KEY POINTS:
If the National Party has hired the controversial Australian political consultancy Crosby Textor - and it seems beyond reasonable doubt that it has - the Canberra-based advisers let them down badly this week.
"Neither confirm nor deny and never explain" is among the mantras that PR consultants always seek to drum into politicians, but if that was the course of action Crosby Textor advised the Nats to pursue this week, it was bad advice. By persisting with the evasive "no comment" line in public, all the while confirming it off the record, the party created the impression that it had something to hide and was hiding it.
In fact, despite the breathless tone with which author Nicky Hager claimed that National leader John Key had hired the Australians, there is nothing remotely to be ashamed of in the relationship. As a political party that, despite its poll lead, is preparing for an election campaign that promises to be bruising, National is entitled to employ the services of whoever it wishes. It can scarcely be castigated for selecting a consultancy with an impressive track record - four electoral triumphs for John Howard in Australia and Boris Johnson's recent victory in the race for the mayoralty of London.
Hager, of course, detects a stench in the arrangement because it undermines John Key's implicit claim to be dissociating the party from the legacy of Don Brash (who used Crosby Textor) and because the company itself has adopted ethically questionable practices: push-polling, which spreads innuendo in key electorates by asking suggestive hypothetical questions in the guise of market research, and masterminding the notorious "baby overboard" fiction that was instrumental in winning the 2001 election for Howard.
It may be true that you can judge a man by the company he keeps but it is what Key and the Nats do as a result of Crosby's advice and not the man's work with previous clients that is at issue.
Key's refusal to disclose which consultancies National hires, on the grounds that a "vindictive" Labour Government could deny them business seemed pretty thin. It is difficult to believe that any contract a party might negotiate with a consultant would not include a clause prohibiting it from working with the client's political opponents for a substantial period. Had he simply come clean and confirmed the Crosby Textor link, adding that the party was pleased to engage advisors to help it communicate its aspirations, he would have taken much of the wind out of Hager's over-inflated sails.
Key's secrecy also delivered Helen Clark plenty of political ammunition, which she fired rather too wildly in the House on Wednesday, making an uncharacteristic gaffe with an innacurate accusation about Key's association with the 1993 privatisation of TranzRail. Her comments outside the House were no less problematic. Her claim that Labour does not hire political strategists "to the best of my knowledge" was a silly utterance coming from a leader who famously allows nothing of note to take place without her having signed it off.
Labour does, of course, use image consultants, media trainers and focus groups: Clark's alliterative description of the Nats actions as "the tactics of Tory tricksters" had the unmistakable whiff of spin doctor's advice about it, as did the repeated yoking of John Key's name with the adjective "slippery" in utterances by almost every Labour frontbencher throughout March.
The bottom line is that politics is a tough business, particularly in election years. Labour, reeling from its repeated bad poll results, will play hardball to hold on to power; it should expect its opponents to play to win as well. Importantly for both of them, the public will soon tire, if it has not already, of name-calling and point-scoring. It is earnestly to be hoped that the ugly tone of the past week is not the shape of things to come.
