David Lange and I were guest speakers at a black-tie dinner in Auckland a few years back. It was before the blood disorder amyloidosis began sapping his strength, and he had just delivered a rollicking speech, without notes as usual, to a hugely appreciative audience. The waiters were serving coffee and chocolates. When the chocolates reached our end of the table, I piously raised my hand and said, “No thanks, my body is a temple.” “Pass them along here,” boomed the former leader of the nation at my elbow. “My body is a warehouse!”
“What’s the name of your documentary?”
“Reluctant Revolutionary.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s about David Lange.”
“Who’s he?”
The phone call was from someone at Television New Zealand, the company that had commissioned the documentary in the first place. The caller was from Sales and Marketing and was working on publicising our contribution to their Saturday night NZ Festival documentary series. She seemed grateful for the information that my co-producer Danny Mulheron provided graciously, albeit in a state of shock and disbelief.
She is possibly one of the two million New Zealanders born since Lange’s fourth Labour government won the snap election of 1984 and flipped this country over like an old, stained mattress that needed airing. If you could transport back in time all the New Zealanders not alive then and, for that matter, many of us who were, the chances are that neither group would recognise the place. The past wouldn’t be a foreign country so much as a different planet.
Michael Cullen, a callow young Cabinet Minister in Lange’s second Cabinet – the onethat tore itself apart – wrote for a recent symposium on the first term of the fourth Labour government that New Zealand is undeniably a more dynamic, varied, exciting and colourful place in 2004 than it was in 1984, and this could be attributed in good measure to that government, as could the fact that we are a more socially divided country with greater extremes of wealth and poverty. The changes did not come without huge cost, and in the end few paid a higher price than the man at the centre of the maelstrom – David Russell Lange.
One of the lesser costs was being ridiculed in print. Cartooning is a foul business. Our job is to mock and find fault from the sidelines. Over the years, David has probably wanted to strangle me. He is not alone. When Dick Griffin worked as chief press secretary for Jim Bolger, he dreaded those afternoons when his boss, waving his massive King Country farmer’s paws at the editorial page of the Evening Post, used to bellow, “Doesn’t your mate realise that when he makes fun of me, he is making fun of the nation?” When David was about to turn 60 [in 2002], because I admired him greatly, even though there were times when I wanted to strangle him, I sent him a tribute cartoon where all the faces carved into Mt Rushmore were his. I got a letter back that was wry, witty, wise and brave:
“Life has fallen into a languid pattern, my voice unreliable and my blood count chronically low and I tend to spend a lot of time asleep. I had three transfusions in the last fortnight and the fourth round of chemotherapy on Friday. One spends lots of time in hospital. I went there for a transfusion a couple of months ago in a government car and the driver was told to wait. They spotted an infection, whipped me off to a ward and
discharged me four days later. The driver had gone. You can’t get good help these days.
“I remain hopeful of some significant remission. I met a chap in the hospital who had four years under his belt, and remember another who had his first chemo with me and died a fortnight later. We were both mortified. There is, for all the morbid self-centredness, a curious pleasure about being released from the banality of political theatre …”
This release came just as the 20th anniversary of the snap election loomed. With not a lot of energy to squander and far better things to do on his rare good days than retrace his time on the boards for the cameras, David declined to take part in our documentary, apart from the briefest of cameo appearances, filmed in the cosy study of his Mangere home. He was tired, his shoulder muscles have wasted, his clothes hung off him, the once great sonic boom of voice was reduced to a croak, but the legendary wit and warmth were still intact. We all wanted to hug him, but you weren’t sure you might not break something. When it was time to go he came out to the verandah to see us off. He had perked up and we got the impression that, provided we kept off politics, we could have stayed and chewed the fat all afternoon. He stood watching us drive off, solitary, stooped, fragile and somehow majestic.
David appears in our documentary in archival footage, but the retracing of his steps is left to others – his siblings, former members of his parliamentary staff, old political comrades in arms and old political foes, though this distinction blurred over the course of his career as comrades in arms became foes and vice versa. In
the end, David’s absence was a curious bonus. It put an extra responsibility on the participants to contribute to the larger truth and not simply air old grievances or settle old scores, and people were more candid and less self-serving than we dared hope for.
We were particularly fortunate to interview Richard Prebble on the eve of his quitting the leadership of the Act Party. He was relaxed, jocular and engaging. Having just weathered months of caucus disloyalty, he was more able to appreciate the nightmare that he and others had subjected Lange to in the last months of his prime ministership. Prebble had some stinging criticisms of his former boss, but these were laced with regret and frustration. Mostly his recollections were fond and filled with genuine admiration.
