Editorial: Key should get on with what really matters

Opinion

John Key is not the first Prime Minister to sack a Cabinet member for conduct unbecoming a minister. Helen Clark, until her third term, made quite an art of it. Mr Key could learn from her. The art lies in an economy of words. When the deed is done the Prime Minister should explain the dismissal in terms that do not invite a prolonged discussion.

We should not have had this daily game of political ping-pong between Mr Key and his opposite, Phil Goff, over who knew what and when, about complaints from women who say they received the unwanted attentions of former Internal Affairs Minister Richard Worth. There must be far more important matters on Mr Key's plate, if not Mr Goff's.

It is a measure of Labour's desperation for attention that its leader is making comment. Normally when something of this nature surfaces the rival party is content to keep out of it, calculating that it has nothing to gain and much to lose by taking cheap shots at a target that is fatally wounded.

In this case, Mr Goff sees an opportunity to besmirch Mr Key with the fact that the complaint on which the Prime Minister acted was not the first he had received. The first, from a woman in the Labour Party, had been relayed by Mr Goff a few weeks earlier. He says Mr Key did not bother to check it out.

Mr Goff said the woman had been offered public posts and there was email traffic to prove it. But when challenged to produce that evidence, Mr Goff had to admit he did not have it. Still, he thinks Mr Key should have asked for it.

Then he tried to organise a meeting between the woman and Mr Key with himself present for her support. Mr Key agreed to it, though not with Mr Goff present, then decided the woman should talk to his chief of staff instead, and Mr Goff could be present. But Mr Goff advised the woman she should not accept anything less than a meeting with the Prime Minister.

All of this is supremely irrelevant unless she can recover some deleted text messages that might disprove Dr Worth's earlier denials. Mr Key has indicated that if he finds Dr Worth has not told him the truth he will move to have him banished from National's caucus. As a list MP with no electorate of his own, Dr Worth would then have no legitimacy in Parliament.

Whether or not it comes to that, the political career of a once prominent Auckland lawyer, the long-time chairman of the firm Simpson Grierson, is plainly over. Mr Key says he will not have him back in his Cabinet regardless of the result of a police investigation of the complaint from a second woman. In that respect, he echoes the attitude of Helen Clark who held her ministers to higher standards of behaviour than those defined in criminal law.

The Herald's inquiries suggest the second complaint against Dr Worth are unlikely to result in charges. The complainant, a businesswoman in her 40s, is said to have accepted the minister's hospitality in a Wellington hotel and had breakfast with him next morning. The incident occurred in March and the woman went to the police in May, at the urging of a friend.

There are several conceivable explanations, none of them reflecting well on Dr Worth. Whatever he told the Prime Minister it was enough for Mr Key to declare the actions to be "not those that befit a minister". Mr Key might have avoided further discussion had he not taken refuge in the police investigation. He could have more clearly stated the actions that Dr Worth had admitted to him and declared the minister no longer had his confidence. Instead he ratcheted up the affair, raising the prospect of the MP leaving Parliament altogether and of the National Party moving against him, and indulging in this low-level politicking with Mr Goff.

Dr Worth is not coming back to the Cabinet and his days as an MP must be numbered, too. Mr Key can turn public attention back to problems that matter.