John Roughan: Why Winston must be more cheerful

If ever a man had swallowed a dead rat it was Winston Peters on Wednesday. Lining up for the obligatory wedding photograph with Helen Clark after the swearing-in at Government House, his face said it all.

"What am I doing here? These are not my kind of people."

Even the presence of a coiffured dame, the Governor General, and a fellow traveller, Peter Dunne, could not lift his spirit. Dame Silvia Cartwright was one of "them" and so was Dunne. Look at him, cheap suit, coat unbuttoned, grinning like a man who is at home with this tribe.

Where did he get that weird hair-do? Looks like he designed it himself. Typical.

And the press over there, none of them giving him credit for being here. They keep quoting that comment about the baubles of office. They don't understand him. Never have. Though, hell, he gives them plenty of opportunity. No politician spends more time carousing with the press, but they won't take him seriously.

Some of them, like John Campbell on TV3, cannot forgive Clark for going with him and Dunne rather than the Greens. If they cannot understand how scary the Greens are to most people they have no way of understanding why he is here - and how much he is suffering for it.

Winston probably didn't realise how hard the swearing-in would be. When the Prime Minister stroked his ego and appealed to him to break the deadlock the election had left, he felt noble about it.

That last-minute letter from Don Brash, suggesting National had Dunne and the Maori Party as well as Act on side, didn't tempt him. It wasn't just that National and the Maori Party are not credible companions, not yet anyway; he knew the kind of Government that Brash, Act and United Future could be.

Dunne's party is conservative on social issues but its economics are very liberal. During the election campaign their finance spokesman Gordon Copeland gave an interview to the Business Herald in which he accused National of being "a bit wimpish" on privatisation of state-owned enterprise.

United Future wanted to float 40 per cent of just about all SOEs to small investors. The benefits, said Copeland, would be to expose the companies to shareholder scrutiny, help build an "ownership society" and give the stock exchange a boost.

That might sound like common sense but to Peters it is anathema. He has that much in common with Clark. He agrees with her on most things. So why was that swearing-in so hard for her as well as him? She wore a fixed smile in the picture, he looked into the middle-distance. It was nothing personal; it was tribal.

Peters, in the phrase coined by Mike Moore in 1996, is "tribal National". He may still loathe the party he left long ago but he can't help who he is.

Political orientation operates far below the level of policy, at which Clark and Peters can find plenty of agreement, and defies even ready social classification. Clark is from classic National stock, a Waikato farming family. Yet she is Labour to the core. Peters is a member of a large Northland Maori family, which normally spells Labour. But he exudes National from every pore.

He is in fact more "Tory" in the traditional sense than the National Party has been for some time. Conservatism in the English tradition combines two strains: a paternal, protective, insular and charitable "Tory" outlook, and a "Whig" commitment to the rights, rewards and prosperity of private enterprise in free markets.

The two currents were long expressed in opposed political parties in England - the Tories standing for protection, the Liberals for free trade - until universal voting rights brought socialism into play in the 20th century.

In New Zealand the arrival of the Labour Party caused conservative and liberal parties to unite in what Marxists would call their class interest. But class, as Clark and Peters illustrate, is an elusive concept these days. The word implies a determinism of birth that has not really applied since the advent of mass education.

It remains a disadvantage to be born into a poor or unhappy household, or one that does not value education. But for several generations now, well-organised societies have provided the education and the economy that allow people to improve their circumstances.

The tribal divide in politics now, it seems to me, has to do with people's response to opportunity, not just the different uses they make of it but more important, the view they form of the relative value of personal effort and social organisation.

Most of the policies Peters espouses are socialist but he would never accept the label. He calls his philosophy "compassionate conservatism". At heart he values the individual before society. That is the difference. He advocates an arrangement such as universal superannuation as a return due to every taxpayer, not as socialists value it, for the social cohesion it can provide.

But the difference is more than philosophical, it is cultural. Just about all of the Labour Cabinet sworn in this week were educated in liberal arts or social sciences and went to work in salaried employment. They are the sort of people who live modestly within their income, not on overdraft as business does. They do not borrow against uncertain earnings. They are content with a fairly average lifestyle and speak, dress and act in a way that implies little interest in material wealth.

The culture of National is quite different and Peters exhibits it to a greater degree than anyone in the National Party. He lives well, dresses well, parties well and loves the company of business people though he doesn't trust them. Nothing stirs him like a whiff of corporate crime.

The conventional view is that he would have led the National Party by now had its economic liberalism not driven him to set up a protectionist alternative. But I'm not so sure. He was never a team player.

Now he is supposed to learn the art of diplomacy for this crowd. He will have to put a more cheerful face on it.