The coup that failed

A truly fascinating article by Phil Quin in the NZ Herald on the failed Labour leadership coup involving Phil Goff.

No not the 2011 coup that wasn’t (as no one wanted the job), but the 1996 where goff agreed to challenge Clark. It helps explain the frosty Clark-Goff relationship. Quin writes:

In 1993, Mike Moore managed to lead Labour to within two seats of clinching an unlikely victory over Jim Bolger just three years after the 1990 rout. But Moore was despised by large sections of the party, especially its senior women, who derided him and his circle of young, male advisers as misogynist buffoons.

Moore’s tireless campaigning in 1993 helped engineer his own downfall because Clark’s allies had installed candidates in almost every winnable seat. They campaigned alongside Moore primed to vote against him in the coming post-election face-off with Clark. The irony was not lost on Moore himself.

A few days out from the election, he had arrived back at the hotel after a non-stop tour of suburban Auckland marginals.

He had noticed to his disgust that the Alliance hoardings far outnumbered Labour’s.

He dragged a bunch of staffers, me included, to the home of Labour’s candidate in Onehunga, Richard Northey, who seemed to be hosting a small dinner party for friends when we arrived unannounced at his door.

“Where are your signs?” Moore asked the startled candidate, who led us to his garage containing dozens of freshly pressed hoardings.

Exasperated, Moore helped load the car with “Northey for Onehunga” signs while the candidate returned to his friends and mid-range pinot. “If he wins on Saturday,” Moore told me, in near-disbelief, “he’s one for Helen.” He did, and he was.

Poor Mike. He was well and truly shafted. As I recall thing, Clark was planning to roll Moore, even if he won the election and became Prime Minister.

After previous stints in 1990 and 1993, I had gone back to work in the Labour Research Unit in early 1996 at the behest of Lianne Dalziel who was health spokesperson at the time. I broached with Dalziel in our first discussion my fears for the party at the coming election.

Dalziel, reliably of the party’s left flank, made clear that she would rather sink with HMNZS Helen than contemplate Goff or the unspeakable alternative (Moore). It seemed wise not to raise the subject with her again.

Very wise indeed.

The key to toppling Clark was flipping six or so of her former supporters, and the early signs were encouraging: Paul Swain (Eastern Hutt), Mark Peck (Invercargill), Rick Barker (Hastings) and Martin Gallagher (Hamilton West), all of whom backed Clark over Moore in 1993, were ready to jump ship.

Peck and Barker soon emerged as key protagonists in the efforts to unseat her. Phillip Field (Otara) was also wavering, and we suspected a number of others – Janet Mackey (Gisborne), Chris Carter (Te Atatu) and even the sopping-wet John Blincoe (Nelson) – might succumb to fears over their own seats and cast their secret ballots against Clark.

“Phil, I need to tell people you’re in,” I told Goff during our Easter weekend call, perhaps for the hundredth time. “OK then, I’ll do it,” he said, without a hint of enthusiasm.

He sounds as enthusiastic about challenging, as David Parker does today.

The challenge against Clark shifted into top gear. Frontbenchers Michael Cullen, Jim Sutton and Annette King took command of strategy along with Goff, while Peck and Barker worked the backbench. Meanwhile, I oversaw phone surveys under the fictional auspices of “Data Research” in places where we felt the MP might be swayed by proof that Clark was toxic with voters.

Chris Carter’s numbers were so bad he thought I had made them up. “Nope,” I told him, “Helen is leading you over a cliff.”

Sutton, Cullen and King were nervous about promoting the largely unknown Goff so close to the election, and also feared the electorate might recoil from his hardline reputation as a Rogernomics-era Minister.

At the same time, a couple of Maori seat MPs were willing to vote against Clark – but for Moore, not Goff.

In a caucus of 41 we counted 18-all with five undecided. Every vote weighed a tonne. The decision was made to proceed with an ambivalent Mike Moore on the ballot. Goff, it has to be said, was noticeably relieved.

So the Goff coup against Clark became the Moore coup.

Would the Labour Party have been better off if Helen Clark had fallen in May 1996? Would New Zealand?

The answer is probably no.

Even if (as seems likely) Moore had performed better than Clark at the 1996 poll and in subsequent coalition talks with Winston Peters, the party would have been in turmoil. It had become by then a vehicle for Clark’s ambition, pure and simple. The leadership of anyone other than her – let alone Mike Moore of all people – would have sparked such intense and active hostility among the party’s power elite that it would surely have fractured. To the Clark-left, winning without her was not winning at all.

It would have been civil war.

Phil Goff, a politician of great skill and energy, now wrestles with the job he agreed to seek 15 years ago.

But he remains entangled in Clark’s political apparatus, and therefore lacks the authority to usher Labour into a new era.

The party is moribund, with few members and even less money. The power to select MPs and distribute favours rests with a tiny elite who jealously guard their majority control over an ever-shrinking entity. …

Phil Goff faces an impossible task as long as the Labour Party remains frozen in time, circa May 1996, as an institution whose primary function is to facilitate the ambitions of a now departed leader.

I suspect Helen doesn’t like Mr Quin and vice-versa 🙂