KEY POINTS:
Of all the gifts Helen Clark bestowed on the Labour Party, one of the greatest was the way she left. Her sudden announcement on election night forced the leadership change and left no time for any newbies with presumptuous imaginations to organise. It allowed a smooth transition to her own anointed successor, the still energetic and talented Phil Goff.
It all looked so easy. There was no bloodletting, no factional war.
Goff says this is because there are no factions in the caucus, that the caucus knows it did not lose the election because it fell apart in any way but came up against the old three-term cycle and caucus can all be proud of what the fifth Labour Government achieved and that there is no disgrace in the losing.
But when I suggested to him people might have been tired of being told what to do by intellectual left-wing feminist women, he acknowledged there had grown the perception of the "nanny" state. In showing he understood this, he altered the party's course a few degrees.
You could safely call his leadership "transitional" if it were not for his fierce ability in debate and his vast political experience. His knowledge of government must be encyclopaedic. Over more than 20 years in two Labour administrations he has held the ministerial portfolios of housing, environment, employment, tourism, youth affairs, education, justice, foreign affairs and trade, defence, corrections, and disarmament and arms control and been an Associate Finance Minister. The man could govern alone, as they say.
But is he a leader?
I am sure he is a good manager. He is pleasant and stable and good with people, but does he have that little bit of darkness in the heart that seems to accompany real, winning political leadership? Does he have that slight distance of the jovial Jim Bolger, who could be brutally frank and had the physical strength to stare down anyone? Does he have that sense you got with Clark that you never quite knew her, that you knew she could move with ruthlessness and finality but that you would never see it because it would happen out of sight? It is more than a slight sense of distance, of apartness, I am talking about but rather a sense of something lurking, some danger swimming unseen just below the surface. That's what we saw when she stepped down. She was two steps ahead of anyone.
The effect was beautifully simple. While Labour moves to the Opposition benches, it does so weirdly unmolested by the election defeat, weirdly undefeated, with a bright and optimistic new leader elected unanimously.
David Cunliffe's aspirations are sensibly acknowledged with the finance spokesmanship with Annette King, one of the safest pairs of hands in the business, ranked between the two men.
I've thought a lot about Clark, about how stunning, if not traumatic, the past week must have been for her.
Within a couple of hours she went from the height of power and prestige - local and international - accumulated during nine years as Prime Minister, to losing the Office and the party leadership.
Suddenly the cameras follow others. Suddenly others lead the news, others call upon a new Prime Minister-elect, a man she once dismissed, a man now smiling to the world with the radiant confidence of victory. Cameras aimed at her party no longer chase her. They follow Phil Goff.
There will be, for her, a terrible reduction in her workload, the formidable hours of reading boring reports and Cabinet papers. Now she does not need to. She will find alienation from the centre of power emptying.
I read an article in the American newspaper, Business Week, in which Aristotle is quoted. Old Aristotle knew the heart of the politicians' problems 2000 years ago. Nothing has changed. Aristotle said, "Politicians have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political office itself - power and glory, or happiness." Says Moira Herbst, who wrote the piece: "Politicians are a rare breed. Motivated by both ego and altruism, they're do-gooders with a hunger for power."
Clark might do a bit of mountain hiking or cross-country skiing in Scandinavia but I never sensed she did leisure particularly well, or that she even sought it much.
From when I met her, started interviewing her and conversing with her in the late-80s, the political life was everything, the goal, the ambition, her only true road. There was no question, nothing would stand in her way. I did not find this odd. In my career, nothing was going to stand in mine, either.
The transition won't be easy.
But weeks will become months. Things get better, loss lessens, jagged edges dull and pain eases and offers come over the phone.
It must be very hard, in this respect, for outgoing American Presidents. I suppose that if you get a second term, you can prepare for the end. But to fail to be re-elected after your first must be deeply painful. Never mind your uncompleted platform, which would break your heart, but how would you get over losing the White House and the intoxicating bowing down of people in front of you, of people everywhere in the world?
So we move to the new, to what I suppose we could call a return to normalcy, under an apparently normal sort of bloke, but a normal bloke who has been successful in his former life and also seems to enjoy golden luck. The timing was right for Key and timing is pretty much everything. The country wanted change. There was something infectious about his raw, exuberant delight when greeted by cheering, ecstatic supporters. The state house boy had achieved his ambition, to become Prime Minister. It was not just the idle talk of boyhood. That alone should give us pause about this fellow. He has goals. And he gets there.
But Key demonstrated leadership with three decisions since he took the National Party reins. First, he took the party into the centre. This was never going to work, remember? Secondly, the decision not to deal post-election with Winston Peters. This was plainly foolish, remember? Thirdly, he refused to retaliate to provocative personal attacks during the campaign. The decisions should show his detractors never to under-estimate him. There is steel and uncanny shrewdness, a little darkness in the heart where only he can see, behind the smile and the beguiling ordinariness of His Bloke-ness.
