KEY POINTS:
Winston Peters' embarrassing admission, despite months of blustering denials, that he had received a $100,000 donation from businessman Owen Glenn poses some real risks, not only for himself but for several other political players.
The latest poll shows New Zealand First still sitting below the MMP threshold on
4 per cent and his popularity as preferred prime minister at a measly 3 per cent. He desperately needs some good publicity from this weekend's party conference in Auckland.
Instead, he will be wriggling under reporters' questions about his party's murky funding structure and what exactly Glenn may have wanted in return for his generosity.
It is obvious from a leaked letter from Glenn published in the Weekend Herald last week that Glenn clearly believes he is still in the running for the honorary consul-general role in Monaco, a position Peters, as Foreign Minister, has the power to grant.
It is not clear yet what, if any, questions Peters answered on this issue in Parliament and if he can be found to have misled the House.
He is certainly guilty of the much more minor offence of misleading and wrongly abusing the media.
Peters should be able to avoid too much flak next week with his mother's funeral and the Association of South East Asian Nations meetings in Singapore.
This puts Helen Clark squarely in the firing line. In the House she will be writhing under Opposition pressure for blithely accepting Peters' assurance at face value that he did not receive any payment from Glenn.
National will be keen to paint her as a slave to Peters, scared of rupturing her fragile government.
Bill English has already gone on the attack this weekend, carefully targeting Clark and her party president Mike Williams, not Peters, because National do not want to alienate Winston in case they, too, need him to hold a coalition together after the next election.
A good question is what role did Williams play in backing the expensive Tauranga electoral petition after the last election?
It was that legal action, along with 13 cases since 1991, that ran up the legal bill that Glenn helped pay off.
It is understood Williams did a lot of the calculations on election spending by National's Bob Clarkson that Peters' lawyers used to try to challenge his election.
The Glenn affair also highlights the fact that, despite the Electoral Finance Act, parties such as New Zealand First have hugely convoluted funding systems that are not transparent. As well as his direct parliamentary funding, a separate leader's fund and New Zealand First's own fund, there is also at least one more bag of cash, the leader's legal defence fund.
All political parties may rue the Glenn affair if it opens up further public debate on getting greater transparency into their hidden funding arrangements.
