Boadicea Without An Army: John Armstrong Talks Up David Shearer’s Latest Chief-of-Staff.

“A BOADICEA with a Mona Lisa smile plus a wickedly infectious chuckle to boot?” Poor old John Armstrong – why does he indulge in this sort of nonsense? Everyone who reads the NZ Herald knows that, as an experienced and highly talented journalist, Armstrong has the capacity to – and frequently does – produce first rate political analysis. But this sort of puerile puffery? Seriously, John, it’s beneath you.

Viewed from just about any perspective, the likening David Shearer’s new chief-of-staff, Fran Mold, to the First Century warrior-queen, Boudicca, is a dishonest comparison. Warrior-queens have loyal subjects to call upon for aid and warriors to defend them. In the context of the Labour Party, Helen Clark would fill the bill nicely and, in her day, the redoubtable Margaret Wilson. But Fran Mold possesses neither subjects nor warriors. She is a paid employee. Hired help. Nothing more.

And that is the problem which Armstrong, in the finest chivalric tradition, is attempting to obscure in his latest Weekend Herald column. Mold’s pleasant smile and “infectious” chuckle notwithstanding, she comes to Shearer’s aid not as Helen Clark’s chief-of-staff, Heather Simpson, did – from the blood-red viscera of the Labour Party – but from the superficial world of journalism. And, right now, a superficial journalist is about the last thing Shearer needs.

Armstrong knows this. Anyone who’s been around Parliament for as long as he has understands that just about all of Shearer’s current problems are political problems. But, by hiring a former journalist to advise him on strategy and manage his office, Shearer is trying to make us believe that his problems are merely presentational. That it’s not so much what he is saying that is holding Labour back as theway he is saying it. He’s wrong about that, of course, but I doubt if Mold will have told him – probably because it exactly matches her own analysis of Labour’s difficulties.

Which raises the question: is Mold in any way equipped to advise a Labour leader in the present political and electoral environment? Because not all journalists lack the ideological and political grounding necessary for a left-wing Leader of the Opposition’s chief adviser. After all, the Labour Party’s first leader, Harry Holland, was a journalist – and a damn fine one at that! Perhaps Mold comes with additional and more recognisable left-wing credentials.

Well, no, not that I can find. In fact, I have absolutely no idea what she did or where she came from before 2001 when she popped up working for the NZ Herald alongside Vernon Small (and John Armstrong?) Sometime after that she started appearing on our television screens as one of TVNZ’s representatives in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. From there it was straight to the Leader of the Opposition’s office – from whence Phil Goff’s previous press secretary, Kris Faafoi, had lit out for Mana and a parliamentary career. Mold continued in her role as press secretary under Shearer until just a few months ago. But now, following a brief sojourn in Auckland, she’s back in Wellington, replacing Alastair Cameron as Shearer’s chief-of-staff.

And that is it. I can offer you no more than this rudimentary sketch of the woman’s career. In the 30 years I have participated in and written about left-wing politics I have no recollection of Francesca Mold acting in any other role than that of a mainstream journalist. Now, she may have been a student activist. She might even have worked for the Labour Research Unit. I simply don’t know.

One thing I do know, however, is that when Heather Simpson became Helen Clark’s chief lieutenant, back in the days when Clark was the Minister of Health, I knew exactly who she was. She was one of an old-time Labour family from Invercargill who’d just missed out on winning the seat of Awarua in 1984. I also knew that alongside Pete Hodgson and Al Morrisson she had played a key role in stopping the second aluminium smelter at Aramoana. At that time, in the early 1980s, she’d been a lecturer in economics at the University of Otago (and the scourge of young lefties like myself who insisted in putting up radical economic remits with which she always seemed to have “one or two wee problems”.) No active member of the Labour Party was ignorant of Heather Simpson’s pedigree. Not only did she know where all the bodies were buried – she knew who had put them there!

And that, Mr Armstrong, is the sort of person a real Labour leader invites to become his or her chief-of-staff. Someone they’ve known and worked alongside for years. Someone who knows all their strengths and weaknesses. Someone who they can trust. Someone who also knows the party and its people: the ones whose egos need stroking; whose belligerence needs calming. Someone who knows exactly what to do without being asked – let alone told.

Why hasn’t David Shearer got someone like that to help him? Armstrong knows the answer to that question too. Because he has no roots in Labour: no allies from way back who have fought the good fight with him in the factional trenches of the party; no debts to call in; no favours that can now be returned. Like David Frost, Shearer is a man who “rose without trace” to lead a party that he doesn’t know, that he doesn’t like, and which doesn’t like him.

So, really, Fran Mold is the perfect chief-of-staff for David Shearer. All she knows about politics is what she wrote in the papers, or squeezed into a minute of airtime on the six o’clock news. If what Stuart Nash says about her is correct, then, for Ms Mold, politics isn’t about principles in action, it’s about personalities in conflict. And that would place her among a generation of journalists for whom mastering the art of the sound-bite is much more important than mastering the art of steering the ship of state safely through the ferocious currents of history.

But Armstrong could have told you all this: everything I have written here and more. He’s been around for the same length of time as I have, and watched with me the princes and the paupers of New Zealand politics come and go – albeit from a slightly better perch. So quite why he consistently declines to tell us what he knows I cannot fathom. Unless it is because he himself has grown tired to telling the story, and has decided instead to become one of the players in the game.

But if that is the case then why doesn’t he offer himself to David Shearer? God knows, he could hardly do worse than Fran Mold!