'Kirk Diary’ fascinates Mr Muldoon

Press, 31 March 1981, Page 2

'Kirk Diary’ fascinates Mr Muldoon

PA Wellington The Prime Minister (Mr Muldoon) believes it “extraordinary” that the late Mr Norman Kirk, a former Prime. Minister, should have confided as he did in what Mr Muldoon considered such a “relatively junior” private secretary. Discussing at a press conference yesterday the book “Diary of the Kirk Years” by a former secretary of Mr Kirk, Miss Margaret Hayward, Mr Muldoon said he was surprised he had confided some of the material in the book. “That I find the most fascinating part of the whole thing—that he had no secrets whatever from this lady.”

Mr Muldoon said he considered most of the book accurate apart from a few points of which he believed Mr Kirk had an inadequate understanding.

No-one else in a similar position to Miss Hayward could give as definitive a book on the “Muldoon Years” as he could himself because they were not part of events. Mr Muldoon referred to

comments Mr Kirk had made on some of his colleagues and said: “I wouldn’t even think those things about my colleagues, let alone tell someone . . . quite extra-

ordinary.” Mr Muldoon said the book did, perhaps, get closer to things which went on in Mr Kirk’s office than his own books did of what went on in his office, “but there isn’t any counterpart in mine . . . 1 don’t sort of send spurious information to various Ministers to see which one is leaking it. There is no counterpart to many of the things that he did.

“I don’t shoot pigeons. I mean, why pigeons when you’ve got journalists?” he said with a laugh.

Mr Muldoon said an impression of the pressures the office imposed on a Prime Minister was given but “I’m perfectly certain I don’t react the way Norman Kirk did. He wasn’t, well—it’s obvious —for a long, long time . . . and that comes through in the whole of the book. “I find the book fascinating. I had no idea things went oii the way they did, in terms of his thinking.”