Roger McClay

No major surprise here – the NZ Herald has revealed that the third trustee of the Spencer Trust is Roger McClay.

I haven’t seen Roger for a couple of years but always got on well with him. Mind you – almost everyone does – he’s a very genial and likeable guy – well suited to a fund-raising role for Winston. Despite my views on Winston, I’ve got on well with many of his staff – I had coffee on Thursday with another former staffer.

The revelation of Roger’s fund-raising role creates a couple of issues for Winston – but fairly minor compared to the others. Pretending you know nothing about the Spencer Trust when one of your staff members runs it, doesn’t hold up well.

The other factor is having taxpayer funded staff members involved in fund-raising. Now I have to declare here that I was a parliamentary staffer for eight years and some of the jobs I ended up doing were interesting to say the least. The line between parliamentary and party is a fine one.

However to the best of my knowledge having a parliamentary staffer actually doing the party fundraising was a line never crossed. There were not many uncrossable lines but that was one of them.