KEY POINTS:
It was the less-than-perfect ending to a less-than-perfect National Party conference when leader John Key uttered the mother of all gaffes.
"I want to send the clearest of messages," he said, in heralding what turned out to be the most confusing: "Under a Labour Government I lead, child abusers will be severely punished."
Surprisingly, many of the 600 delegates still applauded.
Then an uncomfortable murmur followed, the more so when they realised Mr Key had not registered his slip-up. The joke about it never came.
One innocent delegate said to an MP later: "The press won't report that, will they?"
Somehow the clever analogies about the economy being a Vespa trying to do 100km and the attacks on Helen Clark's record on housing affordability lost some of their impact.
It has been a difficult week for National, a week in which the party's smooth run ended.
In the lead-up to the conference, Mr Key was distracted by a public row with the Herald over what he had said on a joint transtasman therapeutics agency. He began the conference having to apologise for MP Maurice Williamson's comment: "If some people can't lose weight, no matter what, how come there were no fat people in the Nazi concentration camps?"
And he ended the conference having to acknowledge a bitter dispute between MP and Tim Groser and his former wife, which has burst into public accusations of scandalous behaviour during Mr Groser's time as a diplomat.
One MP confidently said later that the media would not be able to report any hubris evident at the conference. Dead right.
Mr Key inherited a reasonably polling party from Don Brash. The last thing he needs is to inherit his notoriety for gaffes that gave every public appearance a nervous edginess. Dr Brash's achievement was recognised by Mr Key in his early remarks on Saturday when he said he brought the party to within a whisker of winning in 2005 "and we shouldn't forget it".
Dr Brash turned up to the dinner on Saturday where Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer apparently spoke eloquently and inspirationally about the history of the centre-right globally.
He spoke eloquently to reporters as well before the dinner, about Australian politics with lines about Labour leader Kevin Rudd that could have been borrowed from Helen Clark's own scripts on Mr Key, or British Labour's scripts on Conservative leader David Cameron.
"In Australia, in the end, what is going to matter is substance not stunts. The leader of the Opposition in Australia is a master of stunts. He does stunts very well but he doesn't do substance."
Mr Downer tried to offset the slight felt by Labour at his presence at a National Party conference by gushing about the good relations with all New Zealand governments.
The National conference, despite the apologies, gaffes and lack of policy detail, was not an unsuccessful event.
Mr Key's speech was the strongest he has given outside the House and showed evidence of some serious work on presentation.
Front-benchers Simon Power on law and order and Tony Ryall on health showed why they are earning their reputations as the top caucus performers after Mr Key (usually), and deputy Bill English.
A little over a week ago, in a pre-conference interview with the Herald, Mr Key was asked how he would judge the success of the conference.
Key: "Not necessarily by the press coverage, although that is important ... the success, in a funny kind of way, won't be what is written on the front page of the paper. The success will be making sure that those 500 or 600 delegates go back to their regional areas and say 'these guys mean business and, boy, we've really got to do the yards between now and then'."
Too right.
