Low hanging fruit

Sometimes the best approach to publicity is just to say nothing.

- MICHELE HEWITSON

A strange man was spotted in a Tauranga supermarket last week, smiling and waving at babies and old ladies. He got a terrible fright at a $20 price tag on a block of cheddar and fainted.

When told the geezer passed out on the floor was Sam Uffindell, National's local MP, one old lady sniffed and said: "Never heard of him. I wish he'd get out of the way." A Of course, this never happened, but it might have during one of Uffindell's now-infamous grocery shopping trips to "give my wife a break".

You can imagine him putting cans of baked beans and jumbo packs of budget bog rolls into his trolley, too, to give him "some good publicity looking like an everyday man doing the chores".

The everyday man doing the chores wears his National Party jacket to the supermarket. He should be wearing a jacket that reads "Prat".

His attempt to drum up publicity has certainly got him publicity. Of the very wrong sort. He sounded like a sexist dinosaur. Not fair, he whinged. He can only do his publicity push - sorry, grocery shopping - once a month because he works 80 hours a week.

Somebody should have advised him to just shut up. He is like Auntie Doris in comic novelist David Nobbs' The Complete Pratt, the wonderful trilogy about another prat, Henry. Doris, too, always makes things worse by going on about them.

DEAD RODENTS

Was there GST on all of those dead rodents Finance Minister Grant Robertson had to swallow last week? Dead rodent No 1 was having to announce Labour's election promise to remove GST from fresh and frozen fruit and veges. Surprise! You could have knocked the nation down with a fennel frond.