KEY POINTS:
What can be done with Mike Moore? He has been to the summit of his career, breathed the air of trade politics, made contacts, moved events in his odd, ebullient way. Now he wants nothing more than to be useful.
I am sure that's all he wants. That
bellow from the back paddock this week, comparing Helen Clark to Muldoon, was a bit desperate. Muldoon? When I look around the Herald newsroom now, there are not many left of those who ever had to face the old tusker.
I've never met another person like Muldoon and hope I never do. You didn't actually meet him, you engaged a pair of gimlet eyes and got no connection.
When you meet someone, even in the mildly adversarial role of a reporter, there is normally a human current - smiles, gestures exchanged to soften the dissonance, agreement wherever possible. Muldoon gave you nothing.
No doubt he was different within the small circle of people he trusted, and he was fiercely loyal to them, but anyone whose job it was to question him met a man so cold it was frightening. That, I think, was the source of the fear admitted by every honest person who had to deal with him: interviewers, officials, even most of his own ministers. It wasn't just that he had a wider command of argument and evidence than them - anyone with the authority and resources of the Prime Minister's office can have that advantage - but that he would use the advantage mercilessly.
He was, you sensed, deeply insecure and sometimes up close you could see his hands shaking.
What might Helen Clark have in common with him? She has the same command of her Government. You can be sure nothing significant happens that she has not approved, and nothing she doesn't want will happen. In fact she has a greater command of her team than Muldoon did. At this stage in his premiership he had narrowly survived a caucus coup and was taking regular sniper fire from a disaffected right. One of his early admirers, Bob Jones, was bent on bringing him down and the Opposition had an interesting new leader, David Lange.
Helen Clark has only the last problem. And her response to it - the concerted attacks on the credibility of John Key over the past fortnight - bares one striking distinction from any dirty work Muldoon ever did. Clark manages somehow to stay above the fray.
She has her ministers do the rough stuff; usually Trevor Mallard, who lit the fuse against Don Brash last year and is always up for the task, but this time it was poor Pete Hodgson. He had to pretend to be scandalised that Key had not occupied the address he registered for the 2002 election.
When Clark is questioned about these tactics she adopts a tone of tolerant amusement, suggesting boys will be boys in politics and it's all a matter of indifference to her. She maintained this detached pose to Holmes on Monday even while mentioning Key's appointment with investigators of an Equiticorp scam in the 1980s.
Key had anticipated that one, and given the Herald the innocent reason he was able to help the prosecution, an explanation confirmed by the former head of the Serious Fraud Office, Charles Sturt. But on Monday the Prime Minister insinuated it was suspicious that Key should raise the subject.
She is very clever and much more subtle than Muldoon, who would have carried out these character assassinations personally.
The quality of Clark that most shocks Mike Moore and others of his vintage, I suspect, is her refusal to defend ministers in trouble. Many have been dropped, temporarily or permanently, for indiscretions that previous Prime Ministers, Muldoon especially, would have helped them tough out.
Her standards might be laudable if she applied them to herself. Some of the mishaps were not nearly as bad as putting a signature to a painting that was to be sold as her work, which I still find shocking but would not want her resignation for.
Loyalty is not her strong suit, nor is it perhaps for most of us born post-war. Muldoon's generation would have found work for someone like Mike Moore, who tells interviewers he has had work from other countries since his stint as director-general of the World Trade Organisation but regrets that he has not been asked to do more for New Zealand.
He probably never expected much from his own party. The last National Government sponsored him for the WTO post and his outburst this week might be a job application to the next one.
But he is tribal Labour in the way Muldoon was National. Moore, in fact, coined the term tribal for those whose political identity is undisturbed by their heresies. How his tribe might now wish they'd kept him busy.
