KEY POINTS:
What's Mike Moore up to? Since being rolled from the Labour leadership by Helen Clark in 1993 he has been extraordinarily disciplined in refraining from public criticism of her in Opposition or in her seven and a half years in Government.
He may have thought it, but he didn't say it. In today's Herald where he compares Clark to the worst excesses of Muldoonism, the dam has burst.
"I'm expecting a cartoon of Helen Clark to appear, morphing into an angry Robert Muldoon. He used SIS files on opponents, perfected the nasty technique of personally destroying opponents, intimidating the media (not that you have to muzzle sheep), and used the levers of Government to create stunts, diversions, and buy votes in marginal seats," Moore wrote.
Taito Phillip Field was threatened with expulsion for a lot less.
Moore is telling NZPA now it was an attempt at humour.
"I wrote that because I believe it. I hope I did it in a good-natured way and I hope, perhaps, some of this personal stuff will stop and we'll get on to the politics of substance." He said he was "pushing it a bit" in likening Miss Clark to the late Sir Robert and she was "not yet" like him. "I was hopefully doing that in a humorous way."
It's a hard explanation to buy. No one understands the power of discipline better than Moore.
His was crucial for six years. Yes, it got him Labour's support for the top job at the WTO - National's support was never in doubt.
But more importantly he was a model for the right faction of the Labour Party. The likes of Jim Sutton, Phil Goff, Phillip Field, Clayton Cosgrove and Dover Samuels did not try to undermine Clark's early leadership.
Without that discipline Clark would never have succeeded as leader. Even the invitation of key front benchers to step down in 1996 was a private poll-driven event by colleagues who believed she could not recover lost ground, rather than a bid to undermine her further.
So why has he breached his own discipline now?
It is possible he was sickened by the recent Labour attacks on John Key - and Clark's "plausible denability" over them.
(Of course she did not know of Trevor Mallard's taunts to Key in the House about the H-fee, nor his Brash-Foreman handiwork, nor the allegations of National's American bagman last election. Any party's hit-men are forbidden from telling the leader about any of their dirty work, precisely so that they can distance the party from it, if need be.)
Perhaps Moore has had one too many old mates who are being levered out of Parliament when he sees more deserving cases for it.
Perhaps he is appalled by the control she has over the party.
Clark is reportedly laughing it off. I don't believe it.
Moore may not have sway in the caucus any longer but he is still a popular and credible figure in New Zealand. And when a former leader with nothing to lose bags the incumbent, it cannot be laughed off.
Moore's breach of his own rigidly enforced discipline is not a joke gone wrong. It is part of a longer-term game.
It makes the Opposition's criticism of Clark more credible and it makes internal criticism of Clark a little easier to raise - when Goff's time comes.
