KEY POINTS:
Sir Keith Holyoake, New Zealand's most successful post-war Prime Minister, has waited a long time for the biography he deserved or any comprehensive assessment for that matter.
Holyoake was a fixture of national life in the 1960s, a calm, cheerful patrician who kept our politics sensible and dull through that effervescent decade.
Politics became so much more exciting after he stepped down - immediately so as his successor, Sir John Marshall, mishandled the apartheid rugby issue through 1972 - that Holyoake's remarkable record, four election victories on the trot, has been almost wilfully underrated by commentators and scholars.
Barry Gustafson, former professor of politics at the University of Auckland, has filled the gap after a similar study of Sir Robert Muldoon, who always said Holyoake was much underrated by those who did not work with him.
Gustafson has come to agree. This book will surprise everyone who used to use the sobriquet "Kiwi Keith" in irony, believing the pompously spoken Wodehouse character was not much like the rest of us.
The nickname, Gustafson reveals, was bestowed on him as a child to distinguish him from an Aussie Keith among his cousins. Holyoake was "Kiwi" to old friends ever after.
The memorable "plum" in his mouth was likewise a childhood affliction, maternally enforced apparently.
Either that or his dentures didn't fit. They say he could never get false teeth that worked properly and had to talk that way to keep them in.
It is surprising how little we knew of the man who led the country for so long. He was not shy of the press, enjoying card games in the gallery, instituting daily media briefings and questions in the House, but he was never candid in public, always proper. Accessible too.
As Prime Minister he lived a few hundred yards from Parliament's gates and insisted on listing his home phone number in the directory. Gustafson records that on one occasion someone rang to report their luggage missing at Wellington railway station and the Prime Minister walked down to help look for it.
Holyoake was down to earth in his interests - rugby, fruit-growing, farming, home gardening - and relished physical and mental work. Like many of his generation, he was not educated much beyond primary school and, according to Gustafson, Holyoake felt this deficit.
But he must have had exceptional personal qualities that were evident from a young age.
When first elected to Parliament from Motueka at age 27, he was already president of the Golden Bay Rugby Union and Nelson provincial chairman of the body that was to become Federated Farmers.
Though 20 years younger than any other MP, he was quickly identified by his party leader, Gordon Coates, as a likely successor.
That was 1932. He held Motueka against the tide when Labour came to power in 1935 but lost the seat with boundary changes in 1938.
His leadership qualities were acknowledged even by Labour. Prime Minister Savage told New Zealand Herald reporter O.S. Hintz that Holyoake was "a good lad ... He'll get back into the House and he'll lead his party someday. And after they have learned from us, they'll be a better party than they are now."
By then Coates' Reform Party had fused with its Depression coalition partner, United, to form National. Holyoake returned in 1943, so highly rated by the party that it had acceded to his demands not only for one of its safest seats, Pahiatua, but that it buy him a farm in that electorate.
Gustafson offers no strong comment on this or another subject that raised eyebrows somewhat later: the Lands Department's decision to construct a road to the boundary of a property that Holyoake had newly purchased at Kinloch on the shores of Lake Taupo.
In Holyoake's absence from Parliament, National had elected a new leader, Sid Holland, who took the party to power in 1949 with Holyoake as his deputy.
They did not get along well on the evidence here but Holyoake was loyal to the end, taking over from an ill and incapacitated Holland just before the 1957 election.
As Savage predicted, Holyoake led a party that had reconciled itself to Labour's welfare state. Through the Holyoake years and long after, New Zealand politics was a contest of management rather than principle. And in all but two elections, 1957 and 1972, of the 10 elections held between 1949 and 1984, voters elected National to manage the welfare state.
It did so under two prime ministers of very different style. Holyoake (1960-72) was a consensus leader who avoided dissension; Muldoon (1975-84) revelled in it.
The challenge for a biographer is to convey the personal qualities that enable a person to lead others. Gustafson has not quite succeeded with Holyoake.
The research seems a little distracted by discoveries of odd comments in interviews and other sources that suggest Holyoake was more "modern" than we remember.
Gustafson introduces Holyoake as "New Zealand's first self-consciously and openly nationalist prime minister" on the strength, it seems, of his indifference to British airs and expectations, his private reluctance to support the United States in Vietnam and his public opposition to British, US and French nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific.
Domestically, he gave crucial support to his Justice Minister Ralph Hanan's liberalism in social policy and Maori affairs.
Gustafson delights in Holyoake's opposition to foreign investors gaining control of local business, particularly news media, his encouragement of tertiary education - to the unwitting benefit, Gustafson notes, of students who abused him mercilessly over Vietnam - and the social legislation of the decade.
The contraceptive pill and the domestic purposes benefit arrived in the Holyoake years and the no-fault accident compensation scheme had its genesis under him.
But none of these were central to his leadership at the time.
He led New Zealand through a period of immense social change: the arrival of television, which was not kind to him, the Vietnam war, university roll growth, rock culture and protest.
He led a Government that contained at least two ministers, Marshall and Tom Shand, who believed they would be better prime ministers but dared not challenge him.
He was a strangely comical political colossus, whose appeal was a mystery to most of us in his lifetime.
Gustafson has produced a clear account of his life but the qualities that made him a commanding figure are an enigma still.
