It would have to have been one of the longest ever diplomatic standoffs between two like minded western countries.
Uncle Sam gave God's Own the bird more than 31 years ago when we said they couldn't send their aging rust bucket the USS Buchanan to our shores because David Lange had embarked on the wildly popular anti nuclear policy.
Within days Washington had severed its visible intelligence and military ties with Wellington and downgraded political and diplomatic exchanges.
The following year Lange met the Reagan Secretary of State, the brusque George Shultz in a hotel room in Manila, the first time in two years they'd met. Waiting in a corridor for the meeting to finish, Shultz's not so secret service suits told myself and a colleague that there was no way we were going to interview the American.
When Shultz emerged I called out to him, he approached just as my colleague was being garrotted and I was being slammed up against a wall and held there. The microphone over the head of the assailant captured the words Shultz imparted to Lange: "We part company as friends, but we part company, as far as the (Anzus) alliance is concerned."