KEY POINTS:
Winston Peters declined to appear on an election show last night because he didn't like the host Bill Ralston.
Sky News' Campaign 08, which grills New Zealand's political leaders and their policies in the run-up to the election, carried on without the NZ First leader.
Ralston instead analysed Mr Peters and his party with political journalists Duncan Garner, Barry Soper, Phil Kitchin and Vernon Small.
Ralston claims he emailed Frank Perry, who works in Mr Peters' office, several weeks ago asking if he would appear on the show. He claims Mr Perry emailed back saying: "Winston won't appear because he's suing you."
But Ralston said Mr Peters wasn't suing him and thought he may have been referring to an incident in 2003 when he was head of news and current affairs at TVNZ.
Peters took legal action against the state broadcaster and other media for comments in an affidavit the channel took from a woman called Yvonne Dossiter who was the partner of Ross Meurant, a former adviser of Mr Peters. TVNZ never ran the story but the comments were leaked in parliament.
Mr Meurant resigned when it was revealed he was in a business relationship with Simunovich Fisheries while advising Mr Peters for a 2003 parliamentary select committee inquiry into scampi quota allocation.
Ralston said he made another seven approaches to get Mr Peters on the programme but the last email from Mr Perry said: "He's not coming on with you, interview yourself, you seem to be good at that."
A producer at Sky then tried to get Mr Peters on the show but received a reply on Friday saying he had checked his schedule and he did not have time to appear.
Ralston said he has since heard Mr Peters is booked to appear on two other television shows in the coming weeks.
"He's a man who bears a grudge, he obviously doesn't like some of the comments I've made to the Herald on Sunday and Radio Live and things like that.
"The only other choice at that point is to do some analysis, talking to people who have actually covered him. What's been going on and what his prospects are."
Producer Janet Wilson said Rodney Hide, Peter Dunne, Pita Sharples and Jim Anderton had already appeared on the show and John Key will be on next week.
"I still wanted to do a story on Winston and the party and their performance since the last election which is what we've based all our programmes on.
"Because Winston wasn't going to come on the show wasn't enough reason for me not to do the programme. We decided to talk about him not to him really."
Mr Peters hung up the phone when the Herald phoned for his side of the story last night.
