I have been taking a well-earned break and watching the saga of Golriz Ghahraman’s political self immolation with a fair bit of schadenfreude.
At first the news leaked out via X (formerly Twitter) and on Marc Spring’s website. It was very quickly picked up by Philip Crump at NewstalkZB Plus and the rest is history. Make no mistake, it was Marc Spring who broke this news and hunted down and published key revelations often hours before the mainstream media, who were slow on the uptake and forever playing catch up.
What unfolded was a masterclass in political annihilation, ably assisted by the perpetrator herself bolting for what complicit media running Green spin lines called a “long-planned holiday”.
After repeatedly shoplifting from swanky stores, that was the worst thing she could have done. Whoever advised her to stay silent and offshore for a week while allegations slowly but surely dripped out to a news-starved nation in the middle of their holidays was a complete dolt. They should never work in public relations again.
But I say it was a masterclass because the story was drip fed over days – what I like to call ‘death by a thousand cuts’. This is how you run a competent take-down of a politician.
The steps are to make an allegation, with only enough information to suggest there is much, much more to come. You do this in the hope that the target will lie, run or go silent. You have strategies for each of those options. The truth is very powerful.
Then you feed more information into the media machine as it rumbles its way to life. Not too much though: you want a rolling maul of allegations over several days. A scandal isn’t a scandal until it has lived for more than three days.
You keep piling on the pressure, and the facts, little by little. Golriz Ghahraman played this like a chimp on a set of drums: badly. Her silence let the leakers fill the void.
The Greens’ leadership also didn’t help. Marama Davidson let the cat out of the bag with some injudicious comments about the process they went through for their strategy. She stupidly said that they remained quiet while they worked out their “plan of attack”. That reveals that the Greens actually planned to fight this.
But that all came to nothing, as Golriz’s absence buried her under a mountain of fact, photos, statements and a fair bit of innuendo. In the end, that mountain, after a week of building, was too insurmountable and she was forced to resign from Parliament.
I can’t wait for the Greens to recover from their shell shock and start their Green stormtroopers attacking on X and suggesting all manner of people responsible for the downfall of their darling, from me and dirty politics to the people they really suspect, the Israelis and Mossad. Don’t worry, it won’t take long for those accusations to be made.
They will, of course, never for one minute blame the actual person responsible: the light-fingered Golriz Ghahraman.
You know, if Golriz had been nicking trackies from KMart and fluffy slippers, we’d probably forgive her. You know, being a hard-working girl from the downtrodden classes…
But in fact she is a giant socialist weasel who was living off the public teat, but it wasn’t enough for poor little fake-ugee Golriz. She wanted more for free and so she will be pilloried as the rank hypocrite brought down by her own grandiloquence and hubris.
And the leadership of the Greens needs to be looked at. The timeline of events is not helpful for them and neither are more injudicious statements by Marama Davidson about an un-named Green “representative” who went and negotiated with Scotties. My understanding from good sources is that that “representative” tried to get Scotties to not go to the Police.
That is the real scandal!
And Ian Wishart has dropped that particular bomb.
There is plenty more to come in this story, of that I can assure you.
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