The ménage à trois

Expect a clenched-teeth consummation as two leaders with an acrimonious history attempt to be civil to each other, and the PM-elect plays Cupid.

- Michele Hewitson

Did Princess Anne somehow secretly slip into the country last week to attend Auckland's Diwali Festival? Patently, that's a preposterous notion; she was likely opening a hospital or feeding her horses. Still, you could be forgiven for thinking Her Royal Highness was in attendance given a voice at least as booming as hers was heard encouraging a member of the media to "naff off". Anne, rather famously, said exactly this to a hack pack after falling off her high horse at the Badminton Horse Trials in 1982.

This naffer-offer was no haughty royal but our haughty new "kingmaker", the leader of New Zealand First, Winston Peters, who was attending the Festival of Light, though by his mien he may as well have been attending the Festival of Darkness. He wandered through the crowds and passed reporters looking as if he had a thundercloud looming above his head, like a big, black grudge.

No one collects grievances like Peters. He has the memory of a particularly ill-tempered elephant when it comes to a slight.

This time he had the huff with a Sunday Star-Times reporter: "Listen, sunshine, you didn't want to know what I was saying before the election, now you want me to tell you after," he said. Before delivering the knock-out, "naff off".

Peters even manages to make sunshine sound like a synonym for nincompoop, moron, or something much ruder, which was certainly the intent.

Whatever the reporter's sin was - failing to bow, perhaps -Peters said, "I'm never going to forget that sort of crap." There is much speculation in Wellington that what Peters wants - and what he will be offered once more, as he was under Labour in 2005 and 2017 - is the plum job of Minister of Foreign Affairs. This would make Mr Naff Off- one of our least diplomatic politicians - our country's most senior diplomat once again.