Clark and Turia still on a rocky road

In a quiet phone call the day after the election, Helen Clark and Tariana Turia agreed to bury the hatchet.

"She said she wanted to put it all behind her," Turia told the Herald On Sunday in a week that has seen her accused of using coalition negotiations as her own personal therapy.

"I accepted that and I presume that's what she's doing."

Learning to shake hands with your enemies is an artform in politics. Just ask Jim Bolger and Winston Peters. Or Jim Anderton and the entire Labour caucus.

Clark and Turia's uneasy rapprochement followed 16 months of sometimes bitter acrimony since Turia seceded from Labour to form the Maori Party.

But despite the salve now being applied to the wound, some say the scars run too deep for Turia to ever trust her former colleagues.

Former Maori Party strategist Matt McCarten said he believed Turia's willingness to talk to National was a "direct result" of her feelings towards Clark.

Their antipathy grew out of a mutual sense of betrayal over the foreshore and seabed legislation.

"Clark would see in her own mind that she went out on a limb to handpick Tariana Turia for Parliament," said McCarten.

"Clark's a self-confessed control freak - she'd feel very miffed that Tariana Turia didn't do what she was told. And then she not only didn't do what she was told, she actually went out, left, survived, and came back with numbers... Clark would find that very hard to stomach."

But the former president of the Alliance Party said there was still a chance the relationship between the two could be rehabilitated, citing the rocky road travelled by Clark and Jim Anderton, who quit Labour in disgust but is now a trusted ally.

"It wasn't so long ago Jim used to tell me if he ever died I wasn't to let them come anywhere near his funeral. Now she'd be guest speaker there," said McCarten.

Clark and Turia's relationship was under strain long before the foreshore and seabed issue arose.

Labour sources described the Maori MP's behaviour in caucus as "septic" and said Clark was repeatedly forced to act as an intermediary in clashes with colleagues.

"Clark tried to accommodate her every step of the way," one source has said.

But Turia's departure from Labour was inevitable - her opposition to the foreshore and seabed legislation was just the final straw.

In the week she finally quit, Turia complained of a smear campaign from within Labour:

"A deliberate portrayal of me as some kind of idiot, as someone who doesn't know her mind."

Clark had lost her patience, lambasting her erstwhile colleague for naivety of "astonishing proportions" for wanting to stay in cabinet but vote contrarily.

On radio last Friday morning, Clark dodged a question on whether Turia was "still smarting" from the treatment that saw her quit Labour, saying only that the Maori Party rejected overtures from Labour for leader-level talks last week.

Turia strenuously denied she was motivated by personal animosity towards Clark.

"That's unfair to place that at my feet. I've never spoken against her publicly, I haven't made disparaging comments about them - but I don't think we've been accorded the same respect," she said.

Not everyone believes Clark and Turia's relationship has been irreparably damaged.

Maria Bargh, a lecturer in Maori politics at Victoria University who studied the campaign in the Maori seats, said she didn't think the bad blood between them would hamper coalition talks.

"I don't really buy that line. I think Tariana's been around long enough to be a bit more pragmatic and compromising," she said.

"Presumably Tariana still has really strong feelings... about the Foreshore and Seabed Act but that's not specifically about Helen Clark. Although given that Clark was one of the central instigators of the Foreshore and Seabed Act, and given that is still a painful point for many Maori, I can see how resentment about both might overlap."

Regardless, neither Turia nor Clark would let lingering resentment blind them, Bargh said.

Labour sources said the party was at a strategic crossroads in its relationship with the Maori Party.

One option was for Labour to embrace the Maori Party as an ally, not necessarily in coalition - that would mean not actively planning to eliminate it at the next election.

The other option is to sideline the Maori Party as a political player - to exclude it from Government, starve it of oxygen and hope it withers or disintegrates before 2008. And then to mount a campaign to reclaim the four Maori seats lost to the party.

With news last week the Maori Party caucus has considered a draft agreement from Labour, indications are that Clark and her advisers could be choosing the first option.

But there is still much talking to be done before Helen Clark and Tariana Turia's shaky truce could become a lasting peace.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY