KEY POINTS:
He grips the bench in front of him and tries to eyeball her. She ignores him and gazes down the chamber before swivelling to fix him with that Ice Queen glare.
She clutches a wad of documents dotted with yellow stickies and spread out like a fan. He has a single sheet of paper filled with typewritten questions.
He is confident enough to depart from his script to try to catch her out. She has always been wise to the need to brief herself to the max so that nothing can catch her out.
Thus has been the pattern of question-time in Parliament over the past couple of months. The (so far) unstoppable force - John Key - meets the (still) immovable object - Helen Clark. Something ought to give. But nothing gives yet.
From the outside, the face-to-face encounters in the House between the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition may not seem that important.
Inside Parliament, it is a different story.
Being light on available coalition partners, National will have to win big next year to be in a position to govern. National is leading Labour in some polls. However, that has come from squashing the minor parties. Labour's vote remains pretty resilient.
With election campaigns becoming ever more presidential, leadership will be the critical difference.
It is an exaggeration to say winning in the House is the precursor to winning in the country. But it helps. However, the pressure is less on Key to succeed in Parliament than on Clark not to fail. She cannot afford to lose supremacy in the House.
You would probably have to go back to David Lange for a precedent for Key's rapid surge up the preferred Prime Minister ratings. The speed of his rise can be gauged from Clark's record. After six years in Opposition, she was on 23 per cent in TVNZ's poll just before Labour won in 1999.
Key is already at 29 per cent - just three percentage points adrift of Clark's current rating. Crucially, he has reached the level where he could overhaul Clark. It would be a double blow to her to be seen to be losing in Parliament as well.
The stakes have accordingly risen considerably when the pair square off in the House. The sensitivity is evident in the Beehive, with some of the spin from that quarter being spurious and ridiculous in trying to argue Key is not cutting it. He is.
However, taking stock as Parliament goes into the Easter recess and Key completes four months as leader, neither he nor Clark has wiped the floor with the other.
Key has days when he could validly claim to have won on points. Clark can likewise argue there are days when she has easily brushed aside Key's challenge.
The onus is on Key to land the punches. He has to topple her to claim the crown.
That is not easy. Clark always briefs herself to the gills so that she not only knows the detail, she has it at her fingertips - hence the papers and the yellow stickies.
And she punches back whenever she can. From experience, she knows the most effective responses to Opposition questions carry a sting in the tail. These are usually delivered in a tone which varies between the mildly vinegarish to industrial-strength hydrochloric in their acidity.
Clark's six years as Opposition leader means she knows all the angles from which Key is likely to come at her.
Key is willing to back his gut instincts and adapt his questions to circumstances - unlike Don Brash, who stuck religiously to those prepared for him in advance.
Key's chances of making things less comfortable for Clark are thus enhanced. But so is the risk that he will come a cropper by winging it too often.
Labour thinks Key's climb in the polls is tapering off and his honeymoon is over. It senses he has lost momentum in recent weeks and that, from here on, it will be hard grind for him to sustain his and National's poll rating. It argues that style can only get a leader so far before substance has to take over. It believes the public will increasingly see him as a lightweight.
On that score, nearly 40 per cent of those responding in the latest 3 News TNS poll thought Key had more style than substance.
However, he rated well on other attributes, being seen as being down to earth and in touch with ordinary people, and not inflexible or narrow-minded. National accepts Key has to establish gravitas - something which Clark has in bucket-loads and which is reflected in her high scores as a capable leader. Her vulnerability is that voters increasingly see her as out of touch and inflexible.
That does not seem to have affected her overall preferred prime minister rating in the TV3 poll. But that rating has drifted downwards off admittedly high levels in other polls as Key makes inroads.
Clark's popularity has slumped previously, first during the so-called "winter of discontent" in 2000 and following Brash's Orewa speech on race in 2004.
National believes it is happening again. While Clark's day-to-day tactical hands-on political management is as evident as ever, National argues she has made some bad strategic calls, such as defending Labour's pledge card spend-up, being too lenient with Phillip Field, underrating Key's "underclass" speech, going into bat for the so-called anti-smacking legislation, and now, by the look of things, pushing for state funding for political parties. Ipso facto, she will make more bad calls which will further alienate voters.
Having ruled the roost for so long, Clark and Labour would suffer a major psychological blow if Key overtakes her as preferred prime minister.
Not only would there be the damaging symbolism of the new order being seen as replacing the established order. It would be a sign that Clark's cross-over appeal to voters who otherwise would not vote Labour is waning. That appeal was on vivid display this week as Clark pitched the Government's response to the commission of inquiry into police conduct very much in the direction of the female vote.
However, although Clark's rating may slip below Key's at some point, her residual strengths make it more likely their respective ratings will jostle against one another without either establishing a definitive lead, especially if Labour can find some way of turning Key into a turn-off for middle ground voters.
So far though, Labour seems in denial over Key's phenomenal rise, rather than confronting it in serious fashion.