This is how many of his former colleagues speak about him. Awe and affection are mixed up with exasperation and sorrow. His intellectual brilliance, speed of wit and oratorical power were without equal – and not just here. I have attended press conferences in London and New York where hard-nosed British and US journalists were dazzled by him. Watching Fleet St’s finest gaping at Lange’s description of Margaret Thatcher addressing him as if he were at a Nuremberg rally was a great piece of political theatre. I was at the United Nations’ 40th anniversary celebrations in 1985 where he was selected to make the third speech on the first day of the general assembly. Ronald Reagan opened it, the Chinese President was the second speaker and David was next, representing the small states. The speech – a tour de force of moral outrage – had journalists all around us asking in hushed, reverential tones, “Who is this guy?” Waving tape recorders, they swarmed after him as he strode down a wide corridor where he ran into a Japanese delegation coming the other way. “Excuse me, are you the Finnish?” they inquired politely. “No!” bellowed Lange, “We’re from New Zealand. We’re the pits!”
I have been in hotel corridors when men like the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and the US Secretary of State George Shultz came out of meetings with David utterly charmed, eyes shining, hanging eagerly on his every word, waiting expectantly for the next one-liner or verbal arabesque. Indeed, despite being furious with David over the nuclear ship ban, Shultz dropped him a warm note when he crashed his race car and another when he resigned as Prime Minister. This immunity to enduring wrath did not extend to David’s deputy. After one testy meeting with Shultz, the word went quickly around the State and Defense departments that Geoffrey Palmer was no David Lange.
Mike Moore describes David as being gifted almost to the point of insanity. David describes Moore as behaving like a pinball machine assembled by a colour-blind electrician. Moore sighs at this and asks, “Why does he do that?” My guess is he couldn’t resist saying it the moment it occurred to him. David used humour both as a shield and as a weapon, to attract attention and to deflect attention, to put some people at their ease and to put some on their guard – but mostly he used humour because he could, even when it wasn’t always diplomatic. Asked if the French Government, in the wake of the Rainbow Warrior prisoner release debacle, were getting any closer to the negotiating table in New York, he snorted, “Continental drift finished some billions of years ago.” When the French finally showed remorse, Lange was asked if the French Government apology to New Zealand had been made public. To which he replied, “I suspect it was available from the fourth Customs officer on the left somewhere in the Alps.”
Enough books – both gushing and incensed – about the Lange government and its radical economic reforms have been published to fill a small library. Books about the Palmer, Moore, Bolger or Shipley governments would fit in a shoe box and still leave room for the shoes. But in all of this literature, despite all the hurt and anger, it is hard to find instances of David and Roger Douglas resorting to personal denigration about each other. Douglas, who gives the appearance of having iced water flowing in his veins, was close to tears
talking about the breakdown in his relationship with David. At the end, he asked after him. Had we seen him? How was he? How could he contact him?
Other colleagues were much the same. Boy, if there was ever a platoon that needed a reunion it was these guys. We tried to get David and Douglas to meet on film, but they quite properly declined to share this private moment. They were the Lennon and McCartney of New Zealand politics. Roger wrote the lyrics. David was the lead singer. They had hit after hit. They took the country by storm. Everything was perfect until Yoko Ono – in the form of Margaret Pope – entered the picture and David decided to leave the group, for which some fans will never forgive her.
Pope contacted us, offering to take part in the documentary. David’s former speech writer, now his wife, is a very reserved and private person. She does not give interviews and was extremely nervous at first, but ended up acquitting herself very well.
Gary McCormick, who didn’t want to talk to us about his friendship with David, but did so eventually because David asked him to, told us that Pope is a very amusing person at home with David, and there are tantalising glimpses of that in her interview.
When Jim McLay sat opposite him in Parliament, David used to regularly punish him with the accusation that he was snuggling up to the bomb, with taunts like, “The present Leader of the Opposition would go into a hot flush if he had to pick three pizza toppings out of four” and “Why does he insist on grinning like a 1954 De Soto radiator grill?” Yet, when David retired from politics and Bob Jones threw a farewell dinner, David not only insisted that McLay be invited, but also that he make the only speech. McLay walked away from politics making a covenant with himself that he would never look back or talk about that time. He broke that vow for our documentary and his contribution is as gracious as the speech he made at that dinner.
We also spoke to Gerald Hensley, the former head of the Prime Minister’s Department. When he describes David, the courtly and elegant Hensley could almost be describing himself. “He was unfailingly nice, unfailingly charming, and for that I liked him a great deal. He was by far and away the easiest Prime Minister I ever dealt with, and I dealt with 10. No civil servant could have asked for more.”
Senior civil servants like Hensley, working along the corridor from their political masters, probably get to spend more one-on-one time with them than their Cabinet colleagues, spouses and children are able to. They see them in the best of times and the worst of times. Someone once wrote that no general is hero to his batman, but this is not true of David. Hensley got to know him very well. “His quick intelligence enabled him to grasp situations quickly, with a minimum of paperwork. Too much paperwork for the Prime Minister and he contrived to lose it, anyhow. His restlessness made him impatient of formality and lengthy sittings. He preferred the personal to the procedural approach, to rely on his empathy for people, rather than his consultation with his colleagues.”
Hensley tells a wonderful David yarn. It was in the wake of the terrible East Coast floods in 1988 (the same floods that prompted Palmer to famously reply when asked if he had any special message of comfort for his beleaguered fellow citizens, “We must all accept that New Zealand is an indutibly pluvial country”). Hensley and David were in a helicopter delivering supplies to farmers trapped by the flooding.
