By JOHN ARMSTRONG
"Silly bitch," "one-girl band," "Helengrad" ... the "tributes" to the Prime Minister just kept on flowing at the National Party's annual conference.
National simply cannot abide anyone else running the country. Opposition is a temporary nuisance - or "forced time-out," as Jenny Shipley euphemistically described it.
But the invective that conference speakers directed at Helen Clark over the weekend in Christchurch demonstrated that National realises just how big an obstacle she is to the party recapturing the Government benches in 2002.
Her spectre stalked the conference, puncturing occasional displays of the "we know best and the voters will soon realise it" smugness that might delude the party into thinking it only needs to turn up at the next election to win it.
Such complacency risks being inflated by last night's One News-Colmar Brunton poll which has National closing the gap on Labour to one percentage point in the nine months since the election.
Occasionally, however, a thunderbolt was fired by the party hierarchy on to the conference floor to remind delegates that there are still 27 months to go before the next one.
The best wake-up call was delivered by Simon Power and Katherine Rich, a couple of Mrs Shipley's "millennium babes" (her cutesy-pie description of National's latest batch of MPs).
The pair declared that the time had come for National to put ideas ahead of ideology, offer more substance and less spin, and start talking the language of compassion, not commerce.
Such moderation would have been heresy not long ago. Regeneration has begun, if slowly. The party caucus still needs to hear some retirement announcements before it can present a fresher face to the world.
But electoral defeat, the arrival of the class of '99 and the burgeoning influence of the 1996 intake are shifting the balance in the caucus away from ardent free-marketeers towards those, like Bill English, who want far more emphasis on social policy.
National's big advantage is not having to convince voters it is good at managing the economy. But it does have to convince them that it is listening to what people want from health, education and retirement policies.
Conference olive branches on superannuation and student loans were thus thrust at old and young voters.
National is also trying to ring alarm bells with middle-ground voters by warning about Labour's "dumbing-down" of education standards and the Coalition's stance on Treaty of Waitangi rights creating two classes of citizenship.
"Race, not need, is Labour's focus. Need, not race, should be our platform," Mrs Shipley declared in her keynote speech, highlighting one of National's crucial "points of difference" with Labour.
She urged her party to "cut loose" in its rethink of policy; Mr English urged delegates to "reach out" to those who had voted Labour, but whose aspirations were now being punished by Labour's mishandling of the economy.
"If we don't talk to them, they can't know us well enough to change their vote."
His straight-talking speech received moderate applause. Hers had sustained acclamation - way above that recorded by Jim Bolger at the same venue three years ago when the skids were under his leadership.
By then, though, the party was sick of him; it still likes Mrs Shipley. But it doesn't like Opposition. When the party reassembles this time next year, she must have demonstrated there is a pretty big light at the end of the tunnel - and that Helen Clark is no longer blocking it.
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