Books
The smiley face on the sticking plaster
by Jon Johansson
In Denis Welch’s biography of Helen Clark, one senses his regret that the pragmatist prevailed over her more idealistic younger self.
New Zealand does not possess a rich, let alone diverse, literature on our premiers and prime ministers, so Denis Welch’s Helen Clark: A Political Life is a welcome contribution to the first raw cut of analysis on Clark and her Government’s place in our political history. First explainers serve a valuable purpose. Although subsequent biographers will possess a greater objectivity gained by hindsight, first explainers provide these later researchers with insights drawn from the milieu in which they have observed their subject.
A test for Welch’s biography, then, will be whether the main contours and patterns of his analysis hold up over the long haul.
In one important respect, it should pass. Welch identifies the principal achievements of Clark: a rebalancing of her Rogernomics inheritance; leaving a fractious and close-to-collapse Labour Party considerably stronger than she found it; significant progressive social policies; and her own personal political legacy in being the woman who shattered the glass ceiling and then commanded the nation for nine years.
He also notes the Clark Government’s signature economic achievements: KiwiSaver and the Cullen Fund.
Likewise, Welch sees two of Clark’s chief weaknesses as prime minister: a lack of long-term vision about New Zealand’s possibilities and her timidity over race leadership. He also laments, one feels, that it was Clark the pragmatist who ultimately prevailed over her more idealistic and left-leaning younger self.
In fact, one of the curious aspects of Welch’s biography is its far greater emphasis on Clark’s travails in, and eventual rise through, the Labour Party during its revolutionary phase – or the “Big Lie”, as the author prefers to label 1984 – than on her time as prime minister. The former traverses 75 pages, essentially taking the reader once more through the minefield of the Fourth Labour Government, while the latter encompasses a scant 55 pages.
One senses that Welch bemoans what he sees as the tepid response to our policy revolution and thus was hugely disappointed that Clark proved to be a leader who, in his words, met the need to cauterise the Big Lie and doctor the truth, “to put a smiley face on the sticking plaster over the wound”.
Throughout the biography, therefore, there is an enduring tension between Clark’s principles and her pragmatism; between the pursuit of her social democratic ideals and her (overly) cautious instincts; between her strong set of convictions and her even stronger adaptability to an ever-evolving political dynamic.
Another problematic aspect of the book is the paradox between Welch’s fidelity to historical determinism – which posits that individual agency is swamped by the greater impersonal social and economic forces the leader is embedded in – and the task of writing a biography. Welch cites Bruce Jesson’s modern riff of an old Tolstoy belief, that “modern history has a momentum of its own, formed through the interaction of countless individuals”.
He attempts to escape this paradox by suggesting Clark embodied and reflected back to us these wider forces. A simpler way to reinforce his good sense in writing about her would have been to say that, as prime minister, she was strategically and pre-eminently well placed to influence events. In our village politics, any prime minister who has the confidence of his or her party, parliament and the people has enormous resources available to change policies or politics.
Why Clark consolidated her policy inheritance rather than transform it is thus a question that remains firmly in mind even after reading Welch’s book.
Where I do feel considerable sympathy for him is in Clark’s refusal to make herself available for an interview. And he describes how other potential interviewees were either reluctant to talk to him, or to talk to him freely, because his project lacked her “authorisation”.
Like Welch, I concluded that it hardly matters, but it does provoke empathy for whoever is eventually selected to write the authorised biography of Clark. Unless she does it herself, some future biographer will be left to answer what remains unanswered about her political successes and, most particularly, her failures: what best explains them?
