[7] His cousin Michael Bassett reflected that Roy "knew how to avoid trouble rather than confront it", and David developed a similar aversion to conflict.

[10][11] Lange worked from an early age and held a number of jobs; in the third form he performed a paper-round for The New Zealand Herald in Mangere East, and later changed from delivery-boy to collecting the money.

[13] In 1961 he started a job as a law clerk at Haigh, Charters and Carthy, a role that had varied work and clients, including the Communist Party.

[3] In July 1976 Lange was involved in the legal defence of former cabinet minister Phil Amos after he protested the visit of the 20,000 tonne American cruiser USS Long Beach in his small yacht the Dolphin by impeding its entry to Auckland Harbour.

Lange was inspired by Amos' stand and following his example would later pass a law banning the visit by nuclear propelled or armed ships to New Zealand.

The Council was dominated by conservative interests and the only Labour candidates elected were Jim Anderton and Catherine Tizard; Lange was "...halfway down the field .... which was better than I expected.

[24] On 1 November 1979 Lange, after encouragement