More mud backfiring

Not that anyone except Sonic and Selma actually thought there was anything to labour's H-Fee attacks on Key, but a former SFO Director has come out and said:

Mr Key was simply one in a “vast array of innocent people, potential witnesses, in a massive fact-gathering exercise. I feel compelled to fully support the reported comments of John Key in relation to the H-Fee transaction. It should not need to be said that John Key was completely innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. For any politician to hint or suggest otherwise would be absolutely rubbish and pure mischief-making”.

This latest attempt has so backfired that Labour now denies they knew anything about it.  Oh except for the fact Trevor mallard kept referring to it in the House.  And Mike Williams claims no knowledge at all – the same Mike Williams heard boasting on planes about dirt they had on John Key.

Fran O'Sullivan writes that Key has emerged unscathed from the smears:

If they are to ram home an allegation implicating Key in the H fee fraud, Labour will now need to produce cast-iron evidence – not simply a guilt by association smear. Right now the public sympathy is running with Key.

John Armstrong sees this as Labour self-destructing:

Is it a destructive mixture of fear and bravado coupled with blind panic which has driven Labour to turn what had been a slow-burning campaign to undermine John Key's credibility into a full-blown and foolhardy character assassination job?

How else to explain the behaviour of Pete Hodgson, the kamikaze pilot who forgot to pack his aircraft with explosives?

His resorting to smear tactics without providing any substance to justify them reeked of the truly desperate.

Labour crossed a major threshold this week in switching its focus away from Key's supposed policy inconsistencies and on to matters of personal character.

Like the junkie who is ever increasing the dose just to get the same hit, Labour's failure to get any bounce in the polls out of its anti-Key onslaught is seeing it scrape the bottom of the barrel even harder to turn up something, anything, it can chuck in the direction of national's leader.

Don't expect it to stop though.