The next few days of our Whodunnit? series will be interesting as we try to track down Labour's leaker for David Shearer.
At #5 on Labour's front bench lurks Clayton Cosgrove. Our only ever encounter with Mr Cosgrove took place at Christchurch Airport a few years ago when he was in such a hurry that he almost collided with She Who Must Be Obeyed. He barely broke stride, and certainly didn't apologise for not looking out where he was going/ The official with him gave us one of those resigned "welcome to my world" looks as the then-Minister rose to his full height (which isn't that high) and marched off with renewed purpose.
Mr Cosgrove is a protege of that long-serving Prime Minister Mike Moore. Moore's last-gasp ascension to the role of PM came far too late to stop Labour's bleeding in 1990, and Mr Cosgrove may well be cognisant of that in 2013. File that thought away.
And at #5, Mr Cosgrove has probably gone as far as he can under the current leadership. He lost his Waimakiriri seat in 2011, and if the rumours of him crossing town to stand in Christchurch East are correct, he probably knows that Waimak is a goner for him.
Clayton Cosgrove is something of an outsider in Labour's caucus. He is neither part of the gaggle or the self-servers (O'Connor; 2011), and is actually one of the few Labour MP's to come from a business background. But we can easily imagine him having a quiet chat with someone like Patrick Gower over an end-of-day beverage, and the language spoken to Gower could quite easily be Cosgrove-speak, especially the bit about the need to act now, not next year (a la Moore in 1990).
On that basis, we're going to give Clayton Cosgrove our highest probability ranking yet; 8/10. That's not to say that we think that Mr Cosgrove IS the secret leaker, but he most certainly COULD be. Do you agree?
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