Why is Key backing Clark?
High up in a building that jostles for space on New York’s Third Ave is where Team Clark is based – the dedicated group of Foreign Affairs staffers tasked with backing Helen Clark’s bid to lead the United Nations.
This is where Clark comes to discuss her ‘‘talking points’’ for upcoming meetings, and for a ‘‘debrief’’ afterwards. Notes are kept of her various meetings and conversations, tabs are kept on which countries might be supporting her bid and – though no-one will admit it – there will probably be assessments of her rivals as well. Another dedicated team based back in Wellington is also working on Clark’s bid. Coupled with the former prime minister’s legendary drive and energy, one thing is clear about this campaign – team Clark is not going to to die wondering whether it could have done more.
Prime Minister John Key keeps making the point that Clark’s place in the middle of the pack so far has nothing to do with her credentials or ability but everything to do with geopolitical realities. You can make the same case about the team of experts working in the background of her campaign.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs went into battle for Clark with its eyes wide open. Its people are campaignhardened, having spent 10 years on New Zealand’s bid to win a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. After the stunning success of that campaign, there must have been reluctance to take on the Clark bid. There were reputations to think of after all. Having masterminded a victorious Security Council bid, entering a competition where the odds seemed stacked in favour of defeat would not have been appealing.
There is also a question of resources; the Security Council campaign sucked up time, people, money and energy. Likewise Campaign Clark. So there would have been mixed feelings when Clark flew into New Zealand one day in April for a private meeting with Key to ask for his backing.
Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully was also at that meeting. Having been so hands-on in the bid to win a Security Council seat, McCully would have known just how much strain it would have put on his ministry. He also knew how much of a toll it would take personally.
Key refers to McCully ‘‘running himself into the ground’’ as foreign minister and he is right. McCully’s travel schedule in the leadup to the bid was manic; a notorious micromanager – a trait that has won him no friends and may eventually be his undoing – his hours are beyond punishing. At the close of last year, he landed in the intensive care unit at hospital, the removal of a benign tumour on his pancreas turning almost deadly when he contracted a superbug. About 20 kilos lighter, he returned to work and said he was going to ‘‘ease back into things’’ but instead embarked on an equally demanding schedule; on the sidelines of this week’s Security Council hearings he was squeezing in up to 15 bilaterals a day.
Clark would not have been the prime motivator for those meetings, but McCully – and Key – are now so invested in her campaign neither of them has wasted any opportunity at the UN this week to press her case. Key has been so ‘‘boots ’n all’’ in fact, he used up one of his biggest diplomatic cards, calling in a personal favour from US President Barack Obama by asking him to take a phone call and hear him out on why Clark should get the job.
There are only so many times a New Zealand prime minister can ask the president of the United States to take his call. That Key did so to support Clark says everything you need to know about how genuinely he is backing her. Key even gave up face-time with Obama in New York this week by using a moment when their paths crossed to introduce Clark. And it didn’t end there. Key used his speech to the UN General Assembly to plug Clark’s case again; she was, he told those gathered there, ‘‘a natural leader’’, a woman with the ‘‘courage, experience and skills’’ needed to do the job. Anyone who travelled forward in time for 2008 would have scratched their head and thought they had arrived in a parallel universe.
So why do it? Why would Key and McCully put everything on the line for Clark? And why would New Zealand invest so much time, energy, and resources – not just in Clark, but on a 10-year campaign to sit on a body that at best seems like a talk-fest, and at worst seems to fail at every critical juncture in international affairs.
The answer to that lies in Helen Clark’s profile and presence on the international stage – when her name is mentioned, it is invariably done so in the context of her being a strong, independent and honest voice on the world stage. That enhances the NZ Inc brand, particularly among those states in Asia and the Middle East wiith whom we invest so much diplomacy. And the answer also lay on the floor of the Security Council in the moments between sessions on the day it debated Syria – a debate forced on to the agenda by New Zealand, even when the likes of Australia and Britain counselled us against it, probably because they saw it as being above our pay scale.
As McCully and Key mingled with the likes of British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and others it was a glimpse into the real world of diplomacy, one in which personal relationships mean everything. And being at the same table as the big guns is what helps foster those relationships. That debate did not solve anything in Syria. But that in itself helped focus attention on the failings of the Security Council, which New Zealand has not shirked from pointing out by making reform a central plank of its campaign to win a seat.
Backing Clark for the job as a reforming force for the UN is another way for Key and McCully to put their money where their mouth is.