Luigi and the Ferret ride again: the long, dazzling double-act of Michael Laws and Winston Peters

Michael Laws is running for parliament again, reuniting with New Zealand First and the ‘master salesman’ he first worked with almost four decades ago.

The flamboyant characters of late 20th century politics keep bursting back on to the stage. Last year it was Ruth Richardson, shirtfronting Nicola Willis. The dancing cossacks did a cameo the other day. Winston Peters? Well, he never went away. But his former sidekick and spin doctor, the Machiavelli, even, to his Medici, is now joining the march back to the political moment.

Confirming rumours that have swirled for some months, Michael Laws was announced today as the the latest in a flood of New Zealand First recruits.

He will stand in Waitaki, but a return to parliament would come via the party list, given Miles Anderson holds the seat for National with a 12,000 majority. It would cap an extraordinary career for Laws, who has served as an MP for National and NZ First, as mayor of Whanganui (or Wanganui, he would argue), and on local bodies in Hawkes Bay and Otago, as well as writing columns and books, and hosting a show on The Platform (a role he hopes to hang on to as he returns to the political fray; he also fancies becoming broadcasting minister).

It would also reunite one of the most dazzling, incendiary duos in New Zealand politics, a collaboration which dates back to the 1980s. Laws arrived in parliament in 85 to work as a researcher for the National Party, then in opposition. He quickly found a friend and collaborator in Winston Peters, the charismatic National MP destined for great things.

‘The devil’s deal’

In his swashbuckling memoir The Demon’s Profession, Laws describes his first formal encounter with Winston Peters. It was 1987 and the MP had been appointed employment spokesman. Laws was called into his office.

He writes: “I remember walking into a dense blue haze and wondering if the sofa cushions were on fire. Instead I had just been introduced to the omnipresent calling card of my new boss. Winston did not just smoke – his lungs smouldered like an underground peat blaze. These attempts at self-immolation were offset by his appearance – a relatively short man, with a dapper dress sense that always appreciated the fine line between fad and fashion. He had just taken to wearing his trademark double-breasted, navy pinstripe suits, but lightened their sombreness with a range of brilliant neckties that would alternate from red to gold to emerald green.”

When I asked Laws about those early days in an interview for the second season of podcast Juggernaut, which spans the Bolger years and the birth of MMP, he said that Peters made him an offer. “He said to me: Laws, you put me on the front page of the newspaper, or, more expressly, you put me on the TV news lead, and I’ll make you. I’ll give you a reputation, and you can go anywhere you want. So that was the devil’s deal, the Faustian bargain.”

Laws set out to make Peters “a sensation”, a “leader of a popular emotion”, and they made for a formidable pair. “He taught me the rope-a-dope political technique of the time, which was to make a claim, make it sound outlandish, get the denial and then produce the evidence,” said Laws. “At that time, everybody thought Winston didn’t have evidence, but he started to increasingly provide it for whatever the claims would be.”

The evidence often came from use of the Official Information Act, then just a few years old. “I realised what a joy it was for an opposition to have the OIA. In those days, government departments gave you the information straight away. They often didn’t brief their ministers, and certainly there was no coordination… And I would bang ‘confidential’ across the top of it, give it to Winston and say, ‘right mate, we’ve got this, let’s go’. He’d go into the house, make the allegation, it would be denied by somebody like Koro Wetere or Geoffrey Palmer or someone. And then, the next day, six o’clock news, there’s Winston brandishing the document, saying: There you go! They told lies! We’ve caught them again! We did so many of those, Winston and I, that you would have thought they would have caught on, but it took them years to understand that they had to coordinate responses under the OIA.”

Peters was something special, said Laws. “Winston was the master salesman. He still is. He could absorb the script really quickly. He had an instinctive eye for politics… He had telegenic personality in spades.”

It was a time to be alive, with the scheming extending from parliament through to the licenced premises of Courtenay Place and around the corner to the Wellington’s hallowed Green Parrot, even if “Winston had a constitution that I couldn’t keep up with”, said Laws. “I just found it so exciting. It was just fun. And for a young man with no ties, no children, no mortgage, it was just sheer, absolutely unadulterated, puckish good fun.”

Tonto the ferret

Laws was so effective that Jim Bolger, whose own popularity paled against his younger minister’s, called him in to work in the leader’s office. But he remained working for Peters, too. In the leadup to the 1990 election, “Winston and I were joined at the hip politically,” said Laws. “Where he went, I knew I would go so, he would end up on the front bench of any incoming government, and I would be there as his senior private secretary – all power, no responsibility.”

But Laws decided he wanted the responsibility, too, and stood successfully for National in Hawke’s Bay. Writing after the election in the New Zealand Herald, Tim Murphy described the new MP as “Tonto to Winston’s Lone Ranger”.

