KEY POINTS:
It's a cheery, springy kind of Otago morning which greets the leader of the National party on his last official full day on the job.
He can smell the fresh, Southern countryside blasting through the air-conditioning into the front seat of the 3-litre gas-guzzling silver Crown limo as it cruises to town with Ashley behind the wheel.
"Ashley's one of the best," Brash says, and just stops himself from squeezing the elderly driver's knee in affection, as they roll along the highway towards Dunedin city.
This will be one of the last rides Brash has with Ashley, or any other Crown chauffeurs for that matter, in their lovely big Crown cars.
Next week he will become an ordinary MP - the kind who has to scramble to his appointments in taxis. Either that or he'll "be pruning kiwifruit on my kiwifruit orchard" he chortles, alluding to his unwillingness to be sent to the backbenches when the new leader is chosen tomorrow.
Of course, he laughs, he's not sure how far he'll really push that threat to leave Parliament. It might take a front bench seat to keep him from packing it in - but he'd rather not speculate on that. There's one thing he knows for certain: "I'm certainly too young to retire."
And certainly too young to throw himself "on a stick of dynamite" and become a sacrificial lamb for National by resigning in the wake of Nicky Hager's investigative time-bomb Hollow Men.
The book details compromising email exchanges around Brash's leadership, and his resignation is a saving grace for the party.
He had no intention of being the fall-guy. He continues to insist he'd been planning to resign for weeks before he knew Hager's book was coming out, and there was no pressure from the party board to go.
Nevertheless he's preparing himself for the possibility that he may end up the scapegoat anyway, if the book proves too damaging to the party.
He will find himself expendable in the scramble to protect new leader-in-waiting, glamour-boy millionaire John Key - and he knows it.
But gee, it's a lovely Dunedin day outside. Brash leaves Ashley to do a loop of the neighbourhood and heads his coterie of ladies in to his first Otago appointment of the day.
And there it is. That spring in his step as he leaps forward to hold the door open for one, two, three, four of us to go through.
Brash may have just dumped his prime ministerial dreams at the door of some smarmy self-made kid from Parnell but, 24 hours after resigning, he is positively invigorated.
Come on, he giggles, let's try and squeeze into what MP Katherine Rich has just promised is the world's smallest lift at the Otago Daily Times building. Inside, Brash stands tall, with his arms hanging obediently beside his legs amid the heady squish of hairspray, power suits and breasts. He's beaming.
Rich laughs. "You could say this is the greatest day of his life." And you'd almost think it was. Could he be relieved to have the leadership over and done with?
No, he says later. Not at all.
He's contradiction in motion.
This Don Brash - the chivalrous door-opener, who breathlessly enthuses over brightly-coloured flowers on the side of the road - just doesn't fit with the other Don Brash - the one who allegedly cheated on both his wives, and (if you believe Hager) also the nation.
It seems ridiculous that this friendly, slightly bumbling banker could have deceived us about his connections with the wacky Exclusive Brethren church.
He's fretting about the picture of him that resembles Colonel Klink from Hogan's Heroes and somehow managed to make the front page of every major paper.
"Oh what a terrible, ghastly photo," he says, grabbing at the paper and frowning. "It does make me look like I'm wearing a monocle." Then he stabs at the deep turned-down lips and dour expression on his face, looks up and pleads, not for the last time today: "Do I really look like that?"
Hager would have us think this goofy, gentlemanly image is a construct to swindle rabidly right-wing policies on the general public under the guise of a moderate centrist party. That he'd be capable of such a deception seems inconceivable on this road trip with polite, cheery Brash.
Then again truth can be a funny old thing.
It's like he tells Neil Collins from Radio Dunedin, which is just a few warm handshakes down the road from the ODT.
Reserve Bank governors in the pre floating exchange-rate days couldn't very well tell the country they were thinking about devaluing the currency. It was the one time they were allowed to mislead the public, he says. "They'd have triggered an enormous currency crisis. They'd have to deny it."
The same is true of political leaders, like him, when they're thinking of leaving.
"If you say, 'look, I'm giving thought to giving it away in a month or two' then it's all over."
Collins reels off a quick question about whether Brash empathises with world leaders who crawl into a corner to take a few pills and go to sleep, to which Brash politely replies he's not suicidal.
Then his favourite song is played - Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline - and to the tunes of "good times never seemed so good" he signs the guestbook and leaves.
