I'm not saying that John Key is an incurable gossip ... but he sure seems to get told a lot of stuff by random people.
John Key has learned the identity of the entertainer guilty of an indecency charge through the grapevine of people circumventing the suppression order.
The Prime Minister yesterday admitted being curious about the entertainer's identity, and asking someone he knew.
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"I can't divulge my source, but it is not an official one," said Mr Key. "I asked someone who I thought might know, and they told me."
In a new chapter in John Key: Portrait of a Prime Minister, devoted to this year's election campaign, Mr Key is quoted as saying: "Someone phoned and told me who the hacker [RawShark] was, but other than having a look at this person, I thought, 'Oh well ... nothing will come of it. Life goes on'."
Monday, 3 November
At today's post Cabinet news conference, Prime Minister John Key revealed that while still at primary school he was told the identity of the secret Watergate source known as "Deep Throat" .
Asked about the claim made last week that he knew the identity of the hacker who was the source for the book, Dirty Politics, Mr Key shrugged and said he knew the identity of "lots of people" that the public didn't.
"For instance, the guy Woodward and Bernstein called 'Deep Throat'", Mr Key said. "There had been something about it on the TV or in the paper, and some kid at school came up to me and said 'you do know that the informant is FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, don't you?'"
"Deep Throat" was the name given to the source of a series of articles that Woodward and Bernstein wrote in 1972 exposing wrongdoing by the US President, Richard Nixon. They are widely credited with helping bring about his eventual resignation ahead of impeachment proceedings.
For more than 30 years, "Deep Throat's" identity was a much-speculated upon puzzle, which only ended in 2005 when Mr Felt himself publicly revealed his role.
Mr Key, however, shrugged off his knowing something that had been one of the biggest mysteries of American politics and journalism and the source of much public curiosity.
"I was only 11 years old at the time," he said. "I actually was interested in the sorts of things most oridinary Kiwi kids are - the All Blacks, comic books and currency arbitrage."
"To be honest, politics wasn't something I really paid much attention to until about three yeats ago."
Wednesday, 5 November
The Prime Minister, John Key, today revealed that he knows the identity of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who terrified London's East End between 1888 and 1891 and has sparked at least 100 theories as to his identity.
The information was uncovered by a National Party staffer, Jason Ede, who was alleged to be involved in a number of dirty tricks with some blogger whom we do not name. Following allegations about Ede's role in the book Dirty Politics, he largely had been kept from the public's eye.
However, Key today indicated that Ede had not been idle during that time.
"Look, Jason was at a bit of a loose end in the month before the election, and we thought that we ought to give him something useful to do. So I thought what better use of his talents than to have him sift through the details of five brutal murders involving deep throat slashes, abdominal and genital-area mutilation, removal of internal organs, and progressive facial mutilations?"
Key claimed that Ede's researches had conclusively proven the Ripper's identity. However, despite the intense public interest in the name here in New Zealand and internationally, he did not propose to make it public.
"At the end of the day, the crimes involved happened in another country over 100 years ago, and the person responsible is almost certainly dead. I could spend my life worrying about people who brutally murder up to 11 women but at the end of the day it doesn't take you anywhere."
"What's more," Key continued, "when Jason told me who the Ripper was, I wasn't wearing my magical Prime Minister hat. So good luck trying to OIA the information out of me!"
Friday 7 November, 2014
In a press release issued at 7:30 pm, Prime Minister John Key admitted that the SIS had briefed him on the identity of the man responsible for planting the bomb that killed Ernie Abbott at the Wellington Trades Hall in 1984.
The information was contained in a dossier provided to the Prime Minister outlining past terrorist-type incidents in New Zealand and making recommendations for combatting future threats from Islamic extremists.
Asked why he wasn't making the information provided available to the public, or to the New Zealand Police, Mr Key just shrugged.
"Look, at the end of the day, I think most New Zealanders will be pretty comfortable with their secret agents deciding what should and shouldn't be told to them. You would have to be pretty naive to think that the SIS are just going to let you know what they know about things that happened thirty years ago."
Pressed on why he wouldn't require the SIS to hand over the information they possessed to the Police, Mr Key replied: "That's their call - if the SIS don't think that the Police should be prosecuting someone for blowing other people up, I'm not going to second guess them."
While Mr Key did admit that "wasn't entirely a good look" for the crime to remain unsolved some thirty years after it took place, he didn't think it was something that the public would be overly concerned.
"Obviously it isn't ideal to have citizens blown to bits on the street, but at the end of the day I actually think most New Zealanders would recognise that if you're going to be silly enough to hang around places like a Trades Hall, you have to expect this sort of thing might happen. So I'm pretty comfortable with where things are at."