KEY POINTS:
Watching the post-censure antics of Winston Peters it truly feels like I've fallen into a world where everything is turned around. Black is white, the sun rises in the west, and a zillion angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Listening to his interviews on Radio Waatea with Willie Jackson and on Close Up with Mark Sainsbury, you can see the defence he will use in the run-up to the election in the hope of rebuilding his party's support.
He is the victim of a conspiracy to pervert the truth by a biased media. The charges were cooked up by his enemies from the Winebox inquiry.
The affair has been subverted by the Act and National parties to destroy him and they have been aided in this by the treachery of the Maori Party and the duplicity of the Greens and United Future.
If there are any mistakes made or wrongdoing done it is the fault of party officials or staff, not him.
The Serious Fraud Office, the police and the Electoral Office aren't investigating Peters. They're probing the New Zealand First party.
To a question from Jackson, quoting the Progressive Jim Anderton saying Peters had some explaining to do about accepting donations from business, Peters spelled it out.
"This is a New Zealand First matter Jim Anderton is raising. It's not a Winston Peters matter." He went on to add, "We have some explaining to do. But he means New Zealand First. I lead the parliamentary party. The president of the party and the organisation is something else."
It may sound extraordinary that Peters seeks to distance himself from the party he created and has led since its inception.
To most people Peters and New Zealand First are synonymous but, technically, he is correct.
If I was a New Zealand First party official or staffer I would be a little nervous hearing that. It sounds like Peters is prepared to throw them to the wolves if the investigations find something wrong.
Of course, presumably as leader of the Parliamentary party he must have some role in the party's executive and governance process and, therefore, must have a measure of responsibility for what the party has done. But he seems not to acknowledge that.
When a mistake can be proved he blames those around him.
For example, when he denied being at the Karaka horse sales with Owen Glenn and it was proven conclusively he was present, he blames his staff. They had told him he was in hospital at the time and could not have been there.
He had no time to check and he accepted the word of the mistaken staff member.
At the time he had no recall of lunching with Glenn at the sales but he seems to have developed recovered memory syndrome because he now remembers clearly not thanking Glenn at the lunch he cannot remember.
Sometimes the personal deficiencies of those around him are used to rebut evidence against him. For example, Peters says it is wrong to claim he had his lawyer, Brian Henry, email bank account details to Glenn immediately after he talked to the billionaire. He swears Henry's typing skills are too slow for him to have done it in the time suggested.
He asks us to believe, by some amazing coincidence, some weird rip in the fabric of space and time, Henry just happened to be pecking out that fateful message at exactly the same moment as Peters was chatting to the man from Monaco.
He even argues that because the Glenn donation covered legal costs he incurred on behalf of New Zealand First in the Tauranga electoral petition and was paid to reimburse National's Bob Clarkson that, it was National that received the donation, not he or New Zealand First.
Weirdest of all is the media conspiracy, of which apparently I am a chief conspirator because TV3 cut short its live coverage of him at the privileges committee.
"TV3 had shut the direct transmission down. Why? Because it wasn't going their way.
"These people don't want the truth," Peters says.
Actually, it was a cock-up not a conspiracy. TV3 cut back to an episode of the The Simpsons because it lost its nerve and feared it was losing viewers and revenue from lost ad breaks.
I know it was a decision it regretted the next day when it saw the ratings and the huge number of people who had been watching.
Peters insists I am biased because he is suing me.
To the best of my knowledge he is not suing me.
He does have legal action pending against TVNZ from the time I was running news there.
That case is over a story about NZ First's funding and big business donations. Sound familiar?
