Former PM was a 'sex bomb'

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Helen Clark, 1973: She liked to think of her look as 'Edwardian'.

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The young Helen Clark was once described as "a sex bomb" in black boots, according to a new unauthorised biography of the former prime minister.

Helen Clark, by Wellington journalist Denis Welch, says trade union leader Matt McCarten's first memory of her was from the early 80s. "She was dressed all in black and had big black boots," McCarten said.

Fellow unionist Laila Harre, later an Alliance Party cabinet minister in Clark's first cabinet, recalled a 1985 party where young men were "salivating over Helen Clark and her boots".

"McCarten: `She was a sex bomb!"'

"Harre: `She was, actually from a left-wing point of view. We don't have very high standards!"'

The unauthorised biography Clark refused to be interviewed for the book also says the former PM "has a black sense of humour but can't afford to air it publicly because New Zealanders don't understand humour... you can be perceived quite inappropriately".

Welch says Clark holds grudges. "She has the memory of an elephant, and never forgets a name, a face, or a grievance."

She's "a great gossip; she loves knowing stuff about people, especially members of the National Party. It's not that she uses it viciously, she just likes the sense of power it brings her", writes Welch.

"Though she disapproves of sexual shenanigans, she would never do someone down on the basis of salacious gossip: she's a very moral, conservative person, a Waikato farm girl at heart."

She also told a newspaper reporter in 1995 that she refused to be ordinary.

"I saw a line in a Christchurch Press editorial that New Zealand like their leaders to be ordinary like them. For God's sake... I am not prepared to make myself ordinary. If ordinary means I have suddenly got to produce a household of kids and iron [husband] Peter's shirts, I'm sorry, I'm not interested."

The book criticises the Labour-led government's economic management, saying "the economy was run for the benefit of Japanese investors and Kiwi consumers".

"It's a magnificent irony that Clark should have been so often accused of running a `nanny state' when, in the fundamental areas of policy that shaped people's livelihoods and the nation's prosperity, she scarcely wagged a finger."

Helen Clark: A Political Life, by Denis Welch (Penguin, $40)

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