KEY POINTS:
Soon after 7am on July 7, 2004, when Helen Clark had finished reading the morning news clippings, she phoned one of her ministers to give him a dressing down, the relatively new Immigration Minister Paul Swain.
Something he had said about lifting immigration targets to 50,000 was picked up by the Herald and splashed across the front page.
The phone call from Clark was recounted with hilarity in Parliament nine days ago in Swain's valedictory speech, delivered with empathetic nods from Labour colleagues.
"I was extremely grateful to receive a phone call from the Prime Minister that morning offering me advice, guidance and detailed information on the Government's immigration programme."
Clark, now campaigning for a fourth term as Prime Minister, sets exacting standards and a cracking pace for herself and has high expectations of others.
Calls such as Swain's have been received by many others. It was typical of a leadership style she has applied as both party leader and Prime Minister, a style that is variously respected and reviled.
In an interview between campaigning in Hawkes Bay and Wairarapa this
week, she talked about her leadership - including those calls - why she is like she is and what gives her satisfaction.
She doesn't expect others to put quite the same effort into the job that she does, but she will not hesitate to tell colleagues when she thinks they are letting the side down.
"I do front people," she told the Herald.
"When I see something silly I just ring up and say 'for God's sake! What on earth do you think you are doing? ... This isn't fair to everyone else. You've let the whole team down'."
She has also found, with experience, that she has to be able to administer a dressing down but "not leave people so devastated that they can't pick themselves up and carry on and do the job."
"In the end you just say 'Well, fix it. Put it right. Deal with it. I can't do all your job for you."'
Clark is not the tyrant that this potentially makes her sound, though her leadership coup against Mike Moore in 1993 showed she was made of steely stuff.
She and activists like Margaret Wilson forged a place for themselves in the party during the 60s and 70s, having to persuade mainly men of another generation that they had a role.
According to Wilson, they wanted only to participate in the party, not to control it.
Clark's first three years as leader were often miserable.
For a start, National Prime Minister Jim Bolger never mentioned her by name for the first three years, Clark says.
It had such a devastating impact on her that she now never mentions National leader John Key by name.
Former colleagues tell of awful caucus meetings, divided between the new intake of MPs who had installed Clark and the Moore-backers who sulked and read newspapers at the back of the room.
Polling was disastrous with surging Alliance and New Zealand First parties. And she saw off a Clayton's coup in 1996 from a group of now-loyal ministers who tried to persuade her to step down.
By contrast Clark now dominates her caucus like no other Labour leader has done since her role model, Peter Fraser, who was Prime Minister for nine years and 256 days - until December 1949.
Clark aspires to the concept of the leader as servant. "We are servants of the people, as it were, and the purpose in being here is to try and do our best to make life better for people."
The greatest satisfaction she claims is "lifting living standards."
"When you are Prime Minister through an era that ends up with 350,000 more people being in work and you've lifted the minimum wages and you've extended Working for Families to 370,000 families and lifted 130,000 children out of poverty you've got to feel that you've had an impact on living standards of the most vulnerable people."
With 15 years under her belt, Clark is already the longest-serving Labour leader.
She has won more elections than any other Labour Prime Minister, three, and is the second longest serving Labour Prime Minister.
If she leads Labour to a fourth term, after the November 8 election, she would need to remain in the top job until August 23 next year to become Labour's longest serving Prime Minister to beat Fraser.
Unifying the party has been a great satisfaction to Clark, who has made a practise of promoting those that posed any threat to her.
"From the time Norman Kirk died [1975] the Labour Party fought itself," says Clark. "It made for some very unhappy years, unhappy years right through the Bill Rowling period, unhappy years through all of David's [Lange] period, and unhappy years for the first three years that I was the leader.
"I know the result of internal division and it was something I was determined to work to put behind us and I think we have been successful because we have put it behind us.
"What's the old saying? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I don't regard myself as having internal enemies but the reality is I have brought in close people who in the past weren't supportive but have become extremely loyal colleagues.
"That is satisfying."
Wilson says that the way in which the pair of them asserted their place in the party - through democratic persuasion - shaped the inclusive style that marks Clark's leadership.
"You had to win the votes at the conference and therefore if you wanted a new policy position - and we did - you had to persuade enough people to your frame of mind.
