Lange's speechwriter destroyed Fourth Labour Government, says Bassett

FROM THE start, the clandestine affair between the married prime minister and his speechwriter aroused feelings of foreboding among his staff.

It was "like a crow on your shoulder all the time, because you're never quite sure when it's going to shit on you", former Lange press officer Ross Vintiner told historian Dr Michael Bassett.

Now, 20 years after David Lange's Labour government exploded in acrimony, Bassett has laid much of the blame for the collapse of that government at the door of Lange's speechwriter, Margaret Pope, whom Lange later married.

Like Mrs Proudie, the bishop's wife in Trollope's Barchester novels, says Bassett, she "started to try to run the diocese".

"It was to have a devastating impact," writes Bassett in his long-awaited book Working with David: Inside the Lange Cabinet.

He argues that Lange was a man with very little in the way of fixed political opinions of his own, a man so uninterested in politics that he had been one of few Labour ministers who had not demonstrated against the Vietnam War.

Lange had been happy to be the brilliant salesman fronting the programme of radical reform that finance minister Roger Douglas and the rest of the cabinet unleashed in 1984 in response to the country's grave economic crisis.

But last week Bassett told the Sunday Star-Times that after the 1987 election, when Lange's own lack of strong political views was combined with increasingly poor health, loneliness and a weakness for strong women, Lange became a tool for the much more firmly left-wing Pope. Bassett claims she had the strength of conviction that he lacked, and that she pushed him to assert his authority as prime minister against Douglas.

"Margaret Pope seems to have convinced Lange that the role he had adopted in selling the government's policy was belittling of him and of his status," says Bassett. "Lange was not a strategist, he wasn't a strategist's backside. He starts trying to run the show when those were not where his talents lay."

At the time, Bassett says, Lange was vulnerable. He was suffering from a battery of health problems and was beginning to drink heavily. Bassett says Lange's doctor, Pat Frengley, told him Lange suffered acutely from "dumping syndrome", a complication of his stomach bypass that caused abdominal cramping and nausea.

Bassett's is not just any account of the much disputed government that in 1988 became paralysed, and which left Labour so divided that it took nine years in opposition to recover.

It will be closely read because as a former Labour minister, Bassett was near the epicentre of the fight for control of Lange's government. He was also taking notes right through, including at every Labour caucus meeting. And he conducted lengthy interviews with many of the ministers at the heart of that government.

On one side of that epic fight was Lange and the left of the party, calling for a halt to Labour's radical reform agenda. On the other side was Douglas, Richard Prebble, Bassett and others who wanted the juggernaut of change to accelerate.

Despite Bassett's own role firmly on Douglas's side of that argument, he hopes his account is a balanced one. And his account of Lange in the early years has much affection in it.

"At his best you couldn't take your eye off him," says Bassett. "He had, in a different way, what Muldoon also had, a degree of unpredictability of utterance."

Bassett says Lange's magic and good humour helped a cabinet grappling with "awful" choices during the 1984-87 years.

But the second term of government was very different. Cabinet unity finally collapsed in the wake of Douglas's flat tax package, a package that would still be hugely controversial today. It proposed all income tax rates would be cut to 23c, supplemented by a guaranteed minimum family income for the poor.

A month after cabinet agreed on the package in broad principle and announced it, Lange unilaterally announced in January 1988 there would be a pause for a "cup of tea". Things unravelled horribly from there.

In retrospect, Bassett thinks the flat tax package was "possibly not" worth breaking up a government over, as it had some flaws as a policy.

For many observers the eventual collapse of Lange's government was hardly surprising, given the yawning gulf between Douglas's accelerating hard-right economic reform agenda, and the traditional left-wing views the Labour Party was founded on. After all, Douglas went on to found the libertarian Act Party.

Lange's own account, in the autobiography released shortly before he died in 2005, was that he became concerned about Douglas's narrow vision very soon after Labour took office in 1984. Lange said in Labour's first term of office, Douglas's capacity for boldness was in demand. But "when the temper of the times changed, he was not capable of changing with it".

Bassett does not accept Lange's government was predestined to collapse because of the irreconcilable political views within it.

"The question that you have to answer is why does it start to grate with Lange, or start to register with Lange, six months after he said that you can't put a cigarette paper between me and Roger. Why does it start to register with him then?

"I think a combination of Lange's health problems, which are starting to get more serious, coupled with Pope's influence, which has more bearing on the scene when Lange is increasingly vulnerable those are the factors," says Bassett.

He challenges Lange's own account of why he lost faith in Douglas, a process that began in early 1987, when Douglas was trying to rein in a $3b deficit and put four options to colleagues while preparing that year's Budget.

By Lange's account, the option Douglas favoured was so extreme it was "burned into my memory". "He argued for the sale of almost every government asset, including roads, hospitals, schools and universities. Every social service was to be privatised. We were to have a single rate of income tax at 15c in the dollar and GST would be raised to 15% to match," he wrote in My Life.

But Bassett says this was a "very extravagant version of what Douglas had proposed", and that Douglas's most extreme option had no more than an emphasis on asset sales, vigorous expenditure cuts, and signalling of a flat tax scenario.

Bassett says there was no need for Lange to take fright. He says the rest of cabinet didn't take Douglas's most extreme scenario too seriously and were expecting a compromise to be hammered out.

"None of the ministers who were normally involved in the Budget process thought there was anything untoward in the ideas Douglas had produced; it was just the way Roger operated," says Bassett.

But he thinks that following Douglas's proposals, Lange was worked on by Pope.

"I think there must have been a very torrid weekend where David was obliged to conclude that Douglas and the direction of the government and his ministry were all taking us to hell in a handcart."

In a 2005 interview, Pope said while she had strongly backed Lange in his scuttling of the flat tax, she did not like the characterisation by "some of David's political opponents" that she was an "undue influence" on him politically. "He never needed anyone to tell him what was right and what was wrong, ever."

Isn't blaming Pope for Lange's falling out with Douglas much like blaming Yoko Ono for breaking up the Beatles? Bassett laughs ruefully.

"I don't think John Lennon was an ill man. Lange is by the early part of 1987 not in good shape physically, he needs a shoulder to cry on and he needs somebody who will boss him around a little bit. He likes strong, stroppy women and she just happens to be one with an agenda."

Nor does Bassett accept that Lange may have been attracted to Pope because she perhaps mirrored his own, more weakly expressed political views.

"I don't think he had any particularly strong beliefs. In his lack of strongly held beliefs I think he became open to her."

He says he remembers asking Lange once, before the affair with Pope had begun, what Lange saw in her.

"And he said `she thinks like me'," says Bassett.

He laughs, because he cannot conceive of anyone thinking like Lange, a man who was utterly, utterly unique. The idea "was too hilarious for words".

Bassett's book, to be released tomorrow, is unlikely to be the last word on what really happened and why. The battle that once raged within Labour over its future direction is now echoed in a contest over how that government will be remembered.

That debate will remain fascinating because the fourth Labour government shaped so much of how New Zealand is today from the floating exchange rate, to the nuclear-free policy, state-owned enterprises, GST, low tariffs, treaty claims that go back to 1840, all the way through to a farming sector that is highly competitive because it has no subsidies.

The Lange side's response to Bassett is likely to come in another book, by former Lange staffer Dr John Henderson, associate professor of political science at Canterbury University.

Henderson says his book is not yet finished. Does he have a view on whether Pope was instrumental in that government's downfall? Henderson isn't giving much away. "That," he says, "is a crucial topic."

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