I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Winston Peters.
It's largely because he alone, of almost everyone else in Parliament, seems to keep a sense of humour which permits him, at 72 years of age, to play the perennial "bad boy".
But when Winston comes to our town with his populist message that "there's trouble in the River City", citing crime statistics that are clearly "alternative facts" - we're not having a crime wave, just the same old crime - he begins to look like an aging Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man.
Winston is getting a bit long in the tooth for that old Robert Preston fantasy role. Besides there's no Marian the librarian to humanise him.
The soft spot may be in my heart, but it's not in my head - nor should it be in anyone else's.
We don't need another faux rescuer in Trump/Michael Laws mode, thank you very much.
Besides, Winston's crime-fighting is better to be focused on his own house, the Beehive, where MP Todd Barclay is banking a hefty pay packet despite his admission that he, Barclay, had spied on his electorate secretary, recording her calls surreptitiously which would usually be a crime.
Who is Todd Barclay and why should we care - besides the fact that he's still hanging on to his seat despite his admission, thereby accumulating some $80,000 of taxpayer money?
That electorate, the Clutha-Southland seat, used to be warmed by the person of the current Prime Minister Bill English, who held it for 17 years until 2014. In 2014, English became a list MP, thereby enabling Barclay's succession.
Jay Kuten
Champion of the underdog Peters, with his nose for the nefarious (winebox, anyone?) should put his crime-fighter costume to better use to open up the can of worms that must have constituted the Clutha-Southland electorate office of National.
There are at least three stories to be investigated here and a coda.
There's Todd Barclay the now 27-year-old MP still tenaciously hanging on to the seat despite his actions in clear violation of the privacy of others.
Bill English, who seems to have greased the skids that propelled the ambitious young man to Parliament, is now looking ever more guilty himself as he tries to wriggle out of having had knowledge for nearly a year of Barclay's actions.
English did know of the tapes, did not know of the tapes, is not sure if there were tapes and, if there were, he didn't listen to them. One thing our PM also didn't do is follow the law and inform the police.
That duty, apparently, fell to Glenys Dickson, the woman at the centre of this melodrama.
Ms Dickson, who served as Bill English's faithful electorate secretary for 17 years, was so incensed by whatever it was Barclay was doing that she took an employment action to Parliamentary Services, netting a settlement paid from the budget of the PM - at that time John Key.
If her loyalty to English led to her job exit, the throwing of her under the bus may have been pillowed by the size of the settlement. Still, she's out of a job and Todd's still in his. How fair is that?
This is the coda: None of this would be revealed without investigative reporting by the website, Newsroom.co.nz.