"That is why she is such an excellent MMP leader because that experience of having to reconcile differing points of view is exactly what you need for coalition or minority MMP Governments.
"You've got to listen, you've to to persuade, you've got to work out ways through - you can't just tell people what to do.
"In a way there is a sort of thread and a pattern there over a period of time."
Clayton Cosgrove, a former Moore aide, and on the right of the caucus, is now Immigration Minister and says the party has not been this unified for many, many years.
"We hold conservative strains, liberal-conservative strains, ultra-liberal strains of the party, and to try and knit those together in a cohesive way and get a unity of purpose is a pretty tall order for any leader.
"But there is a unity of purpose and she has crystallised that."
Clark had built a solid consensus around a set of ideas and policies that people felt not just comfortable with, but passionate about, including the "new age" policies around innovation and enterprise, not just health, education and welfare.
Clark's control was evident from the moment she became Prime Minister in 1999.
Her party had been in Opposition for such a long time that they had very well-formed policies and had little need of the public service or their contestable advice.
Senior public servants who were used to being part of debates over public policy in cabinet committees had lesser roles.
They now still wait outside the committee rooms to be called into those debates, a source of some resentment in the public service.
Clark's was a party with a strong policy mission and at its head was, and is, a Prime Minister who is policy focused.
The first term (1999 to 2002) was pretty much taken up with fulfilling the party's promises: repealing the Employment Contracts Act, returning ACC to a monopoly, reinstating income-related rents for state tenants, establishing Kiwibank with the Alliance and starting the Closing the Gaps set of policies.
Labour's big items in the second term (2002 - 2005) included Working for Families, Kiwisaver, the primary health care strategy, and coping with the effects of Don Brash's Orewa speech.
The major policy items in the present term have been the extension to Kiwisaver and climate change policies, and having to cope with a popular and younger opponent in John Key.
This third term has been the hardest - dominated by non-core issues relating back to the 2005 election.
The damage began with the Auditor General's finding of misspending of public money for election ads - the lion's share, $800,000, by Labour - and continued with the Electoral Finance Act and Winston Peters' various donations misdemeanours.
Unlike the first and second terms, for much of the third term, Clark lost control of the political agenda.
Labour lost its polls lead early in the term and has not regained it.
She might pull out some policy rabbits from the shrinking hat this election campaign but there will be no change in promoting her leadership as Labour's biggest asset.
Her strength, at least until this term, has been her political management, her extensive networks throughout the country, her ability to unify, to plan and implement change.
The right has often cast her as a dangerous radical, a gradualist maybe, but a radical reformer.
Former Labour colleague and United Future leader Peter Dunne disagrees and believes that fundamentally she is a conservative.
"There is this perception of Helen as this left-wing Boadicea: armour-suit, slaying all the right-wing dragons, ideologically driven. I actually don't think that is Helen at all. I think that is the perception she seeks to convey but I think she is very much a product of her upbringing. I think she is a typical conservative rurally based New Zealander."
Clark discounts the notion that at heart she is a conservative Waikato farmer's daughter.
"No. My husband might say that. He thinks I'm very conservative.
"But I like change to be gradual. I like to see things properly bedded in. Take one step before you take another. Crawl before you walk. Walk before you run. I like to get things moving sequentially in an ordered fashion.
"It might be a thousand small steps but when you stand back and look at it, it is going to take us a long way."
She does not regard herself as a radical.
"I regard myself as a person with strong beliefs and values and a clear idea of where I want to get to, but I will follow a very long-term strategy."
Dunne has flirted openly with National, seeing it as the most likely party to form the next Government. But he is a great Clark fan and says he feels embarrassed that he voted for Moore in the 1993 leadership coup.
If Key does take her job, she has set a new standard of public duty for Prime Ministers.
"She is a 24/7 Prime Minister," says Dunne. "There is a sense that the Prime Minister is always there. It has been very strong over the last nine years. Always there for the big moments.
"You don't a sense that the Prime Minister is away from the job.
"She has an intimate involvement in just about everything that the Government is doing. You seldom see her caught on the hop about some aspect of a Government policy. In that sense for whoever her successor is she has set a fairly high bar."
