Brian Edwards: Helen, Portrait of a Prime Minister

By JOHN ROUGHAN

All biography must be a labour of love; how else could someone devote years, usually, to the life and character of another person.

The fact that Brian Edwards is an unabashed admirer of Helen Clark was not fatal to this book. The fault was his failure to write it.

Edwards has done enough legwork for an interesting portrait, but not nearly enough mind work.

He has recorded the recollections and impressions of family members, friends and observers of Helen Clark, but he has not taken the next step.

Had he stepped back, thought about the material and tried to craft it into a coherent story, it could have been more balanced, less awe-struck, more insightful, more worthy of its subject.

The book is built instead on long passages of quotation, lightly linked with commentary that seldom adds anything to the material the author has recorded.

It is readable enough, after the early chapters on ancestry and childhood which are as indigestible as any family's account of its forbears. There are other hallmarks of amateur publishing - double spaced type, clunky writing and glaring error. (The Rugby Union, not Holyoake, rejected the whites-only invitation for an All Black tour of South Africa in 1967.)

The style throughout is leaden, as in: "This is the single most common theme to emerge in conversation with Helen's family and friends: she looks after people, she cares. It is completely at odds with the image that dominated the media from the time she first came to prominence in the mid-1980s ... "

We might have been given that message more subtly and effectively, with stories from her life that could be made to speak for themselves.

Still, there is enough in Edwards' interviews to reward the politically interested reader with interesting snippets.

Margaret Wilson mentions that Helen Clark was never strongly associated with feminism in the Labour movement.

"It wasn't that she was opposed to feminism but she had a more mainstream, socialist analysis ... I agreed with that but I never thought it was sufficient."

There is Helen Clark herself on Jenny Shipley: "I don't think there would have been the slightest prospect of her becoming Prime Minister if I hadn't been Leader of the Opposition. They decided to put a woman up against a woman."

And some interesting male impressions of the young Helen Clark.

Bob Harvey, Jonathan Hunt and Richard Griffin found her "extremely attractive" when she arrived at Parliament.

Harvey: "She had a serene beauty, if you like, an unearthly beauty for a politician. She seemed not quite of this earth, if I remember rightly."

The book is devoted to a very serious person yet pays not the slightest attention to the serious things she is doing, and what she is in politics to do.

David Lange says, "She actually has an agenda. I don't know the detail of that agenda today. But it will be there and it will be still maturing."

Nor, of course, is there a word of criticism of her performance as Prime Minister. Nothing about her backdown on closing the gaps, or her refusal to defend Tariana Turia on the "holocaust".

Her inability, as yet, to face the challenge of Waitangi is excused.

To be hailing Helen Clark a great Prime Minister, possibly in time our greatest, after two years in office, is simply absurd.

She has emerged as a personality the public did not previously know and her modest confidence now is immensely appealing. But there are elements to leadership - Waitangi is an example - in which she has yet to measure up, and might not be able to measure up. The author is sensible enough not to claim this is a biography. He calls it a portrait.

Good portraits, though, are brought to life by the painter's insight and hard work. The raw material is here; it will be a useful reference. But the story has still to be written.

* John Roughan is an assistant editor of the Herald.

Exisle Publishing $44.95