Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that New Zealand would not be expelling any Russian diplomats who were thought to be spies for the simple reason that there were none in that category was as farcical as anything you would find in an Austin Powers movie. But nowhere near as funny.
A better comparison might be Get Smart with Winston Peters cast as Maxwell Smart, the walking disaster of a secret service agent, and Ardern as Agent 99, the ever-loyal side-kick desperately trying to persuade her hopeless colleague to do the sensible thing, but rarely succeeding in doing so.
What is not in question is that the real world and the 1960s TV show have one thing very much in common when it comes to New Zealand’s response to the Salisbury nerve agent attack. However you choose to spell it — chaos or KAOS — there has been plenty of it.
We are close to entering the fourth straight week of this diplomatic fiasco. We are no clearer why New Zealand's foreign minister continues to exhibit what can only be interpreted as refusal to sheet home responsibility for the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy directly to Moscow.
It is a complete mystery as to what is driving Peters to continue to refuse to condemn Russia when Britain's other friends and allies have shown no such hesitation.
It is not that he has lacked the opportunity to follow their example. Questioned in Parliament on Thursday, Peters opted to go no further than saying that "to the best of anyone's investigations thus far," the nerve agent "looks like it was manufactured in Russia, that it was sourced out of Russia, but as to who were the perpetrators of that violent terrorist crime, that is still a matter of substantial investigation".
The Government has imposed travel bans on diplomats expelled from other countries.
That reply begged a pretty obvious question: If it was not yet clear who was responsible for the attack, why was New Zealand about to impose travel bans on the more than 100 Russian diplomats expelled by more than 20 nations this week?
Only one conclusion could be drawn from this inconsistency. Ardern had finally buckled to pressure to do something about another glaring inconsistency, namely New Zealand's failure to follow its partners in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement and expel Russian spies who plied their trade behind the cover of diplomatic accreditation.
She had also buckled in the face of the New Zealand becoming an international laughing stock following her statement earlier in the week that the advice that she had been given was that there were no spies to expel.
Back in the days of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, expulsions of staff from that country's embassy in Wellington were so regular you could almost set your watch by it.
To assume that there are no longer spies in what is now the Russian Federation's embassy requires the assumption that Russia's intelligence agencies have changed the way they operate since the collapse of Communism.
The only thing that has changed is the name on the embassy's front door.
The fact that a former agent of what was once known as the KGB now occupies the Kremlin should persuade you that nothing else is different.
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Ardern's assurance was naive in another way.
Even Ireland —a country as utterly non-threatening to Russian interests as New Zealand —managed to find one envoy to expel to add to the bus loads suddenly deemed to be persona non grata by other countries across Europe and North America.
And in case you were wondering, prior to this week there was the exact same number of accredited diplomats in Russia's Dublin embassy as there are in its Wellington post — a total of 17.
The message from all this that while expelling diplomats is purely symbolic, when circumstances demand, you find a spy or spies to expel.
Questions might be asked about the validity of the choice. The political consensus to which governments of every complexion religiously adhere is that prime ministers never comment on intelligence matters.
When you are confronted with the kind of quite sickening and quite frightening arrogance being displayed by Russia, solidarity is paramount.
If you don’t back your mates, you can hardly expect them to back you if you suddenly find yourself in the sights of the same or similar bully.
It is basic. It is International Relations 101. It is the backbone of New Zealand’s foreign policy. And it always will be.
If you question that assertion, just read Ardern’s recent speech setting out her stance on foreign policy matters.
Small countries needed friends, she declared emphatically. Her government, moreover, would look to strengthen partnerships with long-standing friends.
If so, her foreign minister has a strange way of going about it.
Peters' appeasement of Moscow raises questions which demand answers from Ardern.
If she condones Peters' actions - or more to the point the lack of them - that effectively amounts to a seismic shift in New Zealand foreign policy.
If she does not condone them, then there is a major fracture in the Labour-New Zealand First coalition.
The prime minister can never be hostage to a minor coalition partner. That she has wielded her authority to force him to attach his name to a couple of joint statements containing specific condemnation of Russia shows that is not the case.
At the very minimum, it is one almighty mess - one that will take Ardern more than a couple of calls to Peters' shoe-phone to clear up.
So seemingly inept has been Ardern’s and Peters’ handling of this foreign policy snafu, however, that you cannot help wondering whether it is all very deliberate.
There is the nagging thought that it is conceivable— just — that Peters' unwillingness to point the finger at the Russians for the Salisbury attack has its genesis in his having been asked to act as a go-between in resolving some other unconnected international dispute.
That is a rational explanation — perhaps the only one available —for him taking a stance which otherwise seems to be in the realm of the irrational.
Peters is a polarising figure on the domestic political stage. But he is respected on the international diplomatic circuit where foreign ministers frequently cross paths with one another.
Avoiding outright condemnation of Russia would boost Peters’ credentials as an "honest broker" — someone who is seen as fair-minded and who can be trusted.
It helps if that any mediator comes from a small nation which is regarded as having a relatively independent foreign policy and crucially has no axes to grind in the international arena.
Suggestions aired last year that Peters might be well-placed to mediate behind the scenes to resolve the North Korea crisis were swiftly scotched in official circles.
There is no shortage, however, of other international hot-spots where Russia has an influence either direct or peripheral but where things have reached an impasse, the most obvious being the horror which is the civil war in Syria.
Such prognosticating is complete and utter speculation, however. There is no evidence of Peters performing any such go-between role now or in the future. Until there is some evidence to the contrary, such an explanation remains far-fetched to say the least.
Were he performing any such go-between role, however, it is more likely than not that New Zealanders will never get to find out about it.
Like Maxwell Smart, Peters would likely be having to operate under a cone of silence.
Heaping criticism on New Zealand's foreign minister when he might be doing some real good elsewhere — or at least trying to do so —would be very rough justice. If so, sorry about that chief.
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