‘I’ve made many mistakes… It’s sort of hard to distinguish one from another.’ There’s something disarming about Paul Goldsmith. It’s in the way the minister for everything (justice, public service, treaty negotiations, arts and culture, and Pacific peoples included) peers over his glasses, answers “yes…” as though he’s admitting to a crime, delivers dry one-liners and stresses odd syllables as he does it. You’d take him for a red wine kind of guy; really, he’s a pale ale man.