High-stakes game pays off for new PM

John Key has managed that rarest of feats.

He has succeeded in strong-arming out of Parliament an MP who had become a headache and liability. Many of his predecessors will watch and weep. Disgraced MPs are notoriously difficult to dislodge. Most will fight tooth-and-nail to retain the comfort of a seat in Parliament, even when it means a life of notoriety and shame.

The last MP to heap embarrassment on National, Brian Connell, lingered on for a year or more after he was booted unceremoniously out of caucus. Labour's constant headache, Taito Philip Field, never let embarrassment over fraud charges overwhelm his grim determination to remain in Parliament till the bitter end.

Yet Mr Key manoeuvred Richard Worth out in record time. It's a further demonstration, if any was needed, that there is steel beneath the boy-next-door charm. It was only a short time ago that John Key celebrated his six-month anniversary as prime minister. It is early to be coping with a Richard Worth-scale crisis. But governments have no control over when bad news rears its head. They can only try to manage the fallout.

Mr Key's instincts served him well in the first flush of the controversy. He determined not to let the problem linger and opted for a short, sharp execution once he knew Dr Worth was under police investigation over a Korean woman's allegation of sexual offending. Dr Worth flew into Wellington last Monday a minister and flew out of Wellington the next morning on two weeks enforced leave and stripped of his portfolios. Mr Key's instincts served him equally well at the end. He upped the stakes against Dr Worth by declaring he had washed his hands of the MP. He could not have sent a clearer message. Expelling Dr Worth would have been messy if, as is more than possible, police decide not to pursue charges. But Dr Worth was left in no doubt he would be a pariah if he returned. It was the only card Mr Key could play.

Maybe it was that which distracted Mr Key earlier in the week, when his instincts, along with any semblance of political management, briefly fled. It was always going to be the case that the Labour Opposition, starved of oxygen after a bruising election defeat, would use the first ministerial crisis to chip some of the gloss off Mr Key's prime ministership.

But National failed to spot where Labour's forces were assembling. It was only after looking through the rear-vision mirror several days down the track that Mr Key realised he had been dragged into an increasingly petty and ugly squabble with his Labour opponent Phil Goff. It was a mudbath out of which he was never going to emerge with much glory. He belatedly rose above the fray, after days of allowing himself to be caught up in the thick of it. Now it is Mr Goff who is likely to face internal rumbling over his handling of the affair.

Mr Goff had placed a strategic time bomb under Mr Key's handling of his internal affairs minister. He made a private phone call to Mr Key weeks earlier detailing a second woman's allegations against Dr Worth of harassment, and an offer of plum government jobs in return for romantic favours. Attacking Mr Key over the other allegations that were before police was a no-go area for Labour. Chiselling away at Mr Key's political management over the earlier allegations wasn't. Was it a coincidence that Mr Goff's phone call weeks after the alleged harassment stopped came not long after the first signs that Dr Worth was becoming a ministerial liability?

Mr Goff says it took that long for the woman to summon the courage to have her case put before the prime minister. But Mr Goff overplayed his hand. First by insisting on the moral high ground by claiming that it was Mr Key, not himself, who placed the harassment allegations in the public arena. Taken at face value he is right but Mr Key only referred to the matter publicly after he was confronted with informed questions by a journalist. Clearly someone wanted the information out there. It comes down to who would benefit most.

SALACIOUSNESS OVER-EGGED

Meanwhile Mr Goff milked the woman's status as an immigrant who was confused and distraught at Dr Worth's intentions. When first asked by The Dominon Post if he knew the woman before she came to him, Mr Goff agreed he had, but only for a short time. By the next day, he had put it out there that she was a Labour Party member. When she was revealed this week as Auckland woman Neelam Choudary, it became clear she was no low-level member. She is prominent in Auckland Labour Party circles. The image of a frightened and traumatised woman doesn't square with the recollections of reporters who came across her regularly on the campaign trail with Helen Clark.

Nor does it square with some of Mr Goff's colleagues. The woman described as "strikingly beautiful" by Mr Goff is forthright and supremely confident, according to some. Her husband was convicted of an immigration scam.

National denies putting Ms Choudary's name out there. But its emergence clearly did the Government's cause no harm after days of squabbling over who said what in the aftermath of that call between Mr Goff and Mr Key.

Mr Goff should have focused on the jobs-for-favours claims. If proven, they are a clearcut abuse of ministerial power. But he played up the victim angle instead and over-egged the salaciousness of Dr Worth's texts to Ms Choudary. It blew up in his face. Disastrously for Mr Goff, his political instincts deserted him just as Mr Key was rediscovering his.

This is where Mr Key differs from his predecessor, Helen Clark. She would probably have stood her minister down till the outcome of the police inquiry. She would have refused to engage with her opponent. And she would have avoided backing herself into a corner by all but demanding her MP's resignation from Parliament and risking looking impotent if he refused.

But where Miss Clark was risk-averse, Mr Key is a risk taker. It could have cost him dearly in his first ministerial crisis. It hasn't so far. If anything the opposite as the final act in the Worth saga proved yesterday.

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