Mike Munro memoir: Death threats, rage and a toxic shift in political life
Sunday, 5 July 2026
Read a chapter from Ringside, How TV3 and ‘a sanctimonious little creep’ corn-ered the PM, here. And read here to find out what Helen Clark says about ‘corngate’ all these years later.
When Mike Munro arrived at Parliament for his first day as chief press secretary to Labour leader Helen Clark in 1996, he had immediate misgivings: police officers were in her office. Clark had been sent a death threat and a bullet in the mail.
Three decades on, he sees threats against politicians as increasingly routine and wonders why anyone takes on the job.
Munro has just released political memoir Ringside, an observational 301 pages of 12 years as a press gallery journalist then as a key adviser to prime ministers Clark and Jacinda Ardern. He reveals what goes on behind closed doors, some of it more horrifying than you’d imagine.
Munro had turned his back on journalism to help Clark, who led a divided and oft-bitter caucus, and was flailing at 4% in the polls. Already wondering if it was a good move and with plenty willing to tell him it was not, that first day was brutal.
Read more:
Where is our Fifa World Cup anthem? (We checked the chilly bin)
Two teams, one final, and a slightly pathetic 45-year grudge
His sense of unease persisted for a year, he tells the Sunday Star-Times over coffee in his Wellington apartment.
“The day I started, a bullet turned up. It had a wee note attached to it, which said, ‘keep away from Waitangi, honky’,” Munro says.
Social media has now weaponised that style of anger, making political life far more fraught, he believes.
Munro wasn’t with Ardern when she presided over the Covid pandemic and got death threats for her trouble, but he says the depth of hostility and menace directed at MPs is hidden.
“It’s very tough now. It’s got a lot worse over the years,” he says, flourishing his mobile phone.
“Now you just pick up your device and we’re all experts, we can disseminate messages incredibly quickly … a lot of anger gets vented, a lot of it’s just plain nasty … complete lies can reach a big audience very, very quickly.
“Not even the political media see the full extent of the threatening language, the threatening notes, the threatening communications politicians get, and a lot of that can be tied to the intensification of social media.”
Yes, political hatred was there in the days of Sir Robert Muldoon, David Lange and Jim Bolger, when Munro was on the other side, a journalist sniffing out scoops.
“We just see it and hear it now,” he says.
And it has an impact. Either capable people stay away from politics to avoid becoming targets, or those who brave it burn out more quickly than in the pre-social media era.
“Helen Clark had three completed terms as prime minister … and I can’t see it happening again. I don’t think you’re going to see people doing long tenures like that any more … the job is wearisome, worrisome, and has too many challenges now for that to happen.”
After more than 40 years in Parliament, he ponders where the attraction is in a job that attracts so much anger, then dumps you with a “piss off now” rather than “thank you for your tireless service”.
“It is brutal, and the losers are disposed of quite quickly,' Munro says. “There is no farewell function. There is no gold watch. When you are defeated on election night, the operation just completely turns over.”
When Helen Clark lost the 2008 election after nine years as PM, she announced that night she was stepping down as leader.
“People were stunned. They expected her to take some time to hand over the reins.”
To him, it was the ultimate display of Clark’s steel.
“She’d done her nine years as PM, her 27 years in Parliament. She walked away, got on with her life, and left the post-mortems to the people taking over.”
And former PM Ardern now lives outside New Zealand.
“The electorate is so fickle, they’re now so enabled to express their rage through social media. Their families get drawn into this now. Personal security becomes an issue,” he says.
Munro reported on politics for 10 years from 1984, was a stay-at-home dad for a year, switched in 1996 to serve as chief press secretary to Clark, then in 2017 was chief of staff to Ardern.
His start as a political journalist was nearly as dramatic as the “bullet” incident ‒ PM Muldoon famously called a snap election days after Munro first sat at his Press Gallery desk.
Labour ousted Muldoon and introduced sweeping reforms and anti-nuclear legislation, and was forced to grapple with the Rainbow Warrior bombing. Munro covers them all . He was political correspondent for the New Zealand Herald, then political editor at The Dominion.