You might think a man who's just resigned as leader might go home and be with his family on a Friday when he's not required in Parliament. But Brash has made prior appointments.
He's got a five-minute speech to make at the end-of-year do for the southern region of National Party and a few media interviews in between.
All leave no time to read the Hager book - or apparently to be briefed on its contents - so he can't very well be interviewed by media who have read the book.
He really wants to rebut the allegations, he says. Vigorously, he promises. But other than my brief scramble in the car later, he just can't really find the time today. "I haven't read the book."
Nor can he on Saturday either. There just isn't time, his minder explains.
That leaves? Sunday. Well that's useless. Then Monday, when he resigns as leader, and - the party hopes - takes much of the relevance of the book with him.
Could this be a dastardly strategy to avoid ever answering the questions?
TV3 has just sprung him in the foyer, a reporter helpfully brandishing the first chapter for him to read.
No time, he explains after we had escaped the cameras.
"I just smiled sweetly and said I had not read it yet."
Yes, a day is a long time in politics. One can quickly become yesterday's news if one's careful. Even lunches offer enough time to get things wrapped up.
Nuclear policies can be over and done with by then, and so can leaders, as Deputy PM Michael Cullen so heartlessly pointed out shortly after Thursday lunchtime when Brash resigned.
Lunch starts with rousing applause as Brash floats into a greying sea of National supporters, and only briefly comes unstuck when a woman reminds the group that "Don is leader till lunchtime". Jaws drop as it dawns on her why the expression is so familiar. "On Monday," she scrambles, "until caucus chooses another leader and till then he needs to be treated as leader."
Much clapping. Then there are pleasantries over quiche and asparagus sandwiches and many thanks to Brash for lifting the party so high in the polls it is now upstaging Labour. Nevertheless he didn't win the election, and because of that he'd thought about resigning a surprising number of times since then, he concedes when we're back in the car.
He'd planned to go after the last election. If he'd lost.
Party hierarchy begged him to stay. His family wanted him to go all along. His wife Je Lan was never happy with his decision to become a politician.
So how was the welcome home to Auckland on Thursday night? His adult children were delighted, he says.
What about Je Lan? Oh that's right. "She was pleased, too."
The resignation was a shock however, to all in caucus except close confidant Murray McCully who knew it was coming.
He'd told McCully, party president Judy Kirk and his chief of staff his plan several weeks ago. The response? He laughs. "The comments varied, actually." Apparently from the 'don't do it', to the 'go for it' variety.
So a bloodless coup. Or was it? Isn't he bleeding at least a little?
Well it had been a dream to be PM, he concedes.
He wanted to make New Zealand a better place.
"But I think one of the things that was my undoing was a television focus on a couple of very untidy photo opportunities which should never have happened," he offers.
None which were directly his fault mind you - but rather a rash of unbelievably bad luck.
First there was the plank-walking incident - "staff should have been there to make sure I didn't attend".
But ultimately, is he actually suited to politics?
Part of his appeal was the fact he didn't seem like a real politician. He was the smart guy we could believe in and relate to.
Yet he was berated by the media for not playing the part of a typical aggressive politician and being hopeless at political attacks in the House.
"I'm not sure what a typical politician is," he muses. "I've never seen much point in attack for the sake of attack, that's very true."
Plus he knew the Labour front bench well from his time as Reserve Bank Governor and even had some of them over for dinner. That made things difficult.
All along the gentleman Don seems to have got in the way of the political Don. Yet the inconsistencies in his gentlemanly side didn't help, either. Revelations of his extra-marital affairs while taking the moral high ground with the Government; excusing himself from effectively debating Helen Clark because he couldn't shout at a woman - and now new allegations from Hager that he'd effectively manipulated the truth.
None of this has helped.
Mind you, he's only human. Made from this very Otago landscape in fact. The little place we just passed called, Allanton, was named after a forebear, he helpfully points out.
And his grandfather was born on Saddle Hill over the way.
His sister and his daughter call to check on him while he's in the car. "My daughter Ruth is the only 38-year-old I know who blows kisses when she leaves a message," he smiles.
Blood runs thick in his veins. But we'd be deceiving ourselves if we thought politics didn't.
This is the son of a Presbyterian minister who fought hard for pacifism and who once said "the greatest threat to the human race is nuclear weapons".
Brash's reply, two years after his father Alan died in 2002, was that New Zealand's anti-nuke policy would be "gone by lunchtime".