KEY POINTS:
Helen Clark will cut a birthday cake at Labour's caucus on Tuesday to celebrate 10 years as party leader. The Herald recalls five of Clark's defining moments.
As Emirates flight EK413 roared out of Singapore on a Tuesday evening late last month, one passenger in first class was not bothering with the in-flight movies, Terminator 3 and Charlie's Angels, or drooling over the haute cuisine.
On route to Afghanistan and Iraq to be seen standing four-square behind New Zealand's military muscle in the Gulf, Helen Clark was looking forward to the night flight to Dubai for other reasons.
It offered a rare luxury for the Prime Minister: brief retreat into splendid isolation.
No phones. No bureaucrats. No interruptions.
The ever-diligent Clark pulled out her pen and began writing.
As dawn broke across the Gulf eight hours later, she had polished off her speech to the upcoming Labour Party Conference, her longhand notes ready to be faxed back to Wellington for typing up.
Other Prime Ministers would have merely put their stamp on a draft submitted by a speechwriter.
It is the measure of Clark's thorough preparation for everything she does that she did the hard graft herself at a time most people would be relaxing.
For Clark, however, this conference speech was critical in balancing the party's rising expectations of Labour delivering more assistance to the poor and low-paid against the wider electorate's insistence on fiscal prudence.
She reminded the party of what had been done in Government since 1999, but pleaded for patience and warned yet again of the dangers of moving too fast for the conservative inclinations of middle New Zealand.
The cautious tone was summed up in a stark sentence: "Labour is not about revolution."
Hardly language likely to send a shiver of excitement down anyone's spine.
And one example of why she is not in the Norm Kirk-David Lange category of Labour leader, who burned incandescent.
And then burned out.
For Clark, it is all about the long haul. The endgame is the "Labourising" of the status quo - turning Labour into the natural party of government.
The Presbyterian farming family's daughter readily admits the Labour leader she is seeking most to emulate is Peter Fraser, the "crusty old Scot" who was Prime Minister throughout the war-torn 1940s and whom she is just eight months away from overhauling as Labour's third-longest serving leader.
"Few, if any, politicians of his time ... matched his energy, his seriousness, his single-minded concentration on government and politics," historian Tim Beaglehole writes of Fraser in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Ditto for Clark, who cites Fraser's reforms of public education and his efforts to give New Zealand a real voice on the international stage as "doing the greatest good" for the country.
"Fraser - with charm," observes one senior party figure of Clark.
And venom. The mere mention of the word "paintergate" and the Prime Minister's eyes fix on the interviewer with all the charm of a hooded cobra.
The fake-painting scandalette has been a real low point, causing her great grief because it eroded her two greatest political assets: her credibility and her integrity.
Clark is a very serious person and serious people do not enjoy being the butt of other people's humour.
Paintergate, however, is a footnote compared to the milestones in her 14 years in leadership positions in the party. Here are five defining moments:
PROMOTION TO LABOUR'S FRONT BENCH, FEBRUARY 1989
Clark had been in the Cabinet for barely 18 months when Lange elevated her to Labour's front bench. "From that point, you were probably looked at a little bit differently," says Clark of her promotion. Not only had she become the first woman to sit on a Labour front bench in Government, but the 38-year-old from the Labour left was positioned to assume the deputy leadership when Lange suddenly stepped down six months later and Geoffrey Palmer headed off Mike Moore to become leader.
She beat off Roger Douglas. Moore was interested only in the top job. Says one current Labour minister: "Helen was put there to provide the hard edge that Palmer lacked." For Clark, however, her standing was all about the future direction of the then hopelessly divided party, being torn apart by the Douglas-driven, right-wing policy agenda.
Says Clark: "I often felt at the time that it was too early for me. On the other hand, people came to me and said, 'You have to do this'."
A year later, Clark stood back as Moore foolishly succumbed to ambition and the urging of colleagues to topple Palmer in a futile attempt to stave off resounding defeat at the ballot box. Moore was tainted by the loss; Clark was not.
Three years later, in 1993, Moore lost again - and Clark ruthlessly moved against him in a coup which saw a host of new Labour MPs side with her and a number of the re-elected back Moore.
In the aftermath, Clark, David Caygill (the new deputy leader), Michael Cullen (who backed Moore and who was devastated at missing out on the deputy leadership) and Jonathan Hunt slipped away for a few days to a house at Paraparaumu, up the coast from Wellington, to work out who should sit on the front bench and how to heal the rifts and avoid deepening the factionalism within the caucus.
THE COUP THAT NEVER HAPPENED, MAY 1996
The following two years, however, were nightmarish. The Alliance were still cannibalising Labour's support; Labour ran third in the Selwyn byelection; Mike Moore remained a nuisance factor; bad poll followed bad poll. In late 1995, Clark called in senior colleagues and urged a more radical policy break from Labour's immediate past to try to gain traction. Meanwhile, her supporters continued to defend her by stressing how she was head-and-shoulders the best Prime Minister Labour had on offer.
