By: Mike Hosking | Wednesday, September 26, 2012 9:04 AM

You couldn’t have written the Kim Dotcom story if you’d set out to.

You’d have been pulled up by the editor very early on for being far too outlandish with too many twists and turns and events that your average reader wouldn’t even begin to believe. But life is stranger than fiction in this one.

So where are we at with the spying business? The bit I am having trouble grasping is why is this a big deal for the Government? Why am I hearing what a tough day it’s been for the Prime Minister? Why am I hearing how much pressure he’s under and how red faced he is?

I know we’re all being told to wait for the report but we can probably toss out a few well educated thoughts this morning. The real crime here, if you want to use that word, is that Dotcom got spied on illegally. Why was this? Because the police asked the GCSB to. It’s illegal because the police told the GCSB that Dotcom was a foreigner - that’s your crime. He wasn’t, he was a local and the GCSB isn’t allowed to spy on locals. Other people do that.

Now how this has much to do with the Prime Minister I am not sure. There is incompetence here but it’s on the part of the police who told the GCSB the wrong thing and it’s on the part of the GCSB who didn’t ask enough questions and do a bit of obvious checking.

I think it’s drawing a very long bow to blame the boss i.e. the Prime Minister who I think we could all agree shouldn’t be involved in the minutiae of day to day decision making, the same way the Minister of Transport isn’t blamed if your plane is late or the Minister of Internal Affairs isn’t blamed if you don’t drop, hold and cover at 9:26 this morning.

The fact Bill English was involved is only embarrassing as far as I can work out if he didn’t tell Key when he really should have. But I have no idea whether that’s the sort of thing you’d pass on to the Prime Minister if he’d been out of the country or whether it’s one of a million little things you did that you wouldn’t bother him with.

Certainly if Dotcom sues us and wins, that’s embarrassing. But once again hardly the fault of Key or English. You have to ask the simple question - where is the line between a state agency and the politicians? If you’re drawing the line to include the politicians, then why do we have departments and department heads? Why don’t ministers just run everything?

So given we don’t run things that way, the blame lies on the desks of those who directly made the decisions - the police and the GCSB. They’re the ones who need to be answerable, to be held to account. Presumably if the report reads as badly as this whole fiasco seems to be playing out, they’re the ones whose heads get to roll.

Blaming Key and co is good political sport and you can’t blame the opposition for being in boots and all. But of all the things Key has to worry about, real things, and be held to account for this isn’t close to being at the top of the pile.

Photo: NZ Herald