John Roughan: Master of illusion needs help

What a strangely insecure personality we find in Winston Peters. That may be the reason he remains so damned likeable despite his low politics and ludicrous self-importance, the reason he is "Winston" to us all.

His insecurity seems to have worsened if anything, over the years. He was always prickly in interviews but more recently it has become ridiculous. He can barely be asked the time of day without demanding to know what the question is implying.

He has built a career largely on illusion and he knows it. He seems, for example, to bear an abiding dislike of the media and he probably does, to the degree that we have not always taken him as seriously as he would like.

But then, I remember the frustration of reporting him in the corridors of Parliament when he was riding some scandal, real or imagined, and he did not always take himself as seriously as we had to take him.

He had a solemn face for a television camera and a quite different one for those of us reporting only his words. He could put words with the darkest national and moral implications into our tape recorders while regarding us with a twinkle in his eye and a smirk on his lips.

He knew we knew what he was doing and he knew we could do nothing about it. The news value of his tease was such that we were obliged to follow it like mindless dogs and he delighted in keeping us yapping for more.

Once or twice, the winebox notably, he was slipped something worthwhile. Usually he hinted at much more than he had.

Even as we were reporting every scrap he threw us, he would maintain a public pose of antagonism to the media, one of the set-piece demons of his speeches.

He has the public believing he and the press are mortal enemies but that is an illusion, too. In person he can be tediously coy but never nasty. In fact - and he probably regards this as a state secret - he seems to like reporters' company.

The parliamentary press gallery has long maintained its own public illusion that it lives cheek by jowl with politicians after hours, and perhaps it did before my time there.

But since the 1980s MPs have been an abstemious bunch on the whole. You could count on one hand the number who might come into the press bar when the House rose and one of them was Winston.

He was relaxed, engaging, never overbearing and could have an intense argument in good humour.

He seemed to have everything going for him in those days. Like most who watched him, I used to believe he would have become Prime Minister if he had played his cards differently. Now I wonder.

The little scene we saw in Washington this week exposed his limitations as seldom before.

Doubtless he thought he was doing what any foreign minister loves most, having television take mute film of him meeting a big name. But when this one, Senator John McCain, accepted questions from reporters Winston found himself ignored.

Furthermore, the reporters were getting better material than they would have got second-hand from him afterwards. At that rate, he would not make the six o-clock news back here.

A normal foreign minister wouldn't care, since the senator was saying everything the Government wanted to hear.

A more secure personality would have waited until one of the press asked an undiplomatic question and then gently insinuated to his host that they should talk first.

Not this one. Winston endured it for perhaps a minute before interrupting McCain on a hokey pretext. McCain looked bemused.

The Senator, touted to be the next Republican nominee for President, had been about to state his support for a free trade agreement.

The debacle was a direct consequence of Winston's needlessly secretive nature. Any other foreign minister would have taken the travelling press into his confidence at the outset, and his staff could have made sure the minister was in control of his meetings.

But almost until his departure for the United States Winston kept his itinerary from the reporters lest his meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice should fall through.

He feared for his dignity if the Secretary should find something more pressing to attend to, like Lebanon. That is the scale of his insecurity.

During 25 years in Parliament Winston Peters has spent only five in government, two as Minister of Maori Affairs before he left the National Party, two as Treasurer in coalition with National and the past year as Foreign Minister in loose association with Labour.

He can list one significant, if dubious, achievement: the abolition of the superannuation means test, the "surtax", and he deserved more credit than he was given for an attempt to introduce compulsory personal superannuation funds in the mid 1990s.

When he sought the role of Foreign Minister this time he made it his mission to repair the 20-year-old nuclear problem with the United States. Helen Clark, one of the principal architects of that problem, would probably be happy to see him do it, too. It needs to be done but there are no votes in it for her.

The time is ripe for him. The nuclear policy has been a practical irrelevance to the US since it took nuclear weapons off its surface ships and, as Michael Cullen observed some time ago, if the US Navy wants to send a conventionally powered ship here, Labour would no longer have a problem.

I hope Winston gets to welcome it. Maybe then he might relax, trust people, trust himself, take himself less seriously, as he can in private, and count himself a success for having survived on his own terms for so long.