KEY POINTS:
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters will simply be playing to the crowd if he bangs on again about "slothful, indolent, lying" journalists at his party's annual conference this weekend.
There is nothing NZ First supporters love more than coming to the defence of their hero when he
is under attack.
The signs are there that Peters will face a volatile time at the election. The stakes are high and, despite what they say in public, both major parties would be relieved if they did not have to deal with Winston the Kingmaker in any post-election auction.
All week a row has raged over published emails in last Saturday's Weekend Herald indicating that billionaire Owen Glenn spread some of his love to Peters.
The NZ First leader vehemently insisted this was not so, but late yesterday afternoon found out that his lawyer had accepted $100,000 towards his legal fees without telling him.
Such criticism from the media - even if in this case they were right - is rich political territory for the minor party to leverage.
It has got their "Winnie" back on the front pages again in a far more sustained and useful fashion than any photographs of the Foreign Minister shaking hands with US Secretary of State Condi Rice will achieve.
Instead of worrying about him getting "duchessed" as the Prime Minister's "poodle", his supporters will cheer him on as the underdog against a nasty, nit-picking media.
Most parties operate a Chinese Wall between their political and party funding arms. But in NZ First the linkages appear less clear.
Frankly, I was surprised Glenn didn't himself speak up to clear up this business of his donation.
The billionaire places value on his name. It does, after all, grace the building of New Zealand's premier business school, to which he donated $7.5 million. His reluctance to get involved publicly suggests a credibility problem. This is an important element that Glenn should consider.
He has been lobbying Peters directly, and also Prime Minister Helen Clark through Labour Party president Mike Williams, to be created NZ's first honorary consul to Monaco.
Telling journalists to "ask NZ First" or Peters to confirm any Glenn-related donation does not pass the credibility test when the billionaire has clearly also been trying to curry favour with the Foreign Minister over the Monaco job.
This issue will play out in Parliament. But there may also be good reasons for Peters to feel more than a little paranoid right now.
Public relations people have also been tasked with making sure that the NZ First leader does not reopen the shenanigans of the 1980s and 1990s.
The best way to do that is for NZ First - and Peters - not to get back into Parliament.
These PR people should not be confused with Glenn's advisers from the BBG Group. At the last election the Exclusive Brethren employed investigators to try to dig dirt on Clark and key Cabinet ministers.
Some of the rumours spread about Clark before and after the election were plain ugly.
After the election I wrote exposing considerable detail on the "Great parliamentary raid" that Labour orchestrated to assist its return to power in 2005.
Not long after, the dirt-shoppers started trying to interest me in their wares. I wasn't interested. I did my own due diligence on the parties involved and distrusted the material's provenance and the motivations of those behind the digging.
But when a prominent business person called me with another exceptionally lurid story that "you should investigate", I went to see Clark and we had a frank discussion. She was well aware of the rumour and clearly hurt her husband was being anonymously vilified.
The motivations behind the so-called story - which was clearly nonsense - were political in nature.
But Clark wasn't the only political leader facing these nasty undercurrents. Former National leader Don Brash's private emails (not just the political ones used in the Nicky Hager book) were also in circulation. Some of his opponents were spreading the story that he would leave his wife before the 2008 election, citing emails that have never been made public. National leader John Key's rubbish bins were also ransacked at the last election.
Peters has made some big enemies over the years, dating back to his crusade on the Wine Box affair.
There is a thin line between so-called reputation management and behaving like the private investigators who tried to shop dirt on Clark, Brash and Key. The industry should reflect on that.
