999 and lost narrowly to Labour’s Georgina Beyer, I’d always thought he’d left National behind years ago.
His new boss David Seymour was spot on when he said at the public announcement that Henry “infects the room with enthusiasm” whenever he steps into one. Having spent the best part of a decade sharing a TV studio with him, I can vouch for that. I can also vouch that if he’s not the centre of attention he tends to lose interest pretty quickly.
But I always thought that of the three great Hs of New Zealand broadcasting in the last 40 years – Holmes, Hosking and Henry – he was the best of them all. His wit is swift, nimble and razor sharp. His interviewing is incisive and he’s able to jump the genres between factual and entertainment with ease – hence his remarkable success fronting shows as diverse as Breakfast, occasionally the 7pm Close-Up and more latterly Traitors and The Chase.
A political career is no great surprise because if there’s one consistency in his life it’s that he never sticks at anything for long.
Not for him the slog of a daily radio breakfast show for decades the way Holmes and Hosking did and are doing. Sure he did Radio Pacific in the morning for a while, but not for long and not with any great ratings success.
The Breakfast era was his most high profile and successful gig but he was forever threatening to leave and not come back the next year. While Pippa Wetzel and Tamati Coffey and I would be back to start the new year around the middle of January, Paul would often show up in early March. On one memorable occasion, Pippa and I even went to see him on board his yacht at Westhaven Marina to convince him that he should stay on for at least another year because the show was going so well and he was obviously the anchor of it. We succeeded but it was never going to last forever.
In the end a very timid TVNZ management let him go after he made some not overly polite comments about the name of an Indian politician named Sheila Dikshit.
That was not long after he questioned the appointment of Anand Satyanand as the Governor General by asking why a “real New Zealander” wasn’t appointed to the position.
Satyanand was born, raised and educated in New Zealand.
At the time I thought his value to the company and his day-to-day performance in the most demanding role on daily TV outweighed the outrageousness of that behaviour, but management thought otherwise. Oh well.
After a few years of not doing much apart from collecting the rent – he was never afraid to let it be known that he owned a few properties purchased with the proceeds of selling a radio station in Carterton in the 1990s – he re-emerged on early morning TV on Three in 2015.
Unsurprisingly he was so successful with that eponymous show that TVNZ moved on its then Breakfast hosts Rawdon Christie and Nadine Chalmers-Ross (Higgins) – and yours truly – because we weren’t competing.
Also unsurprisingly, the early morning Paul Henry didn’t last long. He quit at the end of 2016 and hasn’t had a regular daily gig since.
Even his time on the TVNZ board hasn’t lasted long. He was appointed – probably because of his ACT connections – from July 1 last year. He just made it through 12 months although his position was untenable after the news of his candidacy.
He’ll undoubtedly be in the next parliament and if ACT are returned in a governing coalition he’ll probably be in cabinet. For someone who doesn’t suffer fools and gets frustrated with bureaucracy, being a fly on the wall when he meets with ministry officials will be a hell of an experience for the fly.
If ACT are not in government I doubt he’ll even last the parliamentary term.
But it’ll be fun while it lasts and his maiden speech will be memorable, although it won’t have a punchline as good as the one he gave at the 2010 TV Awards at Auckland’s Civic Theatre.
In his acceptance speech for TV Personality of the Year, or whatever it was called, he regaled us with some stories of viewer correspondence.
He told us his all-time favourite finished with the bold type instruction “JUST DIE YOU C**T.”
It brought the house down.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