His transition from journalist to strategic gatekeeper required a re-engineering of mindset. Even if a PM is well informed and hard working ‒ as he says Clark notoriously was ‒ they still have blind spots.
“You're watching their back all the time, because they can't see everything that's going on in the world,“ Munro explains.
“They are very, very busy people. You're making sure they're ready for the unexpected, providing presentational advice. Do we get angry? Do we just pass it off? There's no room for spontaneity. You try to be ready for everything.”
Munro laughs over one piece of winning media advice during the Clark era, around the 2005 spear tackle on Lions captain Brian O'Driscoll by All Blacks Tana Umaga and Keven Mealamu.
It left O'Driscoll with a dislocated shoulder, ending his Lions tour and requiring surgery, yet there was no citing or suspension for the All Blacks pair.
Clark did not have it down as a potential issue for her Monday post-Cabinet press conference, which involved running through political and other issues that might arise.
“When Helen asked about what else the journos might throw at her, the infamous spear tackle was mentioned. She immediately asked, 'What's a spear tackle?',” Munro says.
'It was the only topic that day on talkback radio and online news, but Helen had been entirely focused on the Cabinet agenda. She was given a couple of key lines expressing deep concern about the dangerous nature of the tackle and recited them perfectly.”
One ambush did get through, 17 days before the 2002 election: the genetically engineered corn controversy, known as Corngate.
Interviewed live on TV by John Campbell, Clark was hit with something she knew little about while Campbell came heavily armed.
“We were completely blindsided and ambushed,“ Munro says.
“In campaign time, all these things are heightened. There’s a profound fear of making mistakes, and something like that throws you completely off your stride. Everyone was deeply dismayed and angry ‒ particularly Helen.”
It was one of the few times New Zealanders saw Clark genuinely angry on television.
“But I say in the book that it was a controlled fury,” Munro says. “She was still able to articulate her anger and say exactly what she wanted to say. It was a remarkably controlled performance given the depth of her rage.”
Though Labour's polling dropped, Munro argues it wasn’t due to Corngate but the sudden rise of United Future leader Peter Dunne, propelled by the worm ‒ a TV device that showed when an audience was warming to a speaker’s message.
There were moments when the risk ran the other way ‒ when a press secretary imperilled the PM.
On the night of the 2000 US election Helen Clark was at a formal function, so press secretary David Lewis prepared two statements in advance: one congratulating George W Bush, the other Al Gore.
From the 9th floor of the Beehive, Lewis watched two TV feeds for the result. When CNN projected Gore the winner, he headed to an empty press gallery, sliding PM congratulates President‑elect Gore under office doors.
Returning to the Beehive, he discovered to his horror CNN had retracted. After alerting the PM, Lewis unleashed a burst of speed ‒ and vocabulary ‒ as he sprinted back to the deserted gallery, managing to retrieve every copy unseen.
“We’d avoided what would have been a whopping diplomatic embarrassment,” Munro says.
Now to Ardern. Munro dismisses criticisms she made unilateral decisions during the height of Covid-19.
“I get angry when I hear people saying she made too many of her own decisions,” he says
“That wasn't the case at all. She was on the phone to public health experts around the world late into the night, checking in to see how Britain was handling it, studying websites, and working constantly with the director-general of health.
“She deliberated deeply, and she would have had a lot of sleepless nights because she is an anxious person, which made those monumental choices incredibly difficult.”
Munro now looks back on his accidental journey from journalist to political operative with immense satisfaction, with his Clark stint the highlight.
He had the thrill of walking into the White House, the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and entering conflict zones in Afghanistan.
He likely paid nearly as many visits to 10 Downing St as some recent British PMs who lived there.
His thoughts return to the toxic digital landscape facing the next generation of leaders.
“There’s a lot of bitchiness, a lot of nastiness. It’s a survival business, really,” Munro says.
“Technology changed enormously the way we conduct politics, and the way politicians are treated.
“They are now exposed to a lot more menacing behaviour.”
Ringside: A Political Memoir by Mike Munro, on sale Thursday 9 July 2026, $39.99 RRP (Upstart Press)