"As the call was transferred our cat (yes that bloody cat) came flying through the cat-flap. She leapt up on to the chair next to Jacinda and began announcing her very squawky arrival," Gayford wrote in the Spinoff.
The feline had to be hustled into the next room while Trump was connected through to Ardern.
Gayford said he had written the piece at 90 Mile Beach in Northland, where he had managed to distract himself in past weeks from the tensions of the election.
He had been at the same spot two weeks before, the night before it was expected Winston Peters would announce his decision.
"It was evening at the Pukenui Café in Houhora and strangers next to me were intensely discussing which way he was going to go - National, they had decided.
"So I finished my Puku Burger, got in a ute, drove back to Auckland and jumped on a flight to Wellington," he said.
In his piece, Gayford described the nervous tension on the third floor of Parliament the next afternoon as "something he would never forget".
"To pass the last moments some Labour staffers down the hall were nervously watching Family Feud on TV."
"They anxiously laughed along so much that a lurking journalist reported this as: 'Sounds of rapturous applause heard coming from the Labour office!'."
He said in reality, "no one had a clue".
Fast forwarding to the moment when Peters announced his decision, Gayford said he, like the rest of New Zealand, had no prior heads-up.
"We all learnt our fate along with the rest of NZ via television that evening," he said.
"I tried to document the moment on camera but the adrenaline flowed so freely that I was shaking uncontrollably."
Gayford said in the Spinoff he was planning on attempting to keep life as normal as possible.
"I don't think the boy from Gisborne and the girl from Morrinsville will find this all too difficult."
