Are Labour planning smear campaign on Shane Jones?

This is very unusual. Whale blogs about a poll being done, presumably on behalf of Labour, asking if people’s view of Shane Jones was:

• Shane Jones delivered amusing one liners but his political career was accident prone and did not amount to much. The most attention he got was for using his parliamentary credit card to pay for pornographic movies.
• Shane Jones was one of the few politicians who tells it like it is and with his attacks on Countdown has been the most effective Labour politician this year. He will be a huge loss to Labour especially amongst Maori and blue collar voters.

If the polling was being done for a media client, then the question would be sensible – it would be for a story on the impact of Shane Jones. But presumably the poll is on behalf of Labour (as was being done by their normal polling company) and the question is why would you poll on Shane Jones, once he has already resigned, unless it was to publicly attack him saying that their polls show that most voters think he was an accident prone MP who amounted to little whose most noticeable achievement was the taxpayer funded porn.

They can’t change the fact he resigned, so I really can’t think of any other reasons they would be polling on him except to undermine him. I’d love to see Shane’s face when he read that Labour is polling on whether people think he was an accident prone lazy pornography viewer or an in touch effective MP. Labour’s caucus meeting next week could be fun What other Labour MPs are Labour polling about in such derogatory terms?

UPDATE: I’m told from a very reliable source that in this case Labour is not responsible for this question. So it will be fascinating to discover who is, if it ever comes out.