Another failed smear

I have been predicting for some months that Labour’s re-election campaign will be a campaign of personal denigration and smears against John Key, and today we saw Stage One.  Colin Espiner blogs on how Clark tried to smear john Key but got her facts wrong:

There are generally three golden rules for MPs planning a personal smear attack on an opponent in Parliament.

The first is to make sure your facts are correct. The second is to ascertain that you are not guilty of the same things you are accusing your opponent of. The third is to do it under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, so if you fail on the first two, at least you can’t be sued.

Prime Minister Helen Clark managed to get two out of three right in Parliament today, but unfortunately she fell down on the most important one: accuracy.

This is the one which probably least bothers Labour.

She further claimed that Key’s family trust owned 30,000 shares in TranzRail at a time that Key made comments as Opposition associate transport spokesman in 2003, in which Key made disparaging remarks about the Government’s offer for the company and suggested Toll was more likely to win the bid.

That is of course what ended up happening. Toll won the bid and I imagine – although I don’t know this – that Toll’s share price went up too.

The only problem is that Key’s family trust had already sold its shares before Key made his comments. He has told Parliament this afternoon (and so I imagine he must be very certain of this) that neither he nor his trust held any shares in TranzRail at the time he made his remarks in June 2003.

Of course one could have checked the facts rather than just make it up. I mean to have the Prime Minister accuse the Leader of the Opposition of such a serious thing, and to get it wrong, should result in apologies.

But Labour don’t care if their smears are correct. John Key is a “rich prick” and they want the public to associate him with greed. They think if they repeat lies often enough, some mud will stick.

Their problem is that it looks so desperate. They are 20% to 25% behind in the polls and as Rodney Hide said in the House, they can’t even tell us how much the purchase of Toll cost, yet can find time to go through share registers trying to smear John Key.