The Tea tape scandal is an incident involving the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and ACT Party candidate John Banks, during the New Zealand general election campaign in 2011. Their meeting in an Auckland café on 11 November 2011, two weeks before election day was seen as a symbolic endorsement of Banks as the National Party's favoured candidate for the Epsom electorate. After publicly meeting for some time, media were asked to leave. A journalist, Bradley Ambrose, left his recording device behind, and subsequently gave the recording of the politicians' conversation to the Herald on Sunday newspaper, which declined to publish it. The recording allegedly contained comments about the leadership of ACT and disparaging remarks about elderly New Zealand First supporters.