KEY POINTS:
If Labour is looking for straws to clutch - and after last week's self-inflicted woes the party will probably take anything on offer - there is a rather large stalk up for grabs in the latest Herald Digi-Poll survey.
While the poll's bad news for the party has Labour now lagging around 13 percentage points behind National, the surge in support for John Key as preferred Prime Minister seems to have plateaued.
National's leader overtook Helen Clark in May's poll. Over the following three months, however, the Prime Minister first recaptured the lead and has subsequently held off his challenge.
Furthermore, the gap between the respective ratings for National and Mr Key indicate one in five would-be National voters are still reserving their judgment on him. That suggests a fair chunk of National's support is "soft".
All this gives justification to Labour's campaign to undermine Mr Key's credibility - a campaign which went badly askew last week and left Labour looking desperate.
It is understood the Prime Minister expressed a few choice words about how things were handled during Monday morning's regular meeting where Labour ministers discuss strategy before heading for the top floor of the Beehive for the more formal business of Cabinet.
The Prime Minister was apparently unhappy with taunts from her front-bench colleagues directed at Mr Key and which he took to be threats to raise something which happened to him while he was a currency trader in the 1980s.
Mr Key subsequently pre-empted any move to tar him by himself revealing he had been interviewed by the Serious Fraud Office as a potential prosecution witness in a case involving Elders Merchant Finance.
Publicly, however, the Prime Minister was yesterday presenting a united front, absolving Labour of responsibility and blaming the media and Mr Key instead for the smear campaign getting out of control.
She stood behind Health Minister Pete Hodgson who kicked off the more personal line of attack against Mr Key last Wednesday by resurrecting old questions about his use of different company and electoral addresses back in 2002.
She distanced Labour from the following day's story in the Truth newspaper about Mr Key's association with two architects linked to leaky home cases.
And she said she was "startled" to read Friday's front-page story in the Herald about Mr Key being interviewed by the Serious Fraud Office. She stressed there had been no strategy on Labour's part to use that against Mr Key.
Labour's campaign to undermine Mr Key has always been regarded as something which needs time to work with voters. It is now acknowledged in the Beehive that last week's big mistake was to try to force the pace.
But the resulting shambles does not mean Labour is now going to stop pointing the blow-torch at Mr Key. The Prime Minister just wants to make sure Labour does not end up pointing it at itself.
