Winston Peters. Pic: NZPA

It was all so depressingly familiar.

Winston Peters tells New Zealand First members it is time for "a new beginning" and urges them to start preparing for the 2011 general election.

He doesn't go so far as to say he will lead the party into that election; his intentions will not be confirmed until NZ First holds its annual meeting at the end of next month.

Between now and then, Peters will shun the media. He might come out with some tantalising, ambiguous comments. Just enough to make sure the media stays alert.

By the time the meeting is held on August 29, speculation will be peaking. Reporters will clamour for advance copies of his speech. None will be available.

When he does announce his triumphant return, it will be the last sentence of his speech.

His tactics will work, because they always have before. There will be saturation coverage of the party conference, as there always has been when Peters has manipulated events to achieve just that outcome.

The main event, the 2011 general election, will be more difficult to manipulate. But if he decides to go for it, Peters will give it everything he has.

It will be hard, really hard. NZ First lost all its seats in last year's election and Peters was deprived of his most important stage, Parliament's debating chamber.

Without parliamentary privilege to protect him against those he attacks, he won't have opportunities to create the intense controversy he has in the past.

He doesn't have a team of MPs to campaign with him and he doesn't have any parliamentary staff.

He doesn't even have a team of former MPs, unless they start to change their minds. Ron Mark, the most effective after Peters, has turned his back on the party. Peter Brown, the former deputy leader, is openly critical of the way Peters ran the last election campaign and seems unlikely to want a re-run.

None of the others in his small band are anywhere to be seen. Peters is going to have to do this on his own.

And that may be the way he wants it. The running of the party was always in his hands alone, to a disastrous extent as the events of 2008 clearly showed.

Brown says Peters has to start being a team player, which he has never been before. Maybe he can change, but that is difficult to imagine.

"I don't think the team made terribly many mistakes at all," Brown said last week when he discussed NZ First's defeat in the last election.

"We stuck to the script and we put all our efforts in, so the reason we didn't clear the 5 percent in particular rests totally on Winston's shoulders."

It very nearly made the 5 percent of the party vote that would have given it seats in Parliament, and without the dreadfully bad publicity that surrounded Peters in the months before the election it almost certainly would have.

Nearly all of the problems were of his own making, but Peters blamed it all, as usual, on the media and big business.

His relationship with the media deteriorated so badly it was almost impossible for anyone to even hold a conversation with him.

It began with his refusal to answer questions about the Spencer Trust, the mysterious donation-receiving unit which, it turned out, no one else in the party knew about.

It reached its lowest point over the $100,000 donation from expatriate businessman Owen Glenn, which Peters initially denied but then had to admit had been received. He said he didn't know about it but a parliamentary inquiry censured him.

Brown says the last straw was a web campaign Peters launched just before the last election. It attacked the media and National Party leader John Key.

"The place went mad," Brown said. "We got abusive phone calls left, right and centre. This was two days before the election, I couldn't believe it."

Brown actually thought it was a hoax, that another political party was up to dirty tricks.

He was the deputy leader, and he was completely out the loop.

Despite these serious misgivings, Brown still believes Peters can put the party back into Parliament.

"Winston is still the most capable leader. He's a nice guy, he speaks well, he's quick on the uptake, he can attract a crowd and he can hold an audience.

All true, although more than a few people might disagree with the "nice guy" description.

Peters could, and probably still can, inspire people to follow him. He can make them angry about things they hadn't realised they were angry about, and he has tailor-made issues to work on between now and the next election.

Bank interest rates and the foreshore and seabed are two examples, and he said in his message to members the Government's economic management would be another. The recession, with its mounting job losses, plays into his hands. He has always been a champion of the elderly and did make some real gains for them while he was in Parliament.

He has a rich vein of hardship and discontent to work on, and he needs to convince just 5 percent of voters that he has the answers.