Whoops, Prime Minister: Clark gets Key attack 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.

National's leader John Key took an absolute pounding in Question Time today, and for a while it looked as if he had suffered a king-hit at the hands of a resurgent PM.

Clark alleged, for those who weren't watching, that Key benefited financially from the sale of TranzRail while a director of Bankers' Trust, which advised the former National administration on the privatisation of the state asset NZ Rail in 1993.

“Bankers Trust pocketed $39m in profit. Ask yourself the question: who benefited from the sale of TranzRail? Mr Key and his friends,’’ she told Parliament.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.

I'm also told by his office that while Key was a director of Bankers' Trust in 1993, he was involved with the bank's trading arm, not its merchant division that handled the sale. His office says he had no involvement in the sale and did not profit from it.  

This rather takes the wind out of the Prime Minister's sails, although her office is attempting to argue that her central point was that Key was in favour of privatisation. I don't accept this. Clark was clearly trying to smear Key by implying that he had engaged in improper behaviour by talking up the share price of a company he held shares in. Except that he didn't.

I think Clark owes Key an apology for what is an extremely damaging claim. Her other allegation is more difficult to prove either way - her office argues that as a director of Bankers' Trust Key would have benefited regardless of whether he was directly involved. This is still a little spurious.

Today's attack on Key failed like several others have in the past because Labour can't get its facts straight. It has tried other avenues, such as the address he placed on his electoral return and his connections with business owners accused of building leaky homes. So far it has been able to come up with nothing more than rumour and innuendo.

Previously Clark left it to others to make the attacks for precisely this reason. There is a risk if you get it wrong. It's unfortunate for that she was given bad information.

I'm left to reflect on her comments to last year's journalism conference, which I recently posted on the Stuff website after receiving the tape under the Official Information Act.

Competition had led to journalists "not letting the facts get in the way of a good story,'' she opined.

"There wouldn't be a day go by when something isn't just plain wrong.''

Quite.