Until a few months ago, Caroline van der Plas was the celebrated politician at the table at Today Inside, but that has changed considerably. She was there again yesterday. “You idiot!”
It’s incredible how quickly you can get the men from Today Inside on board, but also how quickly you can lose them completely: Caroline van der Plas knows all about it. During the Provincial Council elections six months ago, it was Caroline before and Caroline after at the table at VI, but lately Johan Derksen has been taking her to task.
Rose for Johan
Johan has strongly criticized Caroline’s somewhat embarrassing interview with De Telegraaf – Arjen Lubach called it a ‘fiasco’ – and her emotional reaction after the revelations about her previous divorce battle. The biggest point of contention? Johan thinks that Caroline is not being honest about her reason for dropping out of the Bevers concert.
All in all, the love has cooled down considerably, but Caroline was still in trouble last night Today Inside. There she decides to hand out peace roses. “Today a rose was baptized by me. The Sweet Caroline rose. I thought: I’ll take them with me as a reconciliation rose. There are no thorns on it.”
No fighting
Johan Derksen reacts somewhat surprised. “We’re not arguing, are we?”
Host Wilfred Genee: “I understand a little bit of what you mean. Of course, there was a time when they would slide off their chairs here when it came to you. When it came to Caroline, those men were unstoppable. There was now a small tenor in the other direction.”
Then he shows a compilation of the devastating statements that Johan has made about Caroline recently. René van der Gijp then: “Things can change quickly here, right? Hahahaha.”
Overexposure
Wilfred finds VI almost unbelievable: “This will be in two months! In two months!”
Johan defends the change. “Yes, but you laugh, but a lot has happened in two months, right? You’ve been in too much publicity, there was overexposure. I sit here every evening. Then you have evenings… I once spent an entire evening talking to that lady from the AD. Then you think: what am I doing here anyway?”
He continues: “But you just have to give a shit about that, because the next day you have to sit here again. But then you start angrily tweeting and stuff.”
Silly thing
Johan’s biggest objection? “That Telegraaf interview was a tragic low point. In the media – and the people behind you should have arranged this better – you should always demand that you can read the story and that you still have the right to edit it. You came off looking like an idiot.”
Caroline says that she has indeed read it in advance, but consciously always makes as few changes as possible out of respect for the journalist in question. “What I thought was a bit lame is that with me you really leave the uh’s in, but everyone in the Netherlands says uh. It is then a journalistic choice to include that.”
‘Look it up’
Many people thought it seemed amateurish that Caroline asked her right hand to Google something during the interview. “But every MP asks an employee: ‘Look this up.’ So I think it’s fine that that happens, but I kind of had the feeling that they put it in because it was with me.”
Johan: “It was just a bad interview.”
Caroline: “Things happen. I must say: that period was a very bad period for me. That’s also around the time that Marcia’s book came out, which really had a huge impact on me. Those weeks were not mine finest hoursso to speak.”