Jim Bunny Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

What have tomato juice and lemon meringue pie in common? Not much.

Except in this case, like revenge, they were both served up cold – and they hadn't been ordered.

And it was all very messy. Because the tomato juice protestor copped a common assault charge, but the lemon meringue pie didn't – even though the target was a tetchy former Prime Minister.

And I ended up with sticky lemon meringue all over my interfering, busybody fingers. Because I got involved when Sir Robert David – aka ‘Piggy' – Muldoon copped a protestor's lemon meringue pie while walking through Auckland Airport.

Mr Muldoon was a polarising chap – a champion of the ordinary bloke to some, and an abrasive, rude, heavy drinking, dictatorial bully to others.

But first the tomato juice – it was served sans celery, salt, Lea & Perrins, or vodka – to a peroxide-bobbed Pommy rabble-rouser called Kelly-Jay Keen-Minshull, aka Posie Parker.

The anti-trans activist was here to tell us what she thought we needed to know – that New Zealand women lived in fear of trans-gender people, that they didn't want ‘men' invading women's spaces – for ‘spaces' read dunnies. 'The worst place for women,” she declared of New Zealand.

How on earth this Posie of black nightshade can draw those conclusions after five minutes in the country?

A random poll

I conducted a random poll of the ‘cis-chicks' in the office. There was just shrugs, no-one quaking at the thought of a trans-gender person storming through the office door demanding a pee in the ladies. But there was this profound observation – 'I don't know why trans-gender women would want to use a ladies loo... our toilet habits are worse than the men's.”

Really? How did she know? Is our ‘man space' being invaded?

Anyhow, Posie didn't get to spill her bile at her Auckland rally. Instead she wore a tomato juice and went scuttling from Auckland and from the country – England's quickest strategic withdrawal since Robert the Bruce put Edward II to the sword at Bannockburn.

Pictures of the incident looked like they were shot in an abattoir – the peroxide blond skull dripping red. I don't advocate violence or breaking the law, and I do get the freedom of speech thing.

But I don't understand us importing a poisonous, divisive attitude when we have our own homegrown prejudice, bigotry and ignorance to deal with. I also don't like Posie's friends – white supremacists and Nazi-saluting goons at her Aussie rally. Nothing to do with her, said Posie. But you can see the sorts of some people her opinions appeal to.

Posie Parker decided she knew who New Zealanders do and don't like to pee with. But she didn't know we also like to throw, lob and drop stuff on people we disagree with, or don't like. And we have a history of what some would call ‘non-violent protest'…

John Banks had horse poo thrown at him by a serial s*** slinger, a symbolic black t-shirt was tossed at the Queen in 1990, and flour bombs were dropped from a plane over Eden Park in 1981 as a protest against the agents of apartheid who were playing the All Blacks. There was ‘dildo-gate' in 2016 when a sex toy was hurled at MP Steven Joyce over 'the raping of our sovereignty”. That was a buzz.

The pie

Now the lemon meringue pie. Sir Robert Muldoon loved sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa and expensive, almost bankrupting Think Big projects. And he loathed unionists, teachers, journalists, students and protestors – one of whom launched the pie at him.

The pie had no sooner struck home when the perpetrator was overcome with remorse – probably worried the proctor would terminate his studies. Or worse…the police finding him and banging him up.

Our pie-chucker was both silly and smart, because he thought if he could get to Mr Muldoon first and apologise, he might be forgiven.

The perp rang me out of the blue while I was working on an Auckland news desk that Sunday afternoon. He asked me to broker a meeting with Muldoon, because me being a journalist, he thought I might have Sir Robert's contact details. He was right.

When I met the pie-chucker I suddenly appreciated his paranoia. He was a little person – and for the police that would have eliminated a large section of the population from suspicion.

An hour later I was banging on Sir Robert's front door in Kohimarama with a little person in toe. Muldoon was at his bristly best. He sneered at me. 'Why am I talking to a reporter? Give me a good reason?”

He did loathe journalists. But moments later Sir Robert was forgiving. 'If it's up to me,” he said, 'this will go no further”. Jolly decent of him. The man who at worst was nasty, cutting and sarcastic, was on this occasion magnanimous.

Now, a week or so after being marinated in tomato juice, Posie, Nosegay, is flinging insults and threats from afar. 'I will be back,” she says.

Please let US have that conversation Posie. Because I don't think most fair-minded, free-thinking New Zealanders appreciate you walking into our country, dripping with hubris, and thinking you know who we are, what we stand for and what's good for us.