Single-handedly, he has caught the attention and - possibly fanciful - imaginations of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders over the issue of electoral funding.
Last year, Helen Clark and Co could barely raise a ripple.
The current soap opera in which he is centre stage, as only Winston can be, has all the right qualities: drama, mystery, hubris, hypocrisy, and highly public slanging matches - and not just between Mr Peters and the media. What's more, the long slumbering hounds of the Fourth Estate have woken, aroused by the scent of blood.
Serious questions and investigative articles on the relationship between money, political parties and parliamentary office are now tumbling off the news-stands: trust funds, leaders' funds, party funds, legal funds, benefactors, donors, registers of pecuniary interest, and so on and so forth.
Who of us would know where the divisions lie, indeed if they truly exist?
With the sudden interest in such matters, Labour might be entitled to feel a little miffed given its protestations last year that there was something rotten in the state of the nation's electoral financing regime.
Its subsequent prosecution of the Electoral Finance Act, met only with howls of outrage and derision.
Which is partly understandable because, as many of its opponents said at the time, it was poorly drafted, arguably imposed unnecessary restrictions on free speech and quite simply was too important an issue to be decided along party lines: a more protracted and meaningful public debate was required, and possibly a Royal Commission, looking at the alternatives and possibilities, educating the general public as to how the system, as it was then, worked, asking the questions - what are the appropriate and fair ways in a modern "wired" society to fund general elections - then formulating alternatives.
No matter that Labour perceived there to be nothing to stop National from spending its overflowing coffers outside the announced election campaign period - as they did during 2005 with their effective billboard campaign.
Entirely legal then, but not exactly in the spirit of the law.
But back to the man of the moment.
Winston Peters' future might hang on the manner in which he responds to the many questions that to date he has imperiously dead-batted.
One of these concerns his relationships with racing interests, including Sir Patrick Hogan and the Vela family, said to have donated funds or otherwise supported NZ First.
His subsequent "benevolence" towards the sector as Minister of Racing - among other things, under his stewardship, totalisator duty was reduced to 4% from a headline rate of 20% resulting in a fillip of about $32 million to the industry - quite possibly has a great deal more to do with his lifelong love of horses and racing, and some of the difficulties the industry was facing at the time.
So probably beyond reproach, but certainly not beyond less flattering speculation - raising the spectre of influence-peddling, and muddying the waters of the moat that separates patronage from policy.
Then there is the question of a donation of $25,000 by Sir Robert Jones to NZ First allegedly ending up in the Spencer Trust - a trust associated with NZ First but purportedly not specifically for its political use.
This is the sort of grey area that a committed overhaul of election financing would delineate.
National has said it is going to repeal the Electoral Finance Act, should it form the next Government.
If it does, it may well behove people to recall the Winston affair.
There is sufficient bad air around the whole business that perhaps - just perhaps - the citizenry might begin to do a little serious thinking about the relationship between democracy and finance: who pays, how much, to whom, and shouldn't we all know about it? This is a small country; tiny in fact.
The leaders of industry, of business, of trade unions, the keepers of individual fortunes, and others of money and influence move in certain circles.
They talk; they meet with politicians; they sometimes reveal things they ought not to.
Anonymous donations placed in trust accounts amount to a sort of Church-and-State separation whereby, theoretically, the politicians have no idea which interests might be tossing them a bone.
As the Tui ad memorably says: "Yeah, right!"
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
