To Labour the point

John Roughan reviews a long-awaited biography of the former Labour Prime Minister Helen Clark

Who was that woman who led the country for nine years?

It is probably going to be Helen Clark's fate to be analysed from the left. That's where she came from, more or less, and she represented the left's first real lease on power in a lifetime.

It called itself the new left in the late 1960s. It was less interested in the class war and trade unionism than in the Vietnam war, South African racism and nuclear annihilation.

Denis Welch, former Listener political columnist and Alliance candidate, forgets the limits of new leftism in his assessment of Labour's most successful leader in 60 years.

His account Helen Clark, A Political Life, published next weekend, hovers between admiration and disappointment. Admiration for her qualities, disappointment that she did not use them more boldly to reclaim the economy from foreign capital, advance environmental sustainability, give more to the poor...

Welch worked from the press gallery when Clark was a dark and brooding MP opposed to the dominant faction in the fourth Labour Government.

He was one of the few in the gallery at that time who had much contact with her, though did not then realise her essential conservatism.

Now, reflecting on her life and times, he remembers that it was fairly unusual and distinctly unfashionable for a student activist in the late 1960s and '70s to join the Labour Party. His research finds Clark was a keen participant in the demonstrations of that time but she was not at the front of the march and she was not with the radicals on the podium.

She was a serious student of politics, conventional party politics, learning its culture and attending meetings of the university branch. The Princes St branch might have been a hotbed of energy and policy remits but to the young Sunday crowds in nearby Albert Park its meetings would have been deadly dull.

If Welch was not in the park he was in the Values Party, a vehicle for idealism that was anti-political in its purity and he largely retains that outlook. His book is marred by a tin-ear for the subtle interplay of power and public mood that make practical politics so fascinating.

He quotes a comment she once made to him: "Power has a blurring effect, not a clarifying one," but doesn't develop this insight to her.

For a person of liberal mind and an acute sense of responsibility power is not an opportunity to indulge willy nilly in "principles". It comes, I suspect, with an overwhelming realisation that nothing is as simple as it seems and a country's welfare is riding on your willingness to consider advice and make the right decisions.

A headstrong, undemocratic pursuit of pure opportunism - or principle depending on your point of view - is exactly what Welch holds against Rogernomics. But he seems to think that undoing the new economy would have been wise and in line with public will. Helen Clark, I think, knew better.

It was one thing to stop the free market's advance into public services and reverse it on a few fronts, such as employment contracts, school funding, accident compensation. It would have been quite another thing to repeal the Reserve Bank Act, restore general tariffs, stop the dollar's float.

People grow in Parliament. The Clark we watched from the press gallery in 1985 had a left wing reputation due largely to foreign policy remits at Labour conferences. She, with Jim Anderton and party president Margaret Wilson, was pivotal in forcing the nuclear warship ban on David Lange.

That achievement is strangely absent from this account.

At that time we didn't know her economic views. If Welch gleaned them from his conversations with her he doesn't reveal them.

He records her split with Anderton - he left the party, she stayed - as one of the crucial junctures of her career. She was rewarded with a cabinet seat after the 1987 election and appeared to have made her peace with the Rogergnomes on condition that they didn't intrude on her portfolios, housing and conservation.

She kept her distance from the Lange-Douglas row and became Geoffrey Palmer's Deputy Prime Minister.

But in recording her rise Welch has completely overlooked her most courageous ministerial decision. The anti-smoking lobby had pressed previous health ministers for bans on smoking in confined public places, and advertising and sponsorship bans.

Successive ministers wouldn't touch it. Helen Clark did. She faced down a storm of public abuse and editorial damnation - I contributed to it and was soon glad she ignored it. The anti-smoking laws show that Clark did not lack the personal courage to be unpopular when it mattered.

She would not display the same courage during her first two terms as Prime Minister because almost the only thing that mattered was to win a third term. Welch notes this but the book does not sufficiently emphasise how important it was to the Labour Party.

By 1999 Labour had seen power for only 12 of the previous 50 years. No Labour Government since the first had been elected for three terms - the average life of National governments - and the only one to be re-elected at all had been the fourth, which Labour people did not regard as their government.

When that government was defeated in 1990 the recriminations nearly destroyed the party, as Welch documents well. It had no confidence in its last-minute leader, Mike Moore. It wanted Helen Clark but National sank so low in the polls while Ruth Richardson was administering her fiscal medicine that Moore was able to survive for the 1993 election.

He was dumped for Clark soon after it. The following year, though, Labour was beaten for second place by Anderton's Alliance at a by-election and there was a prospect the next election could see it displaced as the main party of the left.

The country was not at all warming to Clark. She looked haunted on television and had the habit of many women of smiling awkwardly when delivering serious criticism.

Early in the 1996 election year she was visited by Michael Cullen, Phil Goff, Annette King and others who suggested she hand the reins back to Moore. She disagreed.

Welch believes that was a moment of truth for her, a turning point. She got help with her presentation and went into the election looking stylish and sounding more confident.

There was a crucial moment in that first MMP election campaign that Welch has missed. It came during a television debate between about six party leaders. Clark made a generous comment to Anderton and turned towards him as she did so.

It was a momentary gesture but not a natural one. It marked the end of a decade's animosity and to the public it cast her as a coalition leader.

In the event Winston Peters would not put her in power and she had another three years to prepare. In 1999 she was certain of victory and laid her plans to be the long government the Labour Party desperately needed.

It would also be a government of no surprises, which the country desperately needed to restore its faith in democracy after 15 years of rapid and largely unmandated change.

No political risks would be taken for the first term. Manifesto policies such as the removal of the parental defence for assault, "anti-smacking", were quietly shelved when polls showed 80 per cent opposition. Ministers found with even the suspicion of a skeleton in a cupboard were summarily suspended.

Only the leader's past was above the rule, for mistakes like "paintergate", which Welch thinks trivial.

Risk-avoidance worked so well that it was maintained for the next election. Clark's guiding rule became "under-promise and over-deliver".

She didn't over-deliver. She gave the country stability without doing very much except govern sensibly, speak concisely, pad the public services with sufficient resources to keep them quiet, patronise arts and sports and military anniversaries, keep supporting parties on side.

She was helped by an economy that was growing well when she took office. Then the dollar rose and a wave of immigration and domestic consumption drove the economy.

Counter inflationary interest rates attracted foreign savings that went mostly into real estate.

Clark's able deputy, Michael Cullen, set up public and private long term savings funds but in retrospect Labour knows it ought to have done something to burst the housing bubble.

The bubble burst in 2007 and Cullen could give away his tax surplus to counter the consequent recession.

If the verdict from the left is that Clark wasted her shot at social change, the verdict from the right is that she squandered years of prosperity.

Neither charge is fair. She was a conservative liberal who knew what her government could do and what it could not. It was not competent to pick economic winners even if it did not believe there was much harm in government doing so.

It could restore faith in politics by doing no more than it promised. It could restore the Labour Party's long-term credibility by winning three elections. That is what she did.

But she inherited an open, competitive economy she could not reverse and the measure of her success in turn are social policies now in force that John Key dare not change.

Assistant editor John Roughan was a Herald press gallery journalist from 1983 until 1986. Helen Clark A Political Life, by Denis Welch (Penguin, $40). Release date August 3.