John Armstrong looks at the Williams/Peters performances at yesterday's Privileges Committee meeting:
Departing yesterday's meeting of Parliament's privileges committee, Peter Williams, QC, was unwilling to add anything further to what he had already told the hearing.
"If I did, I would probably be jailed for contempt," Winston Peters' legal counsel said.
That sounded less like a joke and more like an invitation. Being jailed by Parliament for contempt would be something Peters and his counsel would love to happen.
This is not the Middle Ages and that is not going to happen. But nothing else would do more to assist Peters' efforts to portray himself as the victim of some conspiracy which is somehow responsible for the mess which has engulfed him and his party.
As Peters would have it, he is the victim of unwarranted allegations surrounding the Owen Glenn donation to NZ First, the victim of Glenn's faulty memory, the victim of a conspiracy of shadowy figures who are behind the politicians out to destroy him, and, lastly, the potential victim of the "kangaroo court" which is the privileges committee.
