Steady as he goes

He's a sucker for punishment, overly earnest and a political junkie. Is Andrew Little the man to save Wellington?

- MICHELE HEWITSON

Here's a cod psychology quiz for Andrew Little, former leader of the Labour Party, former national secretary for the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union and now Wellington mayoral candidate. It is: is he running for mayor because, a) he's a hopeless sucker for punishment; b) because he's a hopeless political junkie looking for another hit; c) because being mayor would be a sort of consolation prize for not becoming prime minister; or d) all of the above?

“Mmm. Um. Definitely not all of the above. I definitely don't see it as a consolation prize. There's a grain of truth to the other two. Anyway, I just think there's a hard job there to be done. I like doing hard jobs.”

He does like doing hard jobs. Does he know why? “I like to see things that aren't going so well, and I like to sort of be the one that can turn around and change it. And I think I've got the kind of thick skin and the temperament to deal with all of the, frankly, shit that goes with it. No one's ever going to be completely happy.”

He likely wasn't born with a thick skin because nobody is. If he didn't have a thick skin “at the beginning of my time in Parliament I certainly did by the end of it, because you just have to”. He entered Parliament in 2011, on the Labour Party list, having previously been the party's president. He was leader of the opposition from 2014 to 2017. He stood down less than two months before the 2017 general election. Jacinda Ardern became leader and Labour won as what was coined Jacindamania took hold.

You'd think that must have hurt and of course it did. But as he later said graciously, “It was incredibly gratifying and satisfying to see that because I knew that [the election result] was not just a possibility but a real possibility.” Of course, he also thought it could have been him. “Of course that's there, but yeah, I guess that's the thing about ego.”