No I didn’t not say nothing of the kind

Yes I didn't

I wish I could take credit for this but Graeme Edgeler pointed it out to me a couple of weeks ago: whenever TVNZ News play a clip of Winston at his famous ‘No’ press conference they always play footage of Espiner asking Peters if he’s accepted money from Glenn, at which point Peters holds up the ‘No’ sign in response and replies ‘Got That?’.

Pretty cut and dried.

Except, as Graeme noted, Espiners question is ‘Are you saying that you have never recieved one dollar from Owen Glenn’. Peters then holds up the ‘No’ sign. There’s a double negative there meaning that Peters answer to Espiners question is no, he is not saying that, therefore yes he has recieved money from Glenn.

TVNZ used the same footage again last night.

I was also interested to see TVNZ quoting an excerpt from Winston’s letter to the select committee claiming he ‘didn’t go to the Karaka sales in 2006 so couldn’t have met Owen Glenn.’

This has caused some excitement in the blogosphere with evidence surfacing that Peters was, in fact at the 2006 sales. The problem is that in his letter to the select committee what Peters actually said was:

Para 7 relating to the Karaka Sales 2006 appears to be a year out. I recall that in 2007 (and my diary confirms this) Mr Glenn and two others joined the table in which I and a friend shared a sit down lunch with about 8 leading names in the horse racing fraternity.

So he doesn’t deny going to Karaka in 06, he just argues that he met Glenn there in 2007.

Espiner is usually a pretty meticulous operator so maybe Peters made this specific denial and I’m just too lazy to google it – but the TVNZ story specifically references and quotes from the select committee letter. With Peters throwing around allegations of media conspiracy like confetti this is not a good time to be getting it wrong.