A cup of tea with Helen Clark

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The portrait on the wall of the Prime Minister's electorate office is of her long-dead predecessor Mickey Savage.

The only portrait of the present PM is a Christmas card showing Helen Clark and her husband, Peter Davis. Her press secretary tells me the room we're standing in has recently been done up. He must mean a coat of paint has been thrown on the walls some time in the past decade.

Some time in those 10 years, too, the posters have changed. Where Socialist International Women's Congress posters once hung, there are now laminated invitations to celebrate Pasifika.

But that's about the only sign of interior decorating. Clark's Sandringham Rd office, next door to the pizza joint which has been there for ever, is cluttered, not very comfortable and scruffy around the edges. You could not accuse Helen Clark of conspicuous consumption.

The most powerful person in the country strides in wearing her as-seen-on-TV beige trouser suit and swinging her big black briefcase. She didn't buy the briefcase: stamped in gold with the words Air Nauru, it was a freebie from a South Pacific Forum.

You could not really say Clark has charisma (nor that she's ever been interested). She does have presence. She does not do chit-chat. We head up the stairs to a room where the light is better. She doesn't want to sit looking into the light, thank you.

She asks for a cup of tea, tells me where to sit, takes off her watch and puts it on the table in front of her. All within minutes of meeting.

She hates to be called bossy. When men are bossy, she has said, and fair enough too, they are invested with authority. "I front issues and I deal with them. No, I wouldn't describe myself as bossy, but I am direct and I am authoritative and I do keep abreast of things."

What she is, certainly, is frugal - I submit that briefcase as evidence.

She basically squats in a corner of Premier House. "I do. There's a little corner which has the bedroom and the bathroom, and when I'm in Wellington I go into the bedroom somewhere around midnight or later. The alarm goes in the morning, I wander along to the kitchen, I turn on the jug and make a cup of tea. Then I'm out of there."

Now, really. What's the point of having power if you can't enjoy a few of its trappings? Partly she lives in Wellington like this because her Auckland home is her real base. But partly it has to do with that ingrained frugal streak.

The dangers of hubris are ever present. She spells it out, in capital letters: "Never Let It Go To Your Head."

"I just think that in a small, intimate democracy like ours, it's very important to keep your feet on the ground."

Her relationship with power is "functional, I would say. And you might say no one would believe a politician saying this, but I'm going to say it: I've never been interested in power for its own sake."

Whether you believe her or not, talk about taking what she calls not living "like the lady of the manor" to the other extreme. I have an image of her folding out her camp stretcher at night. "Oh, no, no," she laughs and insists, "I've got a lovely bed."

What she does for fun, as everybody knows, is to leave her lovely bed, put on her boots and climb very steep hills.

To make the PM glow, ask her about mountains. What she loves about going up steep things is that it takes you to places where the only challenge is "working out where you put your feet, how you keep your balance. You must be very focused on the things which really matter, which is partly the enjoyment, the buzz, keeping yourself safe but also having a challenge."

Tell her it sounds exactly like what she does for a job and she says, "I like a challenge."

When I told a mate of mine that I was interviewing Clark, he said: "Even her leisure has to be character-forming. She exudes a puritanical lack of joy."

Almost everyone who has seen her on television would think that to be about right. Hardly anyone, once they've met her, would go along with that assessment.

Here's a revelation about Clark: she is actually the funniest person in the country. According to her. That is my exaggeration but, honestly, she says it's just that she can't be seen to be funny because, well, people don't always laugh. They tend to take her seriously, so she's given up being funny in public.

"It really doesn't worry me because what I've found is that it's quite hard to be warm and funny in public. It can be taken the wrong way."

At the time of her 20th wedding anniversary she was asked at a press conference how she and Peter would be celebrating.

"'Oh, well,' I said, 'we'll probably talk by phone later in the day. And that's the way it's been for 20 years,' I said ... as a joke. 'It's probably why it's lasted so long.' And they all went and wrote it up seriously.

"My normal practice is not to tell jokes in public life because people have no sense of humour."

Even sans jokes, Clark is riding high in polls which show Labour support as high as 50 per cent. Her personal rating pegs her as the most popular serving PM in almost 20 years. She has been described as being "quite unnecessarily good at her job."

She regards that as a compliment: "Yep. Definitely. I think it means they haven't found a lot to criticise."

In her manual of How to be a Successful Prime Minister, there is no such thing as being too good: "Nah. You can't."

Her public image has been nothing less than triumphant; a metamorphosis. In 1993 she became the new Leader of the Opposition. She had challenged Mike Moore for the leadership and won. She had blood on her hands that was to prove almost impossible to wash off. She was regarded as aloof, intellectual, elite. As unelectable. We hated her and she knew it.

Now what you hear is that Helen Clark is synonymous with invincible. Ask her what happened and the look on her face is pure glee.

"I think I relaxed in myself. I think it's all to do with your confidence and your ability to do the job and people see that in you."

The confidence of a formerly "charmed life" was knocked out of her during those first years in Opposition. She regrouped, swapped "carping" for positivity, and "anyway, I'm a very resilient person".

Resilience aside, and despite those polls, there is still a perception of her as the passionless PM. She won't admit to an Achilles' heel. "No I can't think of anything obvious." If she could admit to a vulnerability, invent a secret vice, we might relate to her more easily.

But perhaps that's the point of Clark: 50 per cent of us appear to quite like being bossed around by Superwoman.

Not that she is bossy, of course. Just authoritative.

And did I mention that she's warm and funny in person?

That is the one thing everyone who has met her says about Clark. Does she live in hope that someone will come up with a better take on her?

When Helen Clark really laughs she honks like a very happy goose. Honk, honk, she goes. "No. I think it's a great line. You can use it again."

Oh, all right. She's the boss.

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