Mike's Minute: The great man that was Sir Bob Jones

I was very sad to hear of the passing of Bob Jones - Sir Robert Jones.

The last contact I had with him was last year when he sent me a copy of his latest book.

They always came with a personal note. When I say personal, it was a letter that he would have dictated and had typed up and then signed himself.

He was from a different era of sorts. I never received an email from him, only letters.

The last time I dealt with him in person was in his office in Wellington overlooking the harbour. That too was from an “era”  - beautifully set up, but in a time-and-place kind of way. It was a lot of panelling, a lot of staff, his office was large and on a corner, and he smoked. That became a thing in the Helen Clark days when she was busy making rules around smoking in doors. Bob was having none of it because in his office he was the boss, if not the king.

So last time I was in his office we had wine and sat amongst the swirling tobacco smoke coming out of his pipe.

The art work was worth the trip alone. He had fantastic taste and a fantastic collection.

He also had one of the best brains you will ever encounter.

What was often lost by many in the barrage of cantankerous verbiage was the amount of knowledge and wisdom he had gleaned from a lifetime of reading and travel.

There wasn’t a place he hadn't been. He had more stories than you ever had time to hear, or he had time to tell.

I noted a small irony on Friday night when I watched TV1 and their coverage.

They made much of the Rod Vaughn helicopter encounter, the irony being no one these days hires a chopper to go looking for a fisherman. And Three reflected the modern malaise as his passing was the second story behind the weather, even though the weather was the day before's news.

It showed a lack of understanding of who Jones was and what he contributed to the country. That’s the problem with modern newsrooms - the institutional knowledge had left the building.

From business, to politics, to public discourse, Jones was an invaluable addition to the national psyche.

Unafraid, bold, brilliant with the language and fantastically funny because he was fantastically irreverent, even when irreverence was wildly more tolerated than it is these days.

It was a great life.

And he was a great man.

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