That’s Tom Scott the cartoonist and political scribe of The Listener four decades ago, not the infamous POS rap artist.

Jones’s memorial service was held yesterday in Wellington and Scott posted his obituary and memories of the man at the Newsroom site. It’s Scott at his humorous best, starting with his loathing of Jones as a result of the latter’s involvement in defeating the hapless Labour PM, Bill Rowling, in 1975.

There are some stories and things about Jones that I didn’t know:

Back then, Bob’s older sister Pat, a vivacious, impassioned Labour Party activist and her husband, the political cartoonist, Bob Brockie, whose insightful and delightfully eccentric work I had admired for years, threw lavish parties in their elegant home in the Wadestown hills….At these soirees, Bob Brockie would take me aside and sing his brother-in-law’s praises, insisting that I would like him when I met him.

Brockie eventually did get them together and as fate would have it, died just the day before Jones did!

He said, “You’re losing your hair, old man, and you’re fat!” I told Bob that next time I drew him I would make him look even more like PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, who he uncannily resembled.

I have not been able to track down any cartoons of Jones by Scott, my copy of The Unauthorised Version: A cartoon history of New Zealand, is not to hand, and I refuse to use those of Far Lefter Evans, so “Death” above will have to make do.

Bob always occupied a vast corner office with views of Parliament in one direction and the harbour in another. Clutching a glass of red wine filled precariously to the brim, Bob paced back and forth, like a caged big cat in a zoo, over spotless pale-cream carpet, which was unnerving in and of itself,…

Keeping a close eye on those renting from him.

If you ran into Bob on Lambton Quay around lunchtime, hungry or not, he would drag you off for more listening sessions at Asian restaurants tucked down backstreets and up narrow flights of stairs. Striding ahead, he would loudly scold pedestrians for wearing sunglasses on the top of their heads or for wearing baseball caps back to front. Over lunch he would berate any diner within earshot for clicking a biro or talking into a cellphone.

Several of his famous quirks.

Bob invented Fake News long before it became a thing. After Muldoon called the snap election in 1984, the NZ Party swung into action and selected an impressive raft of candidates. Bob allowed television news crews a quick peek from the door into their campaign headquarters in downtown Wellington – it resembled the Houston space flight control centre on steroids. Gorgeous women sat at clacking keyboards and flickering screens while fax machines and printers buzzed and hummed. Bob told me later that computer companies renting office space from him were induced to provide the electronics and he provided the women. It was an elaborate ruse designed to demoralise National and it worked.

His larrikan sense of humour again, but with a purpose. He could be charming and also an obnoxious bastard, combining both into the same time frame, as Scott describes a dinner in Sydney where Bob invited Wallaby first five-eighths, Michael Lynagh and former British heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Bugner, with Scott cooking:

After dinner we retired to a smoking room, settled down on leather sofas and Bob told Joe Bugner, a mountain of a man who had once gone 15 rounds with Muhammed Ali in a challenge for the World Heavyweight Crown in Kuala Lumpur, that his problem was that he had been a coward in the ring. Joe took exception. “What are you calling me?” Ignoring the hurt and menace in Joe’s voice, Bob calmly repeated the claim. “You heard me. You were a coward in the ring.” Joe angrily demanded a retraction. Bob said it again. Joe rose out of his chair. 

Scott managed to calm things down with humour, as you would expect. The dinner invite to Lynagh came as a result of Jones being invited to watch the Wallaby-All Black test match the day before and dragging Scott along with him:

We drove there in his gleaming blue Jag, a nightmare journey with Bob honking the horn so continuously it became one long siren, all the while cursing “wet bastards” – other drivers whose only crime was to observe the speed limit. When traffic backed up at intersections, Bob unhesitatingly crossed the centre line and drove on the wrong side of the road, shooting through on red if need be. His driving made Toad of Toad Hall look like the Queen Mother. It was a huge relief to get to the grounds in one piece, but the drama wasn’t over. Bob got into a loud argument with another guest, a comprehensively pissed High Court Judge, punched him in the face, and we were asked to leave.

It tracks with Jag owners….

It seems appropriate to also include this obituary of Bob Brockie, courtesy of another favourite writer of mine, Karl du Fresne and in reading it you do have to chuckle at like-types attracting each other:

Bob Jones’ younger brother Lloyd, the novelist, lived in the Brockie household as a teenager when Bob was married to Pat and described him as three or four people crammed into one skin. “He knew everything about the natural world, could identify every bird, plant and insect, collected butterflies, spoke Italian, could bang out arias on a piano, was funny, could draw anything, and produced cartoons that skewered the vanities of his subjects.”
…
In both his columns and his cartoons, he was a natural rattler of cages. He once reflected that he had spent his life kicking the establishment in the shins.

Sounds like someone who’d fit well with Jones.