KEY POINTS:
David Lange the court jester would have delighted in the comic potential of former colleague Michael Bassett choosing a publisher called Hachette to publish his unflattering exposé of the one-time Labour Party leader.
Apart from that, there's not a lot to laugh about in this tale of woe, aside from the many anecdotes of Lange's clowning that the author can't resist including. I love the image of the Prime Minister swinging open his Beehive door in a Mickey Mouse cap he'd brought back from Disneyland to find a grumpy American Ambassador standing there instead of the expected Cabinet colleagues. That, and the unexpected image of Bassett's wife, Judith, cooking a 40th birthday cake for Lange, which cuzzie Michael then shoved in his briefcase and took to Wellington for an impromptu office party.
It's said that revenge is a dish best served cold. But not 19 years cold. By now, the garnishings of sour grapes are tending to dominate - and the memories of the rest of us have long faded. The publisher realises this with a helpful hand-out to the media entitled "The Significant Bits", beginning with tittle-tattle about Lange's father's court case which "has never been in the public arena".
In Britain or the United States, this is the sort of book that would have been rushed out within months of a government's collapse, caused a sensation, topped the best-sellers lists, then everyone would have moved on.
Now it's something for the political junkie which at the end of the day leaves the author and reader alike still asking the question: Why did the man the Rogernomes chose to act as their front guy eventually betray them?
Bassett blames it on the wicked witch of the left, Margaret Pope, who wheedled her way into Lange's office as speechwriter then into his bed as lover. She and a retinue of - to continue the fairy-tale metaphor - evil hags like Helen Clark, Margaret Wilson, Helen Sutch, Rosslyn Noonan - the list goes on. Oh yes, and dreaded Jim Anderton.
"Lange didn't stand for anything more than a warm fuzzy hope that people's lives could be improved by his being in office. His lack of policy grounding made him fair game for the more doctrinaire woman who had entered his life in 1982."
Of course, it could equally be argued that it was this lack of policy grounding that made him such easy prey for Roger Douglas and his followers such as Bassett. Why else would they choose the dithering, disorganised, over-eating, pulp-fiction-reading clown of this book as their standard bearer?
With the right's growing disillusion, he had nowhere to go but out. The left had long given up on him. When Lange resigned in 1989, activist Peter Beyer explained to me his lack of tears with an old African proverb: "He who shits in the road will encounter flies on his return."
What disappoints me is that the author has tried to write this with his professional historian hat on instead of going for broke and letting it all hang out as the Samuel Pepys of the later 20th century Labour Party. What a great diary it might have made.
Bassett began note-taking at the time he joined the Springleigh party branch in Mt Albert in 1964 and never stopped. Judith Bassett added to the growing archive as in later years, did colleagues like Jonathan Hunt.
When Bassett entered caucus in 1972 he kept scribbling. In 1980, after he was part of the coup that replaced deputy leader Bob Tizard with Lange, caucus narrowly voted to ban the note-taking. Bassett argued they had the choice of letting him take accurate notes as events happened, or risk his recalling details inaccurately when he wrote it up later.
The ban was never lifted, but after a few months, Bassett resumed his open jotting. From 1984, he did the same in Cabinet.
It wasn't sneaky. In 1990 he told me: "When I come to caucus these days I have a big red clipboard with a big spring on top and a piece of paper. I sit myself down in one of the big red chairs at the front, part of the praetorian guard that sits to the right of the Prime Minister ... Everyone sees me.
"The line I have taken with my colleagues is that you take me warts and all, and one of my warts is that I keep notes." He said there'll be no regilding of the lily. "I would never dream of going back and doctoring the record." Noting his own views have changed, he said historians "will realise what a fallible person I am ... [but] the record is there and I'm prepared to live with it".
Great raconteur that he is, a warts-and-all book of this diary was what I was hoping for. Sadly, all we get is the odd tantalising snippet along with a lot of rehashed self-justification.
* Working with David. Inside the Lange Cabinet by Michael Bassett. Published by Hachette Livre.
