James Meager profile

A good profile of James Meager at Stuff.

His first memory is of police coaxing him out from under a bed. Now James Meager, who grew up in a Timaru state house, wants to be Rangitata’s next MP. …

He grew up in south Timaru, with the Road Knights around the corner and cousins in the Mongrel Mob.

“I think about that sometimes, whether there is a thing in my life that made me go down one pathway and not the other,” he says.

“My first living memory is being sort of coaxed out from underneath the bed by a police officer.”

His parents separated when he was 4, and his mother left to raise three kids, of which he was the eldest.

50 years ago National MPs came from relatively privileged backgrounds and Labour MPs did not. Now it seems to have reversed with many National (and ACT) MPs coming from very challenging backgrounds, while more and more Labour MPs are from the comfortable middle class.

He is upfront about the time he woke up to find a letter delivered to his room at Selwyn College, in Dunedin, while he was a second year student.

The letter requested he leave the college that day, following an incident the previous night when he threw a drink over a student, frying their laptop.

Meager is upfront about his time at university, describing himself as loud-mouthed, obnoxious and opinionated.

Some of that behaviour came after drinking alcohol – which incidentally he hasn’t touched for two years – and included sleeping in people’s gardens rather than walking home after a night of binge-drinking in his high school days.

And I once vomited in a church (during a service) because I had drunk three bottles of Baileys the night before, when I was at Otago. Many students had experiences at university that do not define them.