Peter Dunne - mad, in a safe, suitable manner

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Goodness, whatever has happened to the inoffensive but dull Peter Dunne?

Mr Moderate, the MP for the family, has been spouting vitriol, calling the nice but dull Greens, of all people, mad nutters from some other planet.

He also had a go at Winston and at Act, which he called a "corpse virtually beyond resuscitation".

You might be forgiven for thinking that Dunne had gone mad. You might be forgiven for hoping that he'd gone mad, because wouldn't that be fun?

Alas, when Dunne turns up in the lobby of an Auckland hotel for our interview, he looks as he always looks: like an accountant trying to be a little, if safely, foppish. He's wearing his pinstriped suit and his pinstriped shirt. He wears braces and a Rolex.

When I raise the Destiny Party - as in, aren't they for family, too? - and tell him that his watch isn't as flash as Brian Tamaki's, he bristles a bit and says, "No, and I have no desire to."

But he does have the Rolex.

"Yeah, well," he says, making it quite plain that he's not going to discuss the matter of what he wears on his wrist.

The watch is perfect, though. It's not at all show-offy, but it is the sedate symbol of aspiration for the male middle classes. It advertises a solid bank balance and solid values.

All of these are what Dunne advertises too. He has always offered himself as the spokesman, as the very model of the middle classes.

What is all this nastiness then? He puts on a "who, me?" face and says, "Well, it's not really vitriol". In any case, he argues, all of that mouthing off amounted to about a minute of his 33-minute speech. And it shouldn't have come as any great surprise.

"Anyone who knows me knows I've got very strong views which I do express colourfully from time to time."

Actually, he had gone a bit loopy. He'd had the flu and had dragged himself out of bed to give his speech at the United Future conference and he really thought he might just collapse on the floor at any moment. Some of that speech, he says, he can't even remember giving.

Still, he meant every feverish word of it. "It was a good chance to get a few things out of my system."

Anyway, he says, the Greens are mad.

"Yes, absolutely. I just watch them in Parliament day in and day out, and what really angers me about them is the perception that they create that you've got to buy into all their stuff to care about our environment. I think it's mad. I think it's grossly arrogant and I find it offensive."

If you couldn't actually hear what he was saying but were observing him from a distance, you'd think he was talking about, say, the very pleasant dinner he had last night.

He hates to be called mild because "Mr Mild doesn't have a strong opinion either way. I don't think I am that. I think I am moderate, I think I am reasonable, I think I am common sense. I like those labels. But I don't think anyone who knows me then says, 'Well, you're a sort of wallflower'."

I think he must mean a shrinking violet. He's been called just about everything in a political career lasting more than 20 years. In the late '90s, George Hawkins threw a handful of coins at him after Dunne left Labour and struck a coalition deal with National.

That hurt, "not because of the action - I thought the action was quite clever - but because it was George. He'd been a friend and a colleague and someone I liked and still do."

Dunne is not a grudge-bearer, although no doubt there are plenty who still bear a grudge against him. He doesn't "do anger all that often, or that well, because I tend to stand back from most things and let them carry on or wash by me".

He really must have the hide of a rhino. He would like to think he is thick-skinned, "but I'm not sure that would be absolutely true. I mean, I know I feel things intently."

Then again, he doesn't care what people say about him. Certainly he is impervious to insults. He has been called boring so many times that perhaps he's simply bored by that particular insult. Or, more likely, he's better at insulting himself than anybody else could be - although it's unlikely that he'd see it in quite this way.

Quite surprisingly, Dunne sees himself as something of a maverick. He says he's always had a sense that it was "myself against the world".

He doesn't quite know why this should be so, except that he was usually the youngest in his class at school "and was usually near the top of it".

When he says he's pig-headed, he means it as a compliment. This is because pig-headed to Dunne means, "I've got a quiet confidence about being right. It's a sense of inner calm that what I'm doing is the right thing."

Now that just makes him sound insufferably smug. Tell him so and he smiles and says, perkily, "Oh yes, I've been accused of being that. I've been accused of being smug, pompous, self-righteous, all those sorts of things, and there's probably an element of truth in all of them.

"Look, I guess I know what I want and therefore life for me is a relatively simple proposition."

A little later and he's at it again. "I can reel off the descriptions that have been applied to me by teachers, by colleagues, by friends: stubborn, impetuous, arrogant and occasionally a little too smart for himself."

He's the eldest child of four and as bossy as the stereotype. He says one of his two brothers likes to tell a story about how they would play rugby as kids: Dunne against his younger siblings.

"I would play the two of them. Why, I don't know, because they had far more ability than I did, but that's the way it worked out."

Dunne was also the ref, "simply because I probably knew the rules better. And he [Dunne's brother] says that the amazing thing was I never lost, which was true. But I think he's making a big leap of logic to suggest there was any connection."

Dunne really does tell the most amazing stories about himself that end up being stories against himself.

He says a teacher once told him he had "a remarkable ability for popping up in areas where I wasn't wanted. And I suppose that's true. I took it as a huge compliment."

I tell him he must have been a very irritating boy and he says, "I don't think I was. I just got on with life. I've never been backward."

I think he was born grown-up.

He says he hasn't a single vice or extravagance. He likes his Irish whiskey and, "from time to time I indulge in the dreaded weed".

This is simply too much, the thought of a stoned Dunne. But he means he quite likes an occasional pipe or cigar. And "none of these things are vices."

At the end of the interview he says: "I've been totally open with you. I haven't sought to hide or gloss over anything, I don't think."

The awful thing is, I'm inclined to believe him.