Don Brash, the bouncy kangaroo

Don Brash says he is doing "an effective job" as National's leader. Picture / Paul Estcourt

One of the many engaging things about Don Brash is the way he turns up - bounces up is more like it - to interviews without a minder.

We had coffee in St Heliers and very jolly it was too. It is like taking tea with Kanga: he's so irrepressibly nice and polite and bounce by measured bounce he willingly goes, from topic to topic, never looking to see if there might be stony ground below.

He will soon tell me that he's very angry indeed - about the economy - but he doesn't do angry terribly well.

You think: You could bop him over the head with a mallet and he'd pop right back up, looking a little hurt that people could be so unkind but ready to forgive.

He'll tell you things, even when you warn him that you're about to ask a mean question. He'll just laugh and say, "I'm bracing myself", and you can tell that he hasn't, not a bit.

You can ask him about things which, from most politicians, would earn you a stern look and an instruction to move along.

This is nice for journalists and you wouldn't want to write anything that might change this but, really, he shouldn't be allowed out on his own.

I ask him whether he was disappointed in the coverage of his Orewa speech and he says, "Well, the Herald didn't run the speech itself on the front page. They ran the leaked version of the speech, ha, on the front page... It was a mistake by one of my staff".

Now, he may be assuming a question along these lines is coming. In which case he got in early. But any politician with instinct would have waited for a cue.

The press gallery is in Wellington; a newspaper is a big place. I didn't know about the mistake. The question would never have been asked.

Then he compounds this impression of his office being a bit Fawlty Towers by telling me that he could hardly be annoyed, could he, with his staff member because "you won't remember, I suspect," but two years ago he accidentally leaked his own speech by sending it to a Beehive staffer.

We are interrupted here by a bloke who wants to talk at Brash: "Where's your mate?" "Which one?" says Brash, "I've got 47 of them."

"You've got," says the bloke, "a handful of good men and the others are just the garbage."

It turns out he was hoping to see Brash out with "what's his name? Big mouth from Epsom." He means Rodney Hide and I am laughing so much that when Brash says "Aah, where were we?" I say, "I dunno. I want to know where your mate Rodney is."

So he had an easy escape route there. But no. He says, "Ha ha, ha ha. Media coverage and leaks". And goes on telling me all about the mistake which - he's quite right - I wouldn't have remembered.

Later I ask him about more emails: the ones Winston Peters reckons he has and which he has said will put an end to Brash's career.

He says he's not at all worried because "first of all, why didn't he release them pre-election?" Also, "I can't for the life of me think of anything I've either sent or received."

"Well, knowing you, who knows what you've sent where!" I shriek. He looks completely startled at this and says, "What do you mean, 'knowing me?"' As though he hasn't just spent 10 minutes talking in such painful detail about his leaky office it was like watching someone stick pins in his eyes.

I suggest he should have his office hermetically sealed. This he takes with a grin and a raised eyebrow.

The leaked email story isn't the first thing he tells me, but it is pretty much the second.

The first is in response to a gift of a question: How does he think Orewa went? He says: "I think it went at least as well as I could have expected."

At some stage he will say that he thinks he has done, and is doing, "an effective job" as leader.

I come back to this - because I'm trying to help him here - and say, "Couldn't you talk it up a bit?" Honestly, nobody likes a braggart of a politician but there are limits.

When I first went to see him in 2003 and asked him to give a sales pitch for his leadership he sat in silence for a long time before listing his possible disadvantages.

He talked about his age then, and it's still being talked about.

This is a perception which, he says, is very hard to dispel. It is annoying, he says, and, obviously, at 65 he's not going to be worried by his age. He launches into a terrible impersonation of Tim Shadbolt here to accompany a long story about how years ago he said he'd still be mayor at 80.

This is most amusing, in a dotty way. But to come back to perception, which is almost all in politics: what can he do? "Well, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm not going to climb Kilimanjaro."

He says he doesn't do venom but that's not half bad. He looks very cheerful when I award him a point for it.

I wonder whether with Orewa he's created something of a rod for his own back and he does one of his terrible "eehs" which serve as an announcement he is about to begin talking and says, "Yep, that's fair comment".

"There is a huge expectation buildup and in one sense [it] is a rod for my own back. On the other hand the challenge for an Opposition leader is always to get media coverage.

Anyway, Orewa this year has been pretty much free of controversy. "I managed to avoid losing another spokesman, which was encouraging. John Key and I joked that a male Pakeha would be a good step this time because the last one [to quit] was a female Pakeha and the previous one was a female Maori."

Now this, I'm sure, is the sort of joke politicians make all the time. I'm not so sure that many politicians then go on to tell insider jokes to journalists. But, as I say, he is irrepressible.

The mean question was this. Who would he rather be rolled by: Bill English or John Key? This makes him laugh hugely. Then, "Well, you limit the choice to two. I think there are actually several people on that front bench."

I know what he's doing: making the Nats sound as though they're a party of clever, capable politicians, many potential leadership material. But, I'm not about to let him list them, for God's sake.

At this point he's supposed to be at least attempting to put to rest the rumbling about rolling him the way he rolled English. I tell him I'm trying to help here, by shutting him up. Small chance. Ten minutes on and Judith Collins' name comes up and he says, "She's very good, She's one of the people you did not name earlier".

I give up and say, "So you'd prefer to be rolled by Judith, would you?"

"Ha ha ha. Have I stopped beating my wife or whatever!"

He's a sober, frugal gentleman really, we all know that. But he was so entertaining (if occasionally unwittingly) and played along with such equanimity he should have the last word.

So I ask him whether he will be leader of the Nats into the next election? He says, "That's my intention."