YES MINISTER: ATTORNEY-GENERAL 2008-2017: An Insider's Account of the John Key Years.

• Author: Ross, Ken

YES MINISTER: ATTORNEY-GENERAL 2008-2017 An Insider's Account of the John Key Years

Author: Christopher Finlayson

Published by: Allen & Unwin, Auckland, 2022, 272pp, $37.

Chris Finlayson's Yes Minister--'a sketch of my time in politics'--is a tonic to Andrea Vance's recent Blue Blood: The Inside Story of the National Party in Crisis. She laid bare National's entrails since Chris moved to the parliamentary departure lounge in 2018. The two books largely flesh out the National Party subsequent to what we knew already from Colin James's 2019 history of the party and Barry Gustafson's Muldoon (2000) and Holyoake (2007) biographies.

Finlayson's memoirs here are the best we can expect from within the Key government. Key, himself, is no scribbler: John Roughan's John Key: Portrait of a Prime Minister (2017) is probably all we will get of Key's inner thinking. Chris Finlayson was exceptional among the Key ministers. He has only Ralph Hanan for companionship in National's hall of fame for outstanding attorneys-general and more generally for their fine fronting of the party's liberal/progressive wing. Both did much towards maturing New Zealand.

While Finlayson writes adeptly, much is not here, left high and dry, notably Key's insipid global diplomacy. Finlayson's breeziness is wonderful--welcomed for his telescoping in on the innards of a supposedly smooth running operation. However, my disbelief knows no bounds that John Key will 'go down in history as one of this country's great prime ministers'. Simply, Finlayson's John Key does not register by a country mile with the John Key I cogitated on in the May-June 2017 issue of this magazine (vol 42, no 3)--someone who 'was not wired for doing the hard yards or exhibiting any high intellect, the two essentials that are integral for success in this arena [world affairs]'. Beyond New Zealand, Key confessed in November 2015, he was a 'junior world leader'--when he had been seen by Australian journalists crossing a Singapore hotel lobby, while the movers and shakers at the global gathering he was there for, which the journalists were covering, were striving for a better world behind closed doors.

Finlayson most lets praise fly about Hugh Templeton, the National MP who was close to a mentor for Finlayson ahead of his arrival in Parliament in 2005. Templeton is applauded as 'outstanding--indeed probably the outstanding--cabinet minister from 1975 to 1984', yet we read that Finlayson is aghast at Templeton's...