By AUDREY YOUNG
More than a week after National's leadership coup, the flowers in Jenny Shipley's office are starting to pong.
But that is the only public stink she is willing to allow. So far she has kept a stiff upper lip and a determination not to publicly bad-mouth those who removed her.
That is not to say there haven't been a few scores to settle in private.
"I have been free, frank and very honest with people about how I feel.
"There's been some good farm-yard language used in the last week. I've always been a person who, if I've had something to say, it has been private, short, sharp and direct."
Mrs Shipley has moved down one floor in Parliament House to the office formerly occupied by another ex-Prime Minister, World Trade Organisation chief Mike Moore.
In the House itself she is seated sombrely on a third-row bench with her former deputy, Wyatt Creech.
Mrs Shipley says that she is "very accepting" of her new station.
But what she says between the lines speaks louder.
She is proud that the last poll taken as her watch ended put National at 40 per cent - 10 points higher than the last election.
"It leaves a big challenge for my colleagues."
Mrs Shipley says Prime Minister Helen Clark analysed the coup most accurately - that it was the result of MPs white-anting Mrs Shipley over a long period, and not just a recent phenomenon.
Mrs Shipley said some people were employing fertile imaginations and rewriting history in their justification of the coup - but she won't name names.
She will write her detailed version of events of this coup and her one against Jim Bolger in 1998.
"I have no intention of dividing caucus. My advice is the white-anting has got to stop and the revisionism and the rewriting of history should stop.
"People should support Bill in order to create history.
"My advice to all of them is if you don't want the whole story told, let's just settle down and get on with supporting Bill and moving forward."
She will hold off making plans but suggests she won't be a seat-warmer.
Top of the list of her proudest achievements was the liberalisation of sex education in schools.
"I've made a conservative party more liberal. It's more tolerant, more respectful, more broad-based."
She also mentions producer board reform, ACC reform, driver's licence changes and getting through the Asian economic crisis.
The 1991 social welfare benefit cuts rate a mention.
"I often amuse myself in Parliament just counting the number of people who tipped out buckets of venom historically and now that they've had an opportunity haven't changed even one detail on some of those major reforms."
She defends them still as essential so that beneficiaries did not earn more than workers.
"I came here to change things.
"The things I measure as significant and successful for me are the things where I helped people start thinking about where the future lay."
Staunch Shipley washes dirty linen in private
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