John Armstrong: Brilliant, flawed, master of irony

The super-sized intellect, the overflowing reservoir of wit, the lacerating tongue: David Lange might have been one of our greatest prime ministers.

The soaring highs of his five-year premiership are abundant enough to see him comfortably elected to that pantheon of the few. The dreadful lows instantly disqualify him.

As a human being, he was hopelessly over-qualified; as a politician, he was deficient of that trade's most loathed yet most essential requisites.

He won his colleagues' plaudits when he did not need them; he was bereft of allies when it mattered most.

He thrived on crisis. He made the job of prime minister look easy, at times ridiculously so.

He was too easily bored.

Not for him the endless grind of politics; the leader's watch-your-back instinct for self-preservation; the back-room manoeuvring; the relentless, emotionless grinding down of opponents - all the things which make up a Jim Bolger or a Helen Clark.

He was variously admired and detested. He was never really loved.

He made people laugh. And laughter was a welcome antidote to the vicious, sullen politics of the Muldoon years.

The unstoppable wit was matched by an unquenchable thirst for an audience.

Together, they gave him a commanding self-confidence in the highest office in the land.

Never more so than in the Oxford Union debate where he pricked an American's self-righteous pomposity. No one remembers what Lange was asked. The unforgettable "uranium on your breath" reply was not only the epitome of Lange, the anti-nuclear policy was an assertive statement of nationalism at a time when New Zealanders were desperately and belatedly searching for an identity.

The flipside of international politics came later with the humiliation of the forced return of the Rainbow Warrior saboteurs after the French applied the thumb-screws by putting the squeeze on New Zealand exports.

There was no laughter then.

But laughter was a mask. In the end, the quips and one-liners could not hide the hurt - the hurt which he felt others he trusted had done to him; the hurt he feared his Government's blitzkrieg economic reforms had done to the defenceless he felt he should have been protecting.

Only towards the end of his life did the self-torment subside. He was finally willing to acknowledge the accomplishments of one of the country's most significant Governments and able to push the lingering regrets to one side.

The reconciliation with Sir Roger Douglas seemed to be as much about exorcising the demons in Lange's soul as bringing the most formidable partnership of modern New Zealand politics to full circle.

It was Lange's savage tongue which sold the economic policies he grew to despise.

No one knew better than he the value of ridicule as a weapon. It was the overweight schoolboy's defence. Make people laugh and they will not pick on you.

On the hustings and in Parliament, this weapon slaughtered Labour's enemies. It was of no use when the challenge to his authority came from within.

At the zenith of his powers, he lost the respect of colleagues who variously lost patience with him, thought he was too erratic or simply thought he was wrong and Sir Roger was right.

Lange's leanings as a Labour traditionalist meant he was never truly comfortable with the post-1984 economic and social revolution over which he presided, but which Sir Roger engineered.

Lange knew there was no other option but deregulation. New Zealand was economic dog-tucker when Labour won the 1984 election, force-feeding itself on subsidies paid for on the never-never. The country had to go cold turkey.

Like Doctor Frankenstein, Lange discovered too late that Sir Roger had no intention of ending the experiment with market forces once the patient was showing signs of recovery and instead believed economic salvation required the full treatment.

Lange's misgivings arose before Labour's 1987 election victory. He was in foul mood throughout that campaign.

It was as if he could foresee in the moment of what should perhaps have been his greatest triumph that his Government would inevitably fly apart.

Tormented by what the treatment was doing to those at the bottom of the heap - let alone his own party in turning traditional Labour thinking on its head - in early 1988 Lange unilaterally canned Sir Roger's flat-tax package which the finance minister had unveiled the previous December to stop New Zealand falling into recession following the stock market crash.

This extraordinary exercising of prime ministerial fiat destroyed the relationship between prime minister and finance minister, linchpin of any Government.

Worse for Lange, Sir Roger held the crucial advantage as the one the public perceived to be the economic guru.

Sir Roger had the zealot's conviction of utter self-belief. Lange had no answer. He had no chance.

Lange was deemed responsible for the implosion within his Government, the public unable to understand why he had so blatantly undermined his finance minister.

Lange could never win the public relations battle.

He struggled on. He sacked Richard Prebble for gross disloyalty. Douglas, too, got the chop.

A major attempt was made to roll him. He survived. But Douglas was restored to the Cabinet through the combined efforts of his loyalists and those who sought to patch up the split.

It was the final straw. On a sunny Monday morning in August 1989, Lange called a press conference and stunned the country by announcing his resignation.

It was jaw-dropping stuff. Here was someone walking away from the most prized job in politics. But Lange, delivering the ultimate punch-line at the expense of his foolish and helpless colleagues, had never looked happier.