KEY POINTS:
Winston Peters says every Chinese leader understands his position. I believe him. Winston personifies everything they fear in elective democracy.
China's leaders see free elections as an invitation to egocentric individuals to play politics for personal gratification rather than social improvement. They genuinely think that where multi-party competition is permitted it will only produce politicians like Winston.
When he turns up as Foreign Minister of the first Western country to forge a free trade agreement with them, and lets them know they shouldn't worry too much about his declared opposition to it, they will smile in understanding, stroke his self-importance a little and have a hearty chuckle among themselves when he has gone.
"These splittists! What boreshit."
Then the President will mention that in his private chat with New Zealand's Prime Minister, she'd made the usual Western pitch for political liberalisation and they will shake their heads in wonder.
It must be hard for people with no experience of free elections to believe that in educated democracies such as ours the vast majority of voters in fact are not seduced by politicians like Winston. It is hard enough to convince some in this that all politicians are not like him.
A tiresome popular misconception, assiduously cultivated by himself over the years, holds that all politicians except him are unprincipled and self-serving. The truth is exactly the reverse. Winston is unique but not for the reasons his admirers think. Just about everybody else in our Parliament is there with a sense of the social good.
It may be the individual freedoms of the right they believe the country most needs, or the collectivist protections of the left, or a healthier environment, or better recognition of Maori, or simply more businesslike or compassionate management.
Winston is different; principle for him is tactical. The Prime Minister expected him to oppose the free trade agreement because he opposes free trade in principle.
That is what we all thought. But the reason he gave this week was quite different. The agreement was too soft, he said, the tariff reductions too slow. He was hoping for better.
Bullshit. Phil Goff's word is the only apt description for Winston's politics. Our tariff phase-downs might be faster than China's in this deal but those China has agreed to are rapid by comparison with New Zealand's voluntary reductions over the past 20 years, which Winston of course opposed. He has opposed every important economic step the country has taken during his time in Parliament. If he operates by a principle beyond personal survival it is simple conservatism: do nothing drastic, nothing much is wrong, leave us alone.
It is an outlook shared by very large proportion of the population, much larger than the 5.75 per cent of the vote his party attracted at the last election, which was barely enough to keep him in Parliament when Tauranga tired of him.
Yet both major parties now plainly hope he will return. Since they have to deal with minor parties to govern under MMP, they both would sooner deal with personal egos than principled parties. It is easier to satisfy a Peters or a Dunne than Act or Maori or the Greens.
Each side at different times has been able to finesse Winston with a sinecure. National made him Treasurer, a position that didn't exist before or since. In that role he was an impeccable presenter of the monetarist principles he had damned up and down the country for the previous 10 years.
Now he is Foreign Minister for everything but trade, which seems rather like being admiral of everything except the ships.
Foreign policy is trade, unless you count the pacifism and other moral causes that a Labour Government follows internationally and it is hard to see Winston pursuing them with passion. He is just enjoying the status.
Meanwhile, his small team in Parliament, who used to sit far from him when he was on the front bench with Jim Bolger, can only watch him and hope the attention he attracts can save their seats again. They do not pretend to be more than his ciphers, openly deferring to him whenever a new question is put to them on television.
But to give him his due, his flexible ego has made him a force for stability in our new system. He was genuinely upset when Jenny Shipley could not maintain a coalition with him, and timed his decision on Labour's China deal this week to ensure he did not undermine it.
Nevertheless, our politics would be better without him. He has been a misleading voice in national debates, a negative influence on public confidence in the country and those who genuinely serve it, a mischievous, evasive, obnoxious muck-raker with the charm of an attention-seeking child.
He has fooled his admirers for too long. May this be the year that voters wash him out of our public life.