There was something in that comparison, said Laws 35 years later. “But I think it was a bit more symbiotic than that.” He volunteered another image from the archives, coined by the columnist Fran O’Sullivan. “She described me – much more disparagingly, but probably more accurately – as Luigi’s ferret. Winston was Luigi because there was a question about whether he tried to portray himself as an Italian rather than as a Maori , and I was his ferret. And I guess that was probably more true.”

As a backbench MP watching the maelstrom of Ruth Richardson’s reforms rip through parliament, he pushed back. While Peters was proving a handful in Jim Bolger’s cabinet, Laws quickly became one of the most vociferous caucus rebels. When Peters resigned his seat to stand as an independent in a Tauranga byelection in 1993, Laws further angered party bosses by getting “completely trolleyed” at Peters’ victory party and going on TV to say no one cared what Bolger thought and call his caucus colleagues “sycophantic toadies”.

When Peters founded New Zealand First in 1993, Laws resisted efforts to jump ship. But by April 1996, he’d had a change of heart, and joined Peters’ small caucus ahead of the first MMP election. The band was back together.

Laws’ tenure as an MP for NZ First did not last long, however, not even two months. He resigned from parliament after being caught up in one of the best named scandals in New Zealand political history: the Antoinette Beck Affair.

What Antoinette Beck did to Michael Laws

Plot twist: Antoinette didn’t exist. As well as being an MP at the time, Laws was on the Napier City Council. He invented Antoinette Beck to sign off on some polling he’d commissioned in Napier so that his secretary didn’t have to. He’d end up withholding information from parliament under questioning and fell on his sword.

“People make mistakes in politics all the time. They mislead people all the time,” he told RNZ at the time. “I’ve joined a party that’s got very high levels of accountability and integrity, and I’ve made speeches about the need for politicians to be accountable for their mistakes and errors, and I’m accountable for these.”

Peters, who was not just a political compadre but a good friend – he’d been MC at Laws’ wedding – was audibly upset by Laws’ exit. “I’ve been in a lot of political fights,” he said. “This has been the toughest day of my political life.”

It was not entirely an exit, though. Laws was back on the NZ First train a few weeks later, working outside parliament to write the party’s election manifesto for the first MMP election. He was also responsible for the election being brought forward by a month, to Bolger’s frustration, to avoid a disruptive byelection.

It wasn’t that difficult to know how to write the manifesto. “The entire NZ First organisation,” Laws would later write in The Demon’s Profession, “was the ectoplasm of Winston’s personality, exactly mirroring all his strengths and weaknesses.”

Laws masterminded the NZ First campaign of 1996, which saw the party surge to an 18 MP caucus and a role it has since commanded: MMP kingmaker. Laws was not part of the negotiations, but he was enlisted at the 11th hour to write up Peters’ big deciding address, which kept everyone, Jim Bolger and Helen Clark included, on the edges of their seats.

“Winston rang me up and said: Can you write the speech? I said, I’d be delighted to. Who have you chosen? And he said, I’ve chosen the only choice that I could make. He didn’t tell me specifically, but I knew what he meant by that. He said: The only thing, Laws, is that I want the announcement in the last sentence. He said, otherwise, go for your life. And he read it word for word… My children are studying politics at the moment at university, and so I say to them, you should read that speech, Dad wrote it. They go: Boring, Dad.”

The puppeteer as puppet

Following the installation of the first MMP coalition, with Jim Bolger as prime minister and Winston Peters as treasurer, a Tom Scott cartoon was published, depicting Bolger being controlled by a puppeteer. The puppeteer is Peters, but he too is being controlled by a puppeteer – Laws. Did that contain a truth?

“I remember that because it caused a great deal of consternation, I have to say, on the ninth floor, and in Winston’s office as well. Yeah, I guess you could say [it was true], because I’d written the policy for New Zealand First, I’d written the entire manifesto in 96 and that manifesto, to a large extent, got incorporated into that first coalition agreement… But that cartoon was actually seen as fact not so much by Winston Peters and myself, or certainly by Jim Bolger, none of them would say that Laws had that kind of influence, but it was seen as fact by a good part of the National Party backbench, and it caused significant resentment, leading to the Jenny Shipley coup.”

Laws never really left politics. He is today an Otago Regional Councillor and has routinely poked the bear as a commentator. In 2011, challenged on some of the rhetoric in his newspaper column, he said: “I’m actually paid to be biased, prejudiced, opinionated and ruthlessly independent. I don’t have to pretend not to be.” But, should he get that high list spot and make it back to parliament, he’ll be returning to an environment that has changed a lot.

“You can’t underestimate how exciting the times were, how big the personalities, how unshackled those personalities were,” he told me last year. “You compare that time with now? It is so different. This is a bland time by comparison. There are no really big personalities. Then, there were big personalities in all of the parties of the time who had no hesitation in sharing their innermost thoughts with everybody and advocating for them publicly. You would not find that today, not only because there aren’t the personalities that existed then, but because they’d be so scared of getting sacked from their job, because party discipline is so overwhelming these days. Bigger personalities, less discipline, a lot more excitement.”