KEY POINTS:
Nice bloke, they say of Phil Goff. What they don't say - as they did of Helen Clark - is "tough", "steely" or "brutal".
But the new leader of the Labour Party may need to be all those things if he is to lead his party through three years in the wilderness and vie for the premiership in 2011, without being toppled by ambitious up-and-comers.
"I don't regard myself as being arrogant," he says. "I've never regarded myself as being nakedly ambitious. I've actually set out, rather, to do the jobs that have been given to me as well as I could."
He has performed an enormous range of ministerial jobs over 15 years in two Labour governments, without seriously denting his "nice" image.
There was a time in Thailand after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, when, perspiring in an open-necked cotton shirt, he gave a lengthy press conference to gathered New Zealand media.
The reporters - some deeply upset by the traumatic circumstances - remember his concern for their wellbeing afterwards.
"Are you all right?" he asked. "How are you coping? Is there anything I can do to help?"
Politicians aren't always inclined to sympathy for journalists, whom they often regard as, at best, adversaries, at worst, bottom-grazing scavengers.
But, like the journalists, Goff had already been up to the makeshift morgue at a temple in Khao Lak, where 2500 bodies lay bloating in the heat. On entering the temple's perimeter, he was overwhelmed by the stench of death.
"Every instinct in your body said, `I'd rather just turn around and walk out of here'," he recalls now.
"It's an experience I'll never forget and an experience I hope never to repeat. I didn't go to counselling. I felt okay in myself. I didn't have nightmares about it.
"But whenever I go anywhere, perhaps a farmyard, with the smell of death and decay, it brings back those memories."
Though Labour MPs are confident that he is a sufficiently good scrapper to challenge John Key in Parliament, some also see him as just holding the fort till a new general arrives.
The last Labour Prime Minister of the fourth Labour Government, Mike Moore, cautions that Goff, whom he has known for many years, can sometimes be almost too strait-laced- as leader, he might need to relax a little more.
Goff left home at 15, while still at school, and stayed with his older brother and Moore in their flat.
"He sometimes is too disciplined and focused," Moore says. "But that's being Phil. I mean, here's a guy who at 18 had a garden. And it was a neat garden, all in rows!"
Reading between the lines, what Moore seems to be describing is a likeable nerd. As a young politician, Goff certainly looked the part - skinny, his hair parted, big glasses. Last week, a newspaper alleged (and this may be almost defamatory in New Zealand) that Goff had never been drunk in his life. Goff, now 55, denies the allegation vehemently.
"Oh no, shit, I've never claimed that I've never been drunk in my life. I learned the hard way, along with every other teenager... The times in the last 30 years that I've been drunk, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand, and they were usually by mistake when a Dallie next-door neighbour gave me some of his homebrew."
Has he smoked marijuana? "I'll give the same remark as Helen Clark: I was a student in the 70s."
That sounds like a yes.
"No, that's a non-answer. But I did the things that you do when you're 15, smoking cigarettes, tobacco. I never enjoyed it, for which I am thankful ... To tell you the truth, I hate smoking."
There are numerous superficial similarities with Helen Clark: both became involved in Labour when they were young; both were pointy-headed young political scientists at the University of Auckland; both were elected to Parliament straight from university; they ended up in adjacent Auckland electorates.
But Goff is anxious to highlight the differences: she was a farm girl, his dad was traditional Labour blue-collar, a fitter and turner with the railways. His grandmother, widowed in 1934, lost her house in the Depression. She thought that Michael Joseph Savage, the first Labour Prime Minister, walked on water.
Goff worked in the freezing works in his school and university holidays, with men who had been there since the 1940s. "I learned a lot at university, but I also a learned a hell of a lot working on the factory floor."
Somewhere along the path of his political career, he developed sufficient grit that, in 1996, he joined four other Labour MPs in challenging Helen Clark's faltering leadership. Clark was struggling, polling 2 per cent in the preferred prime minister stakes, and the five confronted her in her office.
Goff, Annette King, Michael Cullen, Jim Sutton and Koro Wetere: she stared them down. Parliamentary lore has it that the Leader of the Opposition's desk still bears the marks of a nervous Wetere's fingernails, where he was clinging on for dear life.
Goff, speaking publicly for the first time about that confrontation, says he was nervous but not sweating. "It wasn't actually an ultimatum, but certainly we thought we were in deep trouble as a party. The biggest irony of that was that it actually steeled Helen to go on and perform at a new level."
And, drawing on a comparison with Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady herself, he says: "It showed, this lady's not for turning. It showed the steel core that Helen has."
Yet only three years later in 1999, word famously went round of a "barbie at Phil's" to which Clark was not invited. Always, Clark was aware that Goff was there, waiting, should she fall under a bus. "But I never pushed her," he adds hastily.
When his time came, it came easily. He was not entirely surprised when Clark announced her resignation late on election night.
"She'd accomplished what she'd wanted to do as leader, and better to go out with a bang than a whimper.
"Hers was the Obama moment on Saturday night, with due respect to John Key."
Now, he is preparing for the first reshuffle of his shadow Cabinet, probably on Tuesday, when younger MPs will be promoted - perhaps at the expense of old friends.
Does he have that "little bit of darkness in his heart", as Paul Holmes will put it in his column later today, that will help him make the cold, even brutal, decisions that are sometimes required of leaders?
"I have bottom lines," Goff says. "I wouldn't sell my mother down the river. That is not to say that I can't make a hard decision that has consequences for people."
One day, you might expect, he will have to face a challenge like the one Helen Clark stared down in 1996. Already, he can see the young leaders of the future coming through. Darren Hughes, he suggests, or David Cunliffe. But he insists, perhaps rashly, that he will not have to be pushed.
"The day that I feel I can't give 150 per cent to politics, I'm out of here. And it won't be because somebody's told me. It will be because that's the conclusion I've reached. I'll tell you as soon as I feel that way."
- ADDITIONAL REPORTING: Leah Haines
