KEY POINTS:
Politics in New Zealand, despicable as it has been for decades, has reached a new low with the secret taping of private conversations at last weekend's National Party conference.
And what I want to know is what sort of scumbag would do such a thing, then spill his or her guts to the media.
And why the media, including this newspaper, would deign to use word for word such questionable material, and in addition do their damnedest to attribute to the victims, deputy leader Bill English and party veteran Lockwood Smith, some hidden and sinister political programme.
As far as I'm concerned, the whole thing stinks. And it is further evidence, if any were needed, that this nation has not only lost its moral compass, we have smashed it.
This was an annual conference of National Party delegates. Each one, I presume, selected to attend, which means they must all have been seen to be party faithful.
Not so, obviously. Among the delegates, or perhaps their hangers-on, there was a turncoat or a Labour Party plant, and it is only to be hoped that sooner rather than later this unprincipled creep will be exposed.
I presume Mr English and Dr Smith have a pretty good idea who the culprit was, and suspect that that person will never see the inside of a National Party meeting of any sort again. But if I were them I would also name and shame the culprit and dump the odium for this whole affair where it rightly belongs.
In a totally unnecessary explanation, Mr English said on Tuesday that he "did not choose my words well". All I can say is that at a National Party conference, of all places, he shouldn't have had to choose his words.
Helen Clark's comment reported yesterday is hilarious. "So the key thing," she said, "is to say in private what you do in public."
Yeah. I'll bet a lot of things are said in the Labour Cabinet and caucus, and even at Labour Party conferences, that are never said in public.
What Dr Smith had to say is largely irrelevant since anyone who follows politics knows that he stands well to the right in the National caucus and that he wields no real power in setting policy.
Mr English said that "eventually" the Government might sell off Kiwibank. So what? Mr English is known as a champion of private enterprise and always has been.
But he is also cognisant of the lasting public resentment over the indiscriminate fire sale of state assets by the Labour Government in the mid-1980s and has said that any future state asset sales will be made in such a way that New Zealanders retain a controlling interest.
Yet National has given an undertaking that no asset sales will take place in its first term of Government, due to start later this year.
And I put more faith in that undertaking than I do in Labour's promise to give more tax cuts if it is, by some arcane miracle, given a fourth term - at least before 2011 when another election would need to be bought.
Mr English talked about National's need to keep the Working for Families package because "you can't take money off them". Well, voters who hadn't worked that out for themselves need a brain transplant.
He indicated that neither former leader Don Brash nor today's leader John Key really understood the ins and outs of that necessity.
So what again. The party leader would be a fool to involve himself in the minutiae of every piece of policy, particularly a policy devised by the labyrinthine mind of an economic historian.
It would take a cross between a Machiavelli and a Stalinist finance minister to do that. And in any case, good leaders stick to the big picture and delegate, which is why Mr Key can safely leave the fiscal detail to Mr English and his advisers.
John Key is no Helen Clark, who is in effect Minister of Everything, and whose ministers daren't make a move save with the blessing of the Dear Leader. Those who tried have invariably been gone by lunchtime.
Another thing that's beginning to bore me silly is the constant carping by the Labour leadership, aided and abetted by the media, about Mr Key and his party not announcing a lot of policy specifics.
It is not just wise, it is imperative, that National keep its powder dry until it is too late for Clark and Co to legislate National's key policies out of existence, or trump them.
I watched Question Time in Parliament on Tuesday in the faint hope that more light might be cast on the English betrayal and, as expected, learned nothing except that my contempt for politicians remains justified.
I was reminded of a tired, hungry and fretful Year 1 class in a primary school. To paraphrase a scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth: Politicians are but talking shadows, poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more. Question Time is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
