KEY POINTS:
John Key, leader of the National Party, is waiting for his deputy Bill English to arrive.
Key said he would "play mother", checked the coffee situation, ducked out again, and then poured one for everyone - politely taking the dregs at the bottom for himself. There's none left for the tardy English.
They sit, side by side, with English on his best behaviour.
Asked if there's a risk his own high profile might overshadow Key he answers "none whatsoever" and offers proof.
"We both did paintings for a Wanganui charity and John's got $2400 and mine got $240."
He knows the relationship is under scrutiny for signs he's looking to undermine Key. He knows he is being watched and so he sits, poker-faced, while Key talks, occasionally nodding, never wincing. He doesn't interrupt, only occasionally taking off where his leader ends, to elucidate some points.
"He's happy," English says of Key. He's also "relentlessly positive" and has "a positive and confident temperament".
Both answer, swiftly and simultaneously, to a suggestion that Labour's needling about significant differences between the two of them was gaining traction.
"No, it's not," from English. "I don't think so," from Key.
It's hard to dent a laughing punching bag, and Prime Minister Helen Clark's description of Key as "the least substantial" of any National leader she has faced simply draws mirth. So does a recent Herald interview with Clark, in which she referred to Key many times without once using his name.
He was dismissed, variously, as "that guy", "this guy" and even "it", as in, "It is a foreign exchange dealer".
Key finds this hilarious, and replies with "Well, 'it' wasn't offended."
"That woman should be more polite," English adds.
Key refers to her as "Helen Clark", or "sometimes if I see her I call her Prime Minister".
"I think anyone that makes it to be Prime Minister of New Zealand deserves that."
In the meantime, his first conference as Leader of the Opposition is coming up, and his theme song is something by Coldplay. It could well be Talk because Key does this at length.
A question on how he will measure the conference's success morphs into a dissertation on the Australian 2001 election, and how everyone wrote off the Liberal Party "and guess what, the Tampa rolled into town and they won".
By comparison, a question to English about emails he sent to Don Brash with some brutal appraisals of his caucus colleagues is answered with a shrug and "the prospect of electoral success is a great healer", neatly managing to avoid retracting or explaining away the comments.
Key, however, talks until he starts mumbling - like a boy running down a hill whose legs are going too fast for the rest of him and who tumbles. That tumble is top of Labour's wish-list for election year.
The thing everyone is pushing him to talk about is core policy.
When this is broached, Key raves on a bit about Labour coming up with a "Wall St slogan on economic transformation or whatever it might be and then you never hear about it".
National, he says, is "taking policy development very seriously."
"We're listening" he says, and what he stands for is "a society that is going to be stronger than the one today".
But people will just have to wait for the main brunt and they won't be explaining because one of the things he learned very early on was that "explaining is losing".
"If you're explaining very complex things, in the end you just won't get there because the public can't grasp that idea."
And he proves his point by going on to not explain his stance on the transtasman Therapeutics Bill, over which he ended up doing a lot of explaining.
The interview ends after two interruptions from staff eager to hurry them off to a meeting. The last question is what they will do if they lose the next election.
"I don't have a plan B," Key says. "We're here to win the election. We've got to earn that right from every New Zealand voter. But I don't do plan Bs."
And English, who might be considered to be already living his plan B after being dumped as leader in favour of Don Brash, gets the last word. "Same."
