KEY POINTS:
The story of the most remarkable New Zealand Government in my lifetime has been waiting 20 years to be told. Those of us who had the good fortune to witness its work at fairly close quarters have been waiting that long for Michael Bassett to produce its definitive
account.
Bassett, we knew, had been taking notes from his vantage points inside the cabinet and the caucus room. As a serious historian with a keen eye for personal foibles and political intrigue, he was uniquely qualified among those well placed to tell the story with all the power and drama it deserves.
So why has he not done so?
The 550-page fruit of all his contemporaneous notes, supplemented by extensive reflective interviews with his colleagues, is a disappointing amalgam of dry history and mildly salacious biography.
It is as though a publisher had read Bassett's original account of the fourth Labour Government and told him to popularise it by focusing on David Lange.
Bassett is related to Lange and knew him from childhood. The book begins, like many biographies, with more ancestral detail than most readers need, and provides a more vivid account of Lange's father, the Bassetts' doctor, than his rotund child.
The future cabinet colleagues had little contact in adolescence and Bassett was unaware when he first entered Parliament in 1972, that Lange, "my silver-tongued distant cousin" had any interest in politics.
Lange's interest was whetted by standing, reluctantly but with Bassett's encouragement, for the Auckland City Council in 1974 and for Parliament the following year.
Lange's entry at the 1977 Mangere byelection, his accession to Labour's leadership, engineered by Bassett, Mike Moore, Roger Douglas and others, the snap election, the currency crisis, _ all have been described more fully and dramatically than here. As has the pivotal role of Lange in his Government's eventual demise _ everything in the book is well known except the sketchy details of the Prime Minister's affair with the speech-writer who detested Rogernomics.
Bassett _ or his publisher _ has decided to make Lange's fatal attraction to Margaret Pope the dominant theme and narrative thread of his book. Reference is made to it wherever possible, or as a gratuitous afterthought at the close of chapters.
Sometimes the sleuthing seems sleazy. The book records that near the end of the 1986 session "Lange had taken a few days off and gone to Great Barrier Island. He stayed at Tipi and Bob's, a restaurant and guest house near Tryphena, where he had company".
In the chapter footnotes that passage is sourced to Lange's papers in the national archives and the author adds that, "confirmation was provided some years later by the motel owner". Readers might recoil less from the image of Lange and Pope than the idea of Bassett with his notebook at Tipi and Bob's.
His better work discovers from Lange's former staff that Pope frequently threatened to resign over decisions the Government was taking and occasionally disappeared for days. But he does not attribute the fall-out with Douglas after the 1987 election entirely to her.
A Bruce Jesson article late that year also got to him, Bassett attests.
The pity about the book's focus on the personal foibles of David Lange is that, remarkable as he was, the fourth Labour Government was far bigger than him. Even worse, the personal focus on the Prime Minister who ultimately destroyed his government gives this account, even of the early years, an air of looming tragedy rather than astonishing achievement.
That Government was a freak of democratic politics. Coming to power by a rare co-incidence of favourable circumstances, it was able to completely re-orient an economy at a pace nobody expected and nobody imagined it could sustain for as long as it did.
That is a book still waiting to be written. And Bassett sadly, will not write it. Even when he lifts his sights and concentrates on the daring decisions of the Government, he manages to make its work seem mundane.
And surprisingly for an historian, there is no sense of excitement in the book, no attempt to place events in the broader currents of the late 20th century, not even much contemporary context.
Inevitably from an insider's account, there are interesting observations: Lange's lack of interest in Labour's early economic debates; Jim Anderton's efforts as party president to undermine Lange's leadership and deselect his supporters; the importance of the abortion issue to Helen Clark and Margaret Wilson, or so Bassett says.
But when Bassett recounts events that were in the public domain you wonder at his reliability. His version of the drama played out on television the night that Muldoon resisted devaluation excludes the vital interview Muldoon gave to TVNZ's Richard Harman. His view of other events, such as the Buchanan incident that brought the nuclear stand-off to a head, seems more restricted than was mine. He admits that ministers hardly knew what was going on when the warship visit request was on its way.
It is a reminder that very few members of any Government have a good view of everything important. Only Lange, Douglas, Geoffrey Palmer and maybe one or two others were always close to the action.
Lange produced an inadequate memoir not long before he died. Perhaps one of the others is capable of writing the book their work deserves. Assistant Editor John Roughan worked in the Press Gallery for the Herald from 1983 until the end of 1985.
