KEY POINTS:
If last Monday's privileges committee hearing was akin to the Spanish Inquisition - as Winston Peters asserts - then somebody forgot to bring the rack.
The committee's powers may be extensive. But they do not include torturing witnesses. Rather than stretching Peters' joints, the committee's members had to
be satisfied with the credibility-stretching explanation volunteered by Peters' "blood brother" lawyer, Brian Henry, regarding the $100,000 Owen Glenn donation.
Peters himself was co-operative. But he was also typically argumentative. He was dismissive.
He answered questions with questions. He deemed questions which he considered outside the committee's terms of reference to be irrelevant and therefore not to be answered.
It was less the Spanish Inquisition and more like A Game of Two Halves.
As always, everyone else made allowance for Peters' verbal pugilism - just as the teams on the television sports quiz tolerate Matthew Ridge's exhibitionism. MPs are so accustomed to Peters' stroppiness that no one on the committee would have found his behaviour out of the ordinary.
Yet any member of the public delivering the string of insults to committee members which Peters did would have been called to order.
That Peters wasn't is not a reflection on National MP Simon Power, who chaired the three-hour hearing in a firm and fair fashion.
Obviously, the political dynamics between National, Act and the Greens on one side and Peters on the other were a huge influence on the evening's proceedings. But the latitude given to Peters demonstrated how there has always been one rule for him and another for everyone else.
For a long time, that found public favour. The NZ First leader was the political outsider. He was the crusader for the truth, the upholder of political virtue.
He was not bound by the normal laws of politics. He freely broke them without penalty. That has changed - dramatically so in the last month as NZ First has been found to be as solicitous of donations from the wealthy as other parties that it so long accused of being venal and corrupt.
Peters is now deemed to be a political insider. He is now bound by the laws of politics. The days when there was one rule for him and one for everyone else are over. He is struggling to come to terms with that.
His attempt to perpetuate the past has turned the divide between Peters' loyalists and Peters-haters into a chasm. Those who have been in neither camp are now being forced to decide where they stand, such has been Peters' polarising behaviour in recent weeks.
The revelations at the privileges committee about his unorthodox relationship with Henry underlined the Prime Minister's point that while Peters may not have done anything illegal, the morality of his actions will be judged in the court of public opinion.
There is nothing illegal about Peters' arrangement with his lawyer which sees Henry donate his time rather than billing Peters for payment, while Peters, oblivious to how much he owes Henry, reimburses the barrister on an ad hoc basis.
Thus, we are told, Peters was unaware of the Glenn donation and therefore could not have been expected to declare it as a gift on the MPs' register of pecuniary interests.
The overwhelming public reaction is that it is all just a little too convenient - that again it is one rule for Peters and another for everyone else.
The arrangement certainly makes a nonsense of the register's integrity - such as it is. The privileges committee's problem is that the Peters-Henry arrangement pre-dates the register. Peters therefore cannot be accused of setting up an avoidance mechanism. But the arrangement sets a precedent for all kinds of intriguing avoidance techniques which would make the register even more meaningless than it is currently.
Easier for the committee to ignore is Peters' likening of Monday's hearing to the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. But it can't. The comparison may be extreme; it may be a joke. But the joke is on the committee if it does not reprimand Peters. Otherwise, anyone up on a privileges charge will be free to cast aspersions on what is effectively a court.
But Peters can laugh in its face because he knows he will probably get away with it.
Labour, whose representatives on the committee happily fed Peters with easy questions, has no interest in making an example of him.
To their credit, the three National MPs were surprisingly robust in their questioning, perhaps because they would have been accused of being soft on him if they hadn't been.
Peters' biggest worry is Glenn's pending testimony. If Glenn says he discussed the donation with Peters, then Peters has big problems. Not with the committee - which, if Peters denies what Glenn says, will have to accept Peters' word - but with the public, who might be angry enough to force the Prime Minister to sack her foreign minister.
That remains hypothetical; the damage to NZ First from a month of havoc is not.
The political credit NZ First had banked from delivering on its promises and keeping the minority Government stable has been run down rapidly in the weeks since it was revealed Glenn had made the donation Peters had so vociferously denied.
That Peters knows his party is in trouble is evidenced by two things. There is talk of putting Ron Mark up as NZ First's candidate in the Wellington seat of Rimutaka to try to win a threshold-nullifying constituency seat now that Peters has clearly done his chips in Tauranga.
Meanwhile, Peters has sought to reinforce his hold on the one voter segment that has been consistently loyal to NZ First. He has made upwards of 15 speeches to Grey Power branches in recent weeks. Among other things, he is promising a further increase in national super and subsidies for winter power bills.
He has also picked up on the string of finance house crashes which has seen many elderly lose their savings. He cannot get their money back, but he is promising a tougher regulatory regime and - in his latest move - a guarantee on deposits up to $100,000 lodged with the two New Zealand-owned banks, Kiwibank and TSB.
Peters is also warning that if NZ First is not returned to Parliament, then it is open for the next government to cut super. He doesn't mention National by name - that would be interpreted as him expecting a change of government. But he means National.
He has also sought to turn his current woes to advantage - claiming the media and Act leader Rodney Hide, who was partly responsible for getting Peters before the privileges committee, are the front for a conspiracy by the wealthy elite to destroy NZ First.
Will all this be enough to save NZ First? Not if the Serious Fraud Office launches a full investigation into the party's handling of donations.
That decision is pending. Meanwhile, current polls are mixed and offer no real clue. But Peters is working his natural constituency harder than ever. His warnings are more blunt and more direct about the protection the elderly risk losing.
The party also believes it is being helped, not hindered, by the likes of Hide's campaign to get him out of politics. If nothing else, his enemies are unwittingly giving Peters the oxygen he needs to survive.
