Giving the voters the brown eye

Auckland’s mayor has arrogance in spades. How can Lenny the Letch possibly think he has a moral mandate to lead New Zealand’s biggest city when those who voted for him were unaware he was banging his bimbo on council time and premises?

I watched in utter amazement as this grubby little pup ducked and dived away from the questions posed to him by John Campbell last night. When asked if the people of Auckland would have voted for him if they had known about his grubby little affair with a young sheila half his age who seems to be turned on by pollies, he dodged the question altogether. He said he was still the same guy they had voted for.

We know he’s still the same bloody guy (don’t we burn them on November 5 each year?); but the bloody point is the voters didn’t know that guy at the time.

Normally I’d say what a man gets up to in his own pants, or out of them as the case may be, is something between him and his family. However on this occasion I draw the line because much of the bonking and wanking that went on here happened not only on council (read ratepayers’) time and on council premises. That is the big game changer here.

Take the example of Joe Bloggs. Joe Bloggs is an apparently happily married man and he decides to indulge in a little rumpy pumpy with a young sheila half his age and gets caught on a night out at hers or in a hotel. It is none of his employer’s business and nor should it be. However if Joe decides to shag his bimbo in his office at work and gets caught out then his employer is likely to take an interest in this and would be within its rights to sack him.

However it would seem that if Joe happens to be the mayor of New Zealand’s largest city, his employer is unable to do anything about it apart from conduct an investigation (read whitewash) and leave it at that.

We have also learned from the doublespeak wording of the report on Len the Letch’s activities that he has done nothing wrong. So getting your rocks off when you are supposed to be doing your job is okay? Even if you do it in the workplace?

And then there is the little matter (well he thinks it is little) of those freebie hotel rooms and those outrageous hotel upgrades that weren’t ever declared as gifts. He says with the benefit of hindsight he might have (and then corrects himself to say would have) done things differently regarding those. Hindsight? Is that when he was blinded by the sight of Bev’s bum?

It is genuinely troubling that this guy thinks he is dealing with a nation of idiots – even if by and large he is. If anybody should have been abundantly aware of the council rules about gifts it should be the mayor who has already completed a term as mayor of that city. This is even more the case when that mayor is a bloody lawyer who has had his own practice. He knew very well that he had to declare those things and the only reason he didn’t was because he would have risked being outed over his clandestine canoodling.

Then we have the matter of all those texts (sexts?) and the heavy breathing phone calls he made while Bev gave him some vocal encouragement as he engaged in another mass debate. The grubby little oik only paid for 10 percent of those calls and left the people of Auckland to pick up the tab for the rest of his phone sex.

There is of course another aspect to all of this and that is the issue of judgment. Here we have a guy who has been entrusted with the management of a city of over a million people and that involves making some pretty important calls that can affect the daily lives of all of those ratepayers. He has already shown that he can’t be trusted by the one person who should above all others be able to trust him and to make matters worse he doesn’t even have the brains to keep it all out of sight. You’d have to wonder about his ability to assess a really important issue wouldn’t you?

So where to from here for Lenny the Letch? We are told he cannot be sacked which I gather is because the report has pretty well wiped his arse for him and it would seem he has no intention of doing the honourable thing which would be to resign. So it would seem that at present Auckland is stuck with him until 2016.

It now remains to be seen how much intestinal fortitude the Auckland City Councillors can muster because they hold the solution to this embarrassing conundrum.

The example has been set in Toronto, of all places. Mayor Rob Ford was caught smoking crack, getting outrageously pissed and generally making a prize Nick of himself. He also defiantly refused to step aside and appeared like Lenny the Letch to think that different rules apply to mayors of large cities than those which govern the behaviour of their ratepayers.

Toronto also has some sort of silly situation where the mayor would it seems have to butcher the entire council live on nationwide TV and then eat them before he can be sacked. However the councillors have decided to take matters into their own hands and have stripped Rob the Slob of all his powers. Effectively he is now mayor in name only and although he is still a big drain on the public purse he is being shut out of all the important stuff and nobody on council will work with him. Eventually the lack of publicity and his leper status will probably drive him back under the slimy rock from whence he crawled.

That's what ACC needs to do. They could start by moving a vote of no confidence and then the media could help by ignoring the prick. People like Lenny the Letch want to be the Big I Am and if nobody wants to talk to them they become increasingly erratic and I doubt he could handle that. It would also be a good way to ensure he doesn’t leap from the local body cesspit to try and further his political aspirations on the bigger stage of national politics.

I also think it would be a good idea for this guy to be taught a salutary lesson that will make other vampires who would sink their fangs deep into the ratepayers’ collective jugular to pay their own way. And he shouldn’t be allowed to simply give the voters the brown eye and carry on – even if he does see Jianqi doing the same thing over asset sales.