Time for tried-and-trusted advice

well advised to reflect on the old adage that it’s never the mistake that gets you, it’s the cover-up.

What Mr Cunliffe shouldn’t do is circle the wagons as some of his more one-eyed supporters outside Parliament would have him do by insisting that everything he did was legal and above board and that his woes are the product of a smear campaign.

The damage inflicted by his latest stumble over trusts is even more egregious because he should have had the political nous after 15 years in Parliament to figure that the arrangements in question did not pass the smell test.

Setting up a trust to take anonymous donations to his leadership campaign was clearly wildly contradictory to Labour’s rhetoric over secret trusts when applied to National and John Banks. The uncomfortable parallels with Mr Banks were apparently spelt out to Mr Cunliffe by some of his MPs.

It was probably not something that occurred to his close friend and lawyer Greg Presland, who was no doubt more concerned with legal boundaries than political ones when he set up the trust on Mr Cunliffe’s behalf.

But it should have occurred to Mr Cunliffe. Factor in the news that Mr Presland’s fingerprints are on Mr Cunliffe’s other big trust blunder and it’s no surprise that there are rumblings from deep within Labour about their leader’s reliance on him for advice and as a sounding board.

There were similar rumbles among Mr Cunliffe’s colleagues when a bunch of new faces appeared in their corridors after the leadership changed hands. Hardly surprising, given that Mr Cunliffe arrived at the leadership with less than whole-hearted support from all his colleagues.

But he won’t win in 2014 unless he can heal his splintered caucus fast. That will involve both sides putting aside any distrust.

Mr Presland is Mr Cunliffe’s former electorate chairman, who also appears to be his lawyer. He is widely believed to be a prolific blogger, writing under the pseudonym Micky Savage on the Left-wing Standard website, which led the charge for a change in the Labour leadership. The day after the Labour leadership was announced Mr Presland was blogging advice which Mr Cunliffe happened to follow on how to take on John Key on his first day in the House.

It was also Mr Presland who advised Mr Cunliffe as his lawyer that he didn’t need to declare an investment trust on the MPs register of pecuniary interests, though Mr Cunliffe later did so after advice from the registrar that ‘‘when in doubt, declare it’’.

What’s baffling is why Mr Cunliffe thought he needed legal advice at all on which of his assets and financial interests should be declared. The starting point for any politician would surely be disclose everything, hide nothing.

But Mr Cunliffe was of course not the only politician suffering from a lapse of judgment.

Justice Minister Judith Collins failed the smell test when she dropped in at the Chinese company where her husband is a director and had her visit used to endorse its products on their website.

It’s difficult to join the dots on a last-minute social call which might result in a Government minister smacking her lips after skulling a glass of milk and praising it so effusively management decided it was worth taking her comments down.

It is more usual for a business call to involve a glass of bubbly or canapes being passed around.

The cabinet manual, meanwhile, clearly states that no minister should endorse, in any media, any product or service.

Prime Minister John Key’s attempt to reconcile that with Cabinet office advice that Ms Collins did not breach the manual was to offer up a lame suggestion that any minister could be caught out by, say, expressing a preference for a brand of toilet paper. His suggestion that the Cabinet office gave the issue extensive consideration suggests there were enough question marks to merit that level of inquiry.

Certainly Mr Key’s backing of Ms Collins was carefully framed around his advice from the Cabinet office.

It was a less than effusive backing of Ms Collins which suggests a wait-and-see approach to whether more comes out.

But Mr Key’s refusal to release that advice proves no politician is immune from forgetting the golden rule that sunlight is the best disinfectant.