KEY POINTS:
One of the minor irritants of a satisfying career is the presumption that everyone wants to be top of the tree. The irritant must be particularly acute for those in public life where commentary thrives on a contest.
Trade Minister Phil Goff, I'd imagine, is having a fairly satisfying career, disturbed only by his misfortune to be the media's heir presumptive to Helen Clark.
How he came to deserve this fate is probably as much a mystery to him as it is to me. He hasn't the air of a leader in waiting, has never said a word that I can recall to suggest he aches for the job, and there is a good reason he wouldn't expect it.
He and Clark are contemporaries. If the Labour Party is bereft of someone younger to put out front by the time she has run her course the party will be a fading force.
But he cannot say that in public because you never really know your fate, tomorrow the team might need you. Interviewers know this when they ask whether he wants to be Prime Minister. This week Goff gave the honest answer: "It's not an overwhelming ambition." Little good it did him. While waiting for the Budget the press feasted on his failure to rule himself out.
Politicians know the game. We need to present politics as a theatre of personal ambitions because the truth is too dull. The truth, from my dealings with them, is that just about any politician good enough to get into a Cabinet is more interested in policies, public issues and problems than who will be the next party leader.
But they play along. We loved Mike Moore when he said the three most powerful words in politics were: "Why not me?"
Actually, he knows the truth better than most. He was around when David Lange resigned and at least one possible replacement, Finance Minister David Caygill, said, "not me".
Prime Minister was "a terrible job", Caygill said, and he wouldn't do it. Everyone knew what he meant. The office requires that you combine the gravitas of power with the dignity of a performing seal.
Lange's deputy, Geoffrey Palmer, didn't want the job either but he stepped up. Sir Geoffrey is not to be the only over-achiever in public life to have found party leadership a step too far from his comfort zone. Don Brash made the same mistake.
When Labour replaced Palmer six weeks before the 1990 election, his deputy, Helen Clark, didn't want the job either, at least, not then. The government had self-destructed. You'd need the opportunism of an ox to want to lead it. Moore got his chance.
Chance plays a crucial hand in any career. Goff, Clark and Michael Cullen were first term MPs when I began covering Parliament. Lange had just replaced Bill Rowling, Roger Douglas had been rehabilitated, heresies were being heard in the party room.
Goff was on the right side of those debates. When the snap election put Douglas in the driving seat, Goff got into the Cabinet. Cullen went to the limbo of senior whip, Clark, dark, silent and brooding, watched the revolution from the backbenches.
But once Lange decided to rein Douglas in, her rise was meteoric. She and Cullen came into the Cabinet and when Lange gave up she was elected deputy. Goff was never in contention.
The job he probably has always wanted is not Clark's but Cullen's. Unfortunately for Goff he lost his Roskill seat in the 1990 defeat and by the time he regained it three years later, Moore had made Cullen Labour's finance spokesman.
Such is fate. Goff could hardly fault Cullen's performance. Cullen had ensured that the defeated caucus remained committed to the pillar of monetarism, the Reserve Bank's independent control of inflation.
When Cullen retires, as imminently he might, he will have presided over the economy for nine good years, the first Finance Minister, as he noted near the end of his speech on Thursday, to present nine consecutive budgets since World War II.
Those years have been the longest period of continuous economic growth since that war. It will owe much to his adherence to sound monetary management and fiscal caution.
Along the way he put his name to a couple of notable new features of the economy that will probably endure: the fund to relieve future taxpayers of some of the burden of baby-boom pensions, and the KiwiSaver scheme.
Goff, meanwhile, has attended to trade and justice with legendary energy, care and unfailing political judgment. The Government will have had the benefit of those qualities in many more ways than we know.
Them's the breaks. I doubt that he lies awake wondering what might have been. There is satisfaction enough in work well done for a purpose greater than personal status.