“We took lots of fresh bread, orange juice and milk and things for isolated places. On the way home at the end of the day, there was one carton left in the helicopter. It seemed a shame to take it all the way back to Gisborne, so I said to the pilot, find an isolated farmhouse and drop it off. We were halfway down over the backblocks, and he pointed down and there was a farmhouse that had been completely cut off by a rising river. We landed in a paddock outside the back door. The farmer’s wife, who of course was secure in the knowledge that there was no one within 20 kilometres except her husband, came out of the back door to see what this clattering noise was. She was wearing a short, pink nightie and gumboots. When she was confronted by the sight of the Prime Minister of New Zealand advancing upon her with a carton of milk and orange juice and other things, she did the only possible thing in the circumstance – she burst into tears.”
Kindness and patience are recurring themes in the stories that David’s staff tell. His principal private secretary, the dashing and urbane Ken Richardson, has worked for seven Prime Ministers and two Governors-General and is the keeper of many secrets. He has never spoken to the news media before, but made an exception for David and this documentary. Richardson is proud of the amusing postcards that David sent from all parts of the globe. Many are filled with cryptic references to KTK moments. Pushed, Richardson explains that David once committed the cardinal sin of falling asleep during a gala Kiri Te Kanawa concert. There was outrage in some circles, so after that, whenever Richardson saw David trapped in some conversation or other with his eyelids drooping, he would sidle over and say, “I think we might have a KTK situation on our hands, Prime Minister.” David would nod gratefully, make polite excuses and allow himself to be whisked away.
David’s capacity for thoughtfulness is probably best illustrated by this story. Shortly after David became Prime Minister, Richardson, who was in charge of his appointments and travel diary, informed him that he had to go to the UK and the US on official business. “I said to him, ‘Which way do you want to fly, east or west?’, and he said to me, ‘I think we’ll go east because you have a mother in California and I’m sure you’d like to meet her.’ And I didn’t even know that he knew that I had a mother in California. So we went and I arranged for her to come to the hotel, and she arrived and she came to my room. We sat there and David was in his suite with Naomi and lots of other people. Mike Moore was there, too. And one of the Secret Service guys came along and said, ‘The Prime Minister wants you’, so I went down and he said, ‘Where’s your mum?’ I said, ‘She’s in my room’, and he said, ‘I want to meet her.’ My mother and brother were all trembling because they’d never met a prime minister before, and he asked, ‘Has he given you coffee?’ and she said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘What a son! You’ve got to have coffee’, and then he jumped onto the piano stool and played the piano. They were absolutely stunned by this, and I had to remind him he had an appointment, so he left us in the suite and said, ‘Have what you like.’”
We also talked to David’s brother and sister, Peter and Margaret – smart, funny, down-to-earth twins to whom David is just their beloved older brother, albeit an older brother who blossomed into something that they never predicted.
As kids, they used to steal thermometers from their father’s surgery, which was attached to their grand family home in the Auckland suburb of Otahuhu (now the offices of a money lender – the final insult of Rogernomics), break them open and play with the slippery contents.
To nearly everyone we spoke to, David remains as bright, as shiny, as inviting, and as difficult to pin down as a blob of mercury.
All we can be sure of is that he brightened the political landscape like no one else before or since. At times, his oratory made us fiercely proud to be New Zealanders. He was wickedly funny, he was endlessly fascinating, he was baffling, he was infuriating, he was wonderful and we are so lucky to have him.
LANGE LAUGHS
“After a very long year, we’ve got a very short knight.”
On Robert Muldoon’s knighthood, 1984
“Our military forces are an arm of government, just like the Department of Social Welfare, although probably less able to inflict widespread harm.”
Defence Quarterly, 1993
“You must be the only ambassador in the world to own a horse named after his country’s foreign policy.”
To retiring US ambassador H Monroe Brown, who owned a racehorse named Lacka Reason, 1986
“I’ve got two shirts still missing from the Bahamas. I’m sure they are part of a youth camping programme somewhere in Tanzania by now.”
On missing laundry while travelling, 1986
“Will the United States pull the rug on New Zealand? The answer is no. They might polish the lino a bit harder and hope that I execute a rather unseemly glide across it.”
Press conference, 1985
“He’s gone around the country
stirring up apathy.”
On then-Opposition leader Jim Bolger, 1987
“I went in a round of the Domain on Saturday morning in a rally car. At the start of it, I was asked if I felt scared. I said, ‘Certainly not, I have been working with Roger for years.’”
On former Finance Minister Roger Douglas, 1986
“Hold your breath for just a moment; I can smell the uranium on it.”
To a nuclear weapons supporter at the Oxford Union debate, 1985
“Yesterday’s fish and chip wrapper is today’s news.”
On Pauline Hanson’s election, 1996
“I’m sorry I could not get the member off all the time.”
To John Banks’s accusation that he was a useless lawyer, 1985