That was no answer to her lacklustre performance as Leader of the Opposition. A delegation comprising Cullen, Phil Goff, Annette King, Koro Wetere and Jim Sutton went to Clark's office early one morning to tell her to step down. She was tipped off the night before. After some agonising, she decided to stay and fight because a change of leader would have made Labour a "laughing stock".
When the delegation arrived, they were surprised to see Clark had gathered her own cabal, including Steve Maharey, Trevor Mallard, Caygill and Hunt. She stared down the plotters who planned to reinstate Moore, although that was never made absolutely explicit. The insurrection melted. They did not have the numbers.
"I think that was a defining moment, when I said, 'If someone else wants to have this job, have the guts to stand up and move a motion of no confidence'. And nobody did."
THE COALITION THAT NEVER HAPPENED, DECEMBER 1996
Nine weeks of post-election negotiations with New Zealand First foundered on Labour's refusal to agree to Winston Peters' demand to be Treasurer. As Brian Edwards states in his biography of Clark, it was a blessing in disguise.
Clark believes such a Labour-NZ First coalition would have been a disaster for Labour because its ratio of parliamentary seats compared to NZ First left it too weak to really counter Peters. Moreover, Peters refused to wear policies fundamental to Labour, such as the abolition of market rents for state houses and scrapping the Employment Contracts Act.
Labour was consigned to another three years in Opposition. "But we were able to walk out of that process with our heads held high. We never looked back."
National's lust for power had two results. National stumbled through three further years of messy, highly unpopular government from which it is still recovering. Meanwhile, Clark was instilling a rigid discipline into Labour's ranks which persists to this day. Arguments are kept in-house. "Helen can be strict in dealing with colleagues because she is seen as being strict on herself," says one long-serving MP.
Labour also had more time to refine its policies. It borrowed Tony Blair's pledge-card - a trust-building device designed to rebuild the electorate's confidence in Labour by setting moderate but achievable policy goals. Clark was conscious that both the 1984-1990 Lange Government and the post-1990 National Government had earned the electorate's animosity by doing the opposite to what they said they were going to do. There would be no second chance for Labour. Allied to that is Clark's insistence on fiscal prudence. Observes one minister: "Whereas some of us would like to spend the money now, Helen will say, 'Let's spend it next year'."
Clark has borrowed National's clothes to portray Labour as a "pragmatic mainstream party" - another phrase conjured up on the flight to Dubai.
Cunningly, she has also used the levers of government to quietly instil a sense of nationalism in New Zealanders. If they feel more confident about themselves, they are likely to feel more confident about her Government. She is not Minister of Arts and Culture for the fun of it.
RECONCILIATION WITH THE ALLIANCE, AUGUST 1998
The Taranaki-King Country byelection resurrected hostilities on the centre-left. Labour was spared total embarrassment by narrowly heading off the Alliance for third place behind National and Act. But, as Clark says, the campaign, which witnessed the Alliance placing white crosses on lawns to mark hospital closures by Labour, was a victory for neither party. "We had this sinking feeling."
Clark subsequently approached Alliance deputy leader Sandra Lee about "burying the hatchet" when the pair crossed paths in Palmerston North. Further soundings brought an invitation to Clark to speak at the Alliance's annual conference. It was pure political theatre. At one stroke, voters could see Jim Anderton and Clark could work together and a centre-left government would not be racked by instability.
ELECTION VICTORY, JULY 2002
A defining moment for Clark as she joined Michael Joseph Savage, Fraser and Lange in an elite club of Labour Prime Ministers who have won two elections in a row. Clark is handily placed to win a third. Labour, which increased its share of the vote from 39 to 41 per cent between 1999 and 2002, has been more sophisticated than National in adapting to MMP and the different campaigning techniques required to maximise the potential party vote. It has shifted focus from trying to win marginal electorates to getting out the vote in safe seats, where its supporters live in huge numbers but previously did not bother to vote.
The party has adopted a presidential style in advertising and billboards by projecting Clark rather than Labour, with the intention of capitalising on her crossover appeal to non-Labour voters as preferred Prime Minister.
And, above all, Clark has concentrated on capturing and holding certain segments of the population - the elderly, Maori, Pacific Islanders, ethnic groups, students and beneficiaries - as a solid core of Labour support.
Even so, Clark found last year's campaign acutely frustrating.
Her coalition partner, the Alliance, had disintegrated. The Green Party, her supposed ally, was in truculent mood.
"Because we had such high [poll] ratings, everyone assumed we were going to win. But we knew from our research that because people thought we were going to win, they thought they could go out and vote for other people. So our vote was going down. But we could not go out and say, 'Hey, our vote is going down'.
"It is a very difficult campaigning environment. MMP is different. I think we are still getting used to it."
