KEY POINTS:
Rodney Hide is given the choice of a Japanese restaurant or the Backbencher, where the menu lists a salad named "Rodney's (Would Be) Caesar - Lost in Narcissism."
He chooses the Japanese and orders a sashimi lunch box from which he eats only the slices of raw fish and a pile of shaved carrot. He doesn't even look at the rice.
He likes sashimi and tells us about his two favourite Japanese haunts in Auckland.
"I'm their biggest customer," he says.
But he's not - not any more.
His "makeover" after Dancing with the Stars is a well-told story. Suffice to say the cherub cheeks are gone. The gaze is the same, direct, but in its new landscape of hollowed cheeks and jutting angles he looks quite hawkish and almost fierce. His teeth are whiter.
His transformation is not only physical - it's also political and he is as evangelical about this as he is about exercise.
He speaks of it as though he suddenly saw the light from the slurry of his muck-raking days, and it comes across as something of a mea culpa for Act's bad polling in 2005 when his party was slashed from nine MPs to two.
Hide now says it's ironic that in the week after Sir Roger Douglas returned to Act's fold and before the party's annual conference, the media remember he exists only because they wanted a pre-skinny Rodney tubthumping quote on the Speakers' Tour.
He sounds surprised, and frustrated, that the media have not yet given up on this and realised that the perkbuster has left the building. In his place is Serious Rodney.
There is a very clear delineation in Hide's life - Before Skinny and After Skinny.
Asked what he does in his spare time, he starts his answer with a long explanation of what he didn't do in the old days because he had no spare time.
Now he exercises. The 51 year old mountain bikes, takes dancing lessons, and goes to a gym, Remuera Rackets, in his Epsom electorate. He used to go to the movies "but I was still thinking about work. When I'm puffing up a hill or concentrating on my tango steps, I'm not thinking about politics."
It's possible his techniques have been too successful, because when the name of Louisa Wall - Labour's new MP who was sworn in last week - is raised, Hide says "who's Louisa Wall? It rings a bell."
'I don't worry," he says at one point, when he's asked if he's scared the small parties will get squashed out of the election in the battle of the Titans, National and Labour.
"I learned not to worry after the last election. I decided in 2004 and 2005 I'd carried such a lot of worry that I wouldn't worry for the rest of my life."
Now, he doesn't bother so much about what the media say, or even the polls, although Act is foundering below 1 per cent.
It remains to be seen what Epsom will think of the new Rodney, with his deliberately lower media profile and his shift to gravitas.
He says he did it all for them because "Epsom voters don't want a pitbull," he says.
"They didn't want a gunslinger. They wanted an MP to represent them and not be embroiled in any fights."
He describes 2004 and 2005 as "pretty tough."
"We took a drubbing," he says of the 2005 election when Hide won Epsom but got only two of Act's nine MPs - himself and Heather Roy - back into Parliament, "and we had to take that seriously."
"With just two MPs in Parliament, I realised that for three years we were going to be pretty irrelevant. I could jump up and down and say 'this is wrong, this is wrong' but the relevance isn't there, is it?"
He says he has calmed down and spent his time working on his red-tape slashing Regulatory Responsibility Bill, which passed its first reading with support from Labour.
"It was pretty hard work running a scandal, but it's much harder work writing a bill. It's not the stuff that will get headlines, but it requires a lot of effort."
Also, " you don't want to be turning up to a church group or school having just had a smash-up in Parliament and people going 'oh, there's that guy who is always arguing'."
Where goeth the weight, goeth the man.
"Call it "my year of living seriously" a colleague says of this piece - a pun on Hide's recent book outlining his transformation, called My Year of Living Dangerously. Another possible twist is "my year of taking myself seriously". Over a 90-minute lunch, he laughs properly only once, when he muddles up the jugs on the table and pours soy sauce into his green tea.
He gets slightly prickly when he's asked if his dancing has improved since Dancing with the Stars.
"I was pretty good," he says.
He's asked whether there's a new woman in his life. He says "there are always rumours," and how flattering it is.
Then he says, "no", and then "I keep that stuff out of it. I can neither confirm nor deny."
He's changed and it wasn't all about dancing. His marriage broke up, he moved in with his parents.
There is a very long pause when he's asked if he thought of quitting politics.
"I don't know if this is quite the same question, but I always ask myself is what I'm doing worthwhile? It's not enough for me just to turn up. So I have had that question and sometimes I haven't been able to answer it. But I always found something constructive to do."
The photographer arrives after Hide has finished his sashimi. Food is wanted for a photo so another small plate of sashimi is ordered. "They used to take pictures of me eating pies," he says.
Roger's back, situation normal
These are happy days in the life of Rodney Hide.
All the stars are in alignment. Sir Roger Douglas is back, Key's lurch to the centre has given Act an opportunity to lure back its former support base, and then there's Epsom.
Act, says Hide, has "an opportunity like never before".
The MP is slavishly grateful to the "good people of Epsom".
"I'd never take them for granted," he says, repeatedly, but he's quite confident of holding on to the seat.
Hide just smiles when asked if he leapt for joy when he heard National had re-selected Richard Worth as its candidate. It was interpreted by the media as a quiet nod to Epsom to keep Rodney on.
But he answers "yes" very quickly when asked if he saw it as a sign National was happy for him to keep the seat.
His campaign is likely to be less frenetic than last time round, when he delivered his patter until he sounded like an infomercial on auto-repeat: "Vote for me and you get me, and Richard Worth back in on the list, but wait there's more, because you'll also get a free set of Act MPs with it."
This time he intends to tell them "that I've been a good MP".
"I haven't gone out and just said 'Well, I'm the MP for Epsom.' I've gone out and done the work. Now I believe other political parties and the media accept that I'll win the seat. I'm more working on it than others, because I'll never take it for granted."
Act's colours are very firmly fixed to National's prospects of electoral success, even though Hide's campaign this year will try to carve out Act's niche by telling voters that National is the same as Labour.
Nearly 60 per cent of Epsom voters picked National for their party vote in 2005, but Hide says he's asked them and "overwhelmingly, they don't want their MP to be just a de facto National MP".
He says Act policies align more with National, "but it's not a case of 'we back National, right or wrong' or 'we oppose Labour, right or wrong'."
Asked if he would ever enter some form of arrangement with Labour, he gets to "no" in a roundabout way, saying it would happen only if it was "a very different Labour government," like the 1980s one packed with Rogernomes.
He thinks the prospect of National's success, and therefore Act's chance to shine, is part of the reason for Douglas popping up to campaign for Act after years of estrangement and sniping about Hide's muck-raking style.
Hide is effusive about 70 year old Douglas, who he says has "big vision" and "principles" and is "iconic".
"People think, 'oh yes, if Roger says this it must be important'."
He thinks there should be "a reflective piece about who Sir Roger is in the media" because he's been to university campuses and discovered that people aged under 40 don't know who Douglas is. He doesn't really care that others - those who reviled Douglas and his policies of the 1980s - wished they didn't know who Douglas was.
Act isn't looking for 45 per cent of the vote, and those who do not appreciate Douglas' finer qualities are unlikely to be Act supporters anyway, he says. "If you were thinking of voting Act and Roger put you off, you'd be under a misapprehension."
When he talks about post-election Act, he refers to "several MPs".
Quite where these will come from is uncertain, as Act is currently polling about 1 per cent.
