Diary

Wednesday, 20th January 2010

Daniel Hannan opens his diary

Two members of the audience have come from Wellington, and one from South Island. All three follow my Daily Telegraph blog, and watch Fox News. When I last visited New Zealand, some 15 years ago, it still felt remote: tremendously like home, of course, but none the less defined, at least to a degree, by how far away it was. Is there a nation on Earth that has been more tangibly impacted by the internet?

Ruth Richardson is one of my heroines. Every finance minister in the world could usefully study the way she set about reducing New Zealand’s deficit at the beginning of the 1990s. While she was about it, she reformed a paleo-socialist welfare system: no small achievement in a country which, ever since the late 19th century, had taken pride in its comprehensive social security.

Ruth invited us to a barbecue at her holiday home in Wanaka, and, in between flipping hunks of meat, delighted my two little girls with her collection of massive blow-up Father Christmases. Being a successful minister, I thought as I watched her, is as much a question of character as of ideology. The best ministers are those who challenge the status quo; the worst those who automatically follow their officials’ advice. The whole purpose of being a minister, after all, is to make state employees work for the rest of the population rather than themselves. Keith Joseph, perhaps the most brilliant man to have sat in a post-war British Cabinet, turned out to be hopeless once he got into the clutches of the civil service. Ruth Richardson, by contrast, has the single most important characteristic in a good minister: restlessness.