by Tom Scott
‘Edwina’s bedroom. After mounting the balcony late at night, Nehru would mount her! Naomi will be in here!’
‘Stop it, David.’ Naomi giggled.
Lange led us through the adjoining bathrooms, small palaces in their own right, to another grand bedroom.
‘Lord Louis’s bedroom—where he would entertain lithe young naval ratings!’ he shouted to more laughter.
THE NEXT DAY, INDIRA GANDHI, daughter of the first Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and now PM herself, hosted a state lunch for David and Naomi in the Hyderabad grand banquet hall, to which the New Zealand media were also invited. Prior to this we were granted a small audience in an antechamber with Gandhi. I was surprised to find her smaller and more beautiful that her photographs allowed, with a disarming smile and unflinching gaze. She gave each of us a small, exquisite white marble box inlaid with brightly coloured stones arranged in a flower pattern from the Taj Mahal.
During lunch she expressed admiration for New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance and the courage of our young Prime Minister. This time it was David’s turn to beam, the adored nephew in the presence of a favourite aunt.
That night we were her guests again on a rickety viewing platform along with a million-strong crowd at Diwali festivities at the Red Fort in old Delhi. Fireworks rat-a-tat-tatted like rapid gunfire. Flames and sparks from giant, four-storey-high papier-mâché representations of various gods leaped high into the crimson night sky. There seemed to be no security in place. Barely a year earlier, in a bloody climax to years of fighting with Sikh separatists, Indira Gandhi had ordered Indian army troops to storm the sacred Golden Temple in Amritsar. Vengeance hung in the air like a million question marks. I had flashbacks to newsreel footage of Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat being assassinated while reviewing a military parade from a viewing platform not dissimilar to this. I shouted into Dick Griffin’s ear to be heard above the deafening cacophony.
‘I smell assassination. I’m getting out of here!’ Dickie went a whiter shade of pale.
‘Bloody hell, you’re putting the wind up me now, I’ll come with you.’ We pushed through the teeming, delirious throng and caught a battered Morris Oxford taxi back to our opulent hotel. Later, sipping ice-cold Kingfisher beers in the calm and quiet of the plush house bar, I felt sheepish and apologised to Dick.
Two weeks later, in the grounds of her official residence, while Peter Ustinov and a BBC film crew were waiting to interview her, Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her favourite Sikh bodyguard. I’m not sure that David Lange ever really got over her loss. He flew to Delhi numb with grief and sat in the front row at her cremation beside George Shultz. David told me the heat from her huge funeral pyre was searing and unbearable—good training for the blowtorch that Shultz and the Reagan administration would soon be applying to the soles of his feet. Drenched in sweat, with tears and perspiration streaming down his face, he braced himself for her brain to boil. When it did, her skull exploded with a gunfire crack that freaked out the Secretary of State’s already twitchy Secret Service.
CHAPTER TWENTY
LANGE IN REPOSE
AFTER HIS RETIREMENT IN 1996, David Lange and I were once guest speakers at a black-tie dinner in Auckland. It was before the blood disorder amyloidosis began sapping his strength. He’d 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!’
Neither of us knew then that our respective careers in politics and journalism had one last round to play. For the twentieth anniversary of Lange’s elevation to the prime ministership, Television New Zealand asked me to make a documentary on him.
‘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 very 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 New Zealand Festival documentary series.
It was twenty years ago. She was probably one of the two million New Zealanders born since David 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 who weren’t alive then, and for that matter many of us who were, the chances are that none of us 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 and republican in Lange’s second cabinet that tore itself apart, wrote for a symposium on the first term of the Fourth Labour Government that New Zealand was undeniably a more dynamic, varied, exciting, colourful place in 2004 than it was in 1984, and this could be attributed in good measure to this government—as could the fact that we are now 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 Lange probably wanted to strangle me. He is not alone.
In 2002, when David turned 60, because I admired him greatly, even though there were times when I wanted to strangle him too, I sent him a tribute cartoon where all the faces carved into Mount Rushmore were his. I got a letter back that was wry, witty, wise and brave:
Life has fallen into a languid pattern, my voice is 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 twentieth 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 had wasted, his clothes hung off him, and the once great sonic boom of a 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 wouldn’t break something. When it was time to go he came out to the verandah to see us off. He’d 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 appeared in my documentary in archive footage, but the actual retracing of his steps was 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 became foes and vice versa. In the end David’s absence was a curious bonus. It put an extra responsibility on the other participants to contribute to the larger truth and not simply air old grievanc
es or settle old scores, and people were more candid and less self-serving than we dared hope for.
I was particularly fortunate to interview Richard Prebble on the eve of him quitting the leadership of the ACT Party, though he had yet to make the announcement. He was relaxed, jocular and engaging. Having just weathered months of caucus disloyalty he was more able to appreciate the nightmare to which he and others had subjected David Lange 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 spoke about Lange. Awe and affection were mixed up with exasperation and sorrow. His intellectual brilliance, speed of wit and oratorical power were without equal. Mike Moore described David as being gifted almost to the point of insanity. When he heard the scathing jokes Lange told about him, Moore just sighed. ‘Why does he do that?’
My guess is he couldn’t resist saying things the moment they 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, was 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 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.’
John Clarke couldn’t have said it better.
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, Shipley or Clark governments would fit in a shoebox and still leave room for the shoes (and the radical innovations and sweeping reforms of the Key government could be written on the head of a pin and still leave room for the angels if they switched to a slow waltz). But in all of this literature, despite all the hurt and anger, it is hard to find instances of David Lange and Roger Douglas resorting to personal denigration of 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 of our interview, 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. I tried to get David and Roger 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 me, offering to take part in the documentary. David’s former speechwriter, now his widow, was a very reserved and intensely private person. She did not give interviews and was extremely nervous at first, but ended up acquitting herself very well. Gary McCormick didn’t want to talk to us about his friendship with David, but did so eventually because David asked him to. He told me that Pope was a very amusing person at home with David, and there were tantalising glimpses of that side of her in the 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 DeSoto radiator grille?’ 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 my documentary and his contribution is as gracious as the speech he made at that dinner. (To this day I receive Christmas cards from Jim and his family from various exotic locales. They are Yuletide circulars and newsletters, but I am still on the mailing list!) I 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 a lot. 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 a 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 Geoffrey 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 indubitably pluvial country.’ Stern and principled to the point of pathology, Geoffrey is indubitably pluvial himself. He continues to write cogent, learned tomes on the need for constitutional reform, for which I am delighted and honoured to provide cartoons and illustrations). 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 circumstances—she burst into tears.
Kindness and patience were recurring themes in the stories that David’s staff told. 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 had never spoken to the news media before, but made an exception for David and my 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. When pushed, Richardson explained 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’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 t
hat he had to go to the UK and the US on official business.
I said to him, ‘Which way do you want to go, 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 see her.’ And I didn’t even know that he knew that I had a mum 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.’
I also talked to David’s brother and sister, Peter and Margaret —smart, funny, down-to-earth twins to whom David was 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 I spoke to, David was as bright, as shiny, as inviting and as difficult to pin down as a blob of mercury. 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.