So Sean Plunket is leaving Morning Report after 14 years.
Plunket is reported to have said on resigning that "I would like to think I have left the place no worse and certainly I would like to think a little better than when I arrived". In the Dominion Post on Saturday he also declared that he had political ambitions, hoping to stand as Mayor of Wellington at some point in the future. (I fervently hope that this is true: it will provide an opportunity for tens of thousands of us to tell Plunket exactly what we think of him. But I digress.)
Ah, the power of self delusion! There was nothing special about Plunket's predecessor, Mike Hosking, who was an under-educated, boorish and conceited lout of the kind found throughout the New Zealand print, radio and television media. But Plunket quickly made Hosking look like a second George Orwell.
Precisely why Plunket has been so relentlessly unpleasant all the time is a mystery - his presence on the programme must have been a constant source of torment to his regular co-host, Geoff Robinson, who (being unfailingly courteous) is everything Plunket is not - but before anyone starts looking for the answer I suggest that when found it would almost certainly be very dull.
Did Plunket behave as he did because of chronic asthma? Did he resent the fact that his physical appearance is highly uncongenial? (Many of the most unpleasant people in human history have also been grotesuely ugly. Think Michel Foucault, Benito Mussolini, our own Robert Muldoon...) Was he in his private life stricken with inadequacy? Was he bullied - even abused - as a child? Or was he himself a bully, and does he pine for the mastery of the playground?
Ultimately, given that the person himself is intrinsically uninteresting, one neither knows, and nor does one care to know. All that really matters is that he's gone. And good riddance to him.
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