KEY POINTS:
At week's end, the carnage is truly gruesome; the casualties truly staggering.
Like Mr Magoo suddenly handed the reins to Boadicea's chariot, expat billionaire and philanthropist Owen Glenn scythed his way through the political landscape seemingly oblivious to the havoc.
Those left to lick their wounds include no
lesser figures than the Prime Minister and Labour Party president Mike Williams, while questions about whether NZ First was also on the receiving end of Glenn's generosity have infuriated Winston Peters, who has directed his anger at his party president for even speculating on the possibility that NZ First might have taken such a donation.
The immediate damage to Labour is the momentum the party had started to build with a series of staged policy announcements has been brought to a sudden halt. In its place, a minor irritant which should have been wiped off the political agenda on Day One was still leading the television news on Day Seven.
Anyone who thinks this was some media beat-up intensified by the early onset of election fever must ask why Trevor Mallard was acting as Helen Clark's minder on Thursday night, blocking Glenn's path to the Prime Minister at the opening of Auckland University's new business school and why she refused requests to be photographed with the school's benefactor.
The public brush-off said it all. With a few gauche remarks, Glenn unintentionally reminded people of Labour's twisting and turning on the party's finances dating back to the pledge card rort of the last election.
Be it a Cabinet post or appointment as an honorary consul, here was the biggest donor by far to Labour's campaign coffers at the last election big-noting about what the Government would be doing for him only weeks after being the recipient of a New Year's honour.
But Glenn cannot take sole blame. He was a ticking time bomb who went off at the most inappropriate moment. The explosive was the New Year's honour - membership of the New Zealand Order of the Merit. The detonator was the previously unknown $100,000 interest-free loan he gave Labour after the last election which he revealed last week.
Without one or other, National would have had no hook on which to hang Clark in Parliament this week. Williams would not have made the misleading statement which landed him in trouble and ultimately saw him offering his resignation.
Labour could more easily have laughed off Glenn's remarks about being offered a Cabinet post and his lobbying to become New Zealand's honorary consul in Monaco, his official home.
Instead, the honour, the loan and Glenn's loose lips combined to make it look like Labour and Glenn were entwined. It all left a rather unsavoury impression of one beholden to the other and that there were no limits on the patronage Labour was willing to exercise for services rendered. That was never the case, of course. The suggestion of a seat at the Cabinet table was always ludicrous. And it is odds-on now that Glenn will not be an honorary consul.
But it is the impression that counts politically. And the impression voters were getting - with some prodding from National - was one of Labour rewarding its mates.
It has escaped no one's notice that all this has occurred at the exact same stage in the current Government's life-cycle as it did in Jenny Shipley's Government in the form of the infamous dinner with Saatchi & Saatchi supremo Kevin Roberts .
Just as Labour targeted Shipley, National's prime objective this week was to ensnare Clark and force her to do the explaining, rather than keep a distance. National shunned words like "sleaze" and "corruption", the latter being only uttered once in Parliament. Rather than lay it on with a trowel, National judged it better to let voters reach their own conclusion.
For Labour, there are questions of political management, given the party's New Year's resolution was to ensure damaging distractions and irrelevant sideshows are minimised so they do not block out the Government's positive messages.
Any post-mortem in the Beehive will have to ask why it took three days for Glenn to correct his claim that Clark had offered him a Cabinet post.
It will have to ask why it took Labour so long to come up with a statement detailing the party's above-the-board handling of the interest-free loan. It will have to ask why Williams' offer to resign - and its rejection by Clark - were not part of that statement.
That would have brought closure of sorts. One reason could be that it was felt Williams' offer made the whole affair look far more serious than in fact it is. But his offer leaked out anyway. That is Labour's prime frustration. National has tried to portray this as Clark's version of Tony Blair's "cash for honours" scandal. But Labour has not broken any law. It instead erred on the side of caution in its handling of the interest-free loan, deeming the interest foregone by Glenn amounted to a donation even though the Electoral Act was not specific whether that was the case.
The loan was listed in the Labour Party's accounts as "loan from supporter". It is unlikely the source would have become public when the party presents its annual return of donations because the foregone interest will be less than the $10,000 level requiring declaration.
Nevertheless, it should be noted Labour is the only party in Parliament willing to allow public perusal of its annual audited accounts.
Neither - unlike National - has it used special trusts through which to channel donations and thus avoid disclosing the source.
Rather than make an anonymous donation, Glenn chose to make public his contributions to Labour coffers, which amounted to $200,000 in 2004 and a further $300,000.
This may have been politic. Questions would almost certainly have been asked about the source of such big donations, which were way above others the party received.
Labour feels it is a victim of its own transparency. It is aggrieved National, which has been utterly untransparent, should be the party of all parties to be tormenting it. But Labour is more the victim of being only partly transparent. It was not open about the loan. Glenn was.
The irony is that had his earlier donations been anonymous, his New Year's honour would have attracted relatively little attention.
That he disclosed his donations was reason for caution. In retrospect, it would have been smarter, though more cynical, to have included him in next year's New Year's honours coming out after the election. That list will be compiled before the election by the current Cabinet honours committee and will be Labour's choices, irrespective of whether it is still in Government or not. Labour thought it could get away with it. How wrong that has proved to be.
