Walker nails colours to another foreign mast

By David Cohen

Friday 20th December 2002

The naming of Simon Walker as the next global communications director of Reuters appears to have quashed long-standing speculation about a possible return to political life in his adopted New Zealand homeland for the onetime Labour Party PR man.

Mr Walker (49) was appointed this month to head the group's 22-strong public relations arm in London.

Although Reuters is better known as a news provider, more than 92% of its operating revenue is drawn from the financial information services it offers to clients around the world, a feature that would make the new position substantially different from others Mr Walker has held over the past three decades.

He recently completed a two-year stint managing the public relations department at Buckingham Palace, a posting which followed a number of similar UK-based communications roles with British Airways, the office of former British prime minister John Major, and the public relations groups Brunswick and, in Brussels, Hill & Knowlton.

Mr Walker, whose boyish overbite and Oxford-honed debating skills turned him into an overnight star in New Zealand in the 1970s after he famously infuriated prime minister (Sir) Robert Muldoon during a television interview on the issue of Soviet warships, last worked here as a political consultant in 1989.

Despite the absence, his name has frequently been mentioned as a possible list candidate with the Act New Zealand party.

As recently as this past summer, a number of party stalwarts are understood to have approached the South African-born communications specialist to see if he would be interested in a leadership position with Act.

Mr Walker, who is vacationing in the country this month ahead of assuming his new responsibilities in January, told The National Business Review that practical considerations continued to rule out any kind of foray back to New Zealand.

"I keep in touch with Act, sure," said Mr Walker, a self described "great admirer" of founder Sir Roger Douglas and his successors.

Still, he added, there was "much more serious work to be done" on the centre-right side of national politics if the country ever was to regain the momentum started by Sir Roger. He did not see much chance of that happening from within the country's major opposition party.

Asked about the current similarities between the British Conservative Party and its New Zealand counterpart, the onetime Tory strategist said: "The parallel is that both parties clearly have grave problems that are closely tied to their leadership, and a groping for what they're going to stand for."

Family and work responsibilities, however, meant that Mr Walker would not be playing a local political role anytime soon, he said, mentioning the schooling arrangements in Britain for his two children, now aged 10 and 17.

"These have been, and are, inhibiting factors."

Mr Walker's own views remain far from inhibited. Asked about the impressive leaders he has had the opportunity of observing in both hemispheres, he quickly mentioned his old nemesis, Sir Robert Muldoon, as "an exceptionally gifted politician who instinctively knew what the floating voter would stand for."

That kind of visceral understanding remained in contrast to the time he spent working in Wellington for the Labour Party "when we had to poll cleverly and skilfully and in great detail to find the same thing out."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair shares the same Muldoonist quality, too, he believes, "of knowing what will play out with middle Britain, although I wouldn't compare him to Muldoon in any other sense."

A little ruefully, Mr Walker said he might still be playing an active role in New Zealand public life today were it not for the sensitivities within the organisation of the state television broadcaster over his earlier political activities, which appeared to have all but shut him out of a job working in the area of his first professional love journalism.

"I would have loved to go back to journalism in this country years ago, but I couldn't after working in politics because my hands were seen as being somehow unclean for having worked with a party."

This struck him then, and still does, as being "a nonsense."

"Having worked for a political party and being immeshed in preparations for a government fighting an election I think one is infinitely more able to report on the subject than somebody who's a political eunuch. But that wasn't the view in this country in 1985."

He did not know if any difference had been made to the situation by the appointment of a former colleague, Ian Fraser, himself a onetime consultant, to the chief executive's position within Television New Zealand.

In one role or another, he said he remained hopeful that a position back in New Zealand will one day beckon.

"There's always been something in me that's been politically interested and enthusiastic."

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