Whale Oil blogger Cameron Slater. Photo / NZME.
It's the kind of empty, but very useful, phrase that could have been dreamed up by a John Key adviser imbued with the problem-solving ethos of the Wellington bureaucracy and thus well trained in the fine art of wanton obfuscation and first-grade humbug. And it probably was.
But hey, when
you've been stuck in a deep hole of your own digging anything that makes life a little easier - or in Key's case a little easier to deal with Little - is not to be sneezed at.
Hence does the Prime Minister now describe his relationship with Cameron Slater as "not a proactive one". That still leaves the question of why Key continues to have any kind of relationship - proactive or not - with the Whale Oil blogger.
The slight distancing executed by Key from the politically septic, suppurating embrace of Slater - rather than an outright renunciation of that relationship - will only fuel speculation that Slater knows or has something which if it became public would seriously embarrass or damage the Prime Minister.
What was clear in Parliament yesterday was that whether such material exists or not, it's not in the possession of Opposition parties. Labour, the Greens and New Zealand First had little fresh to keep a head of steam on the saga surrounding the dirty tricks campaign run out of the Prime Minister's office.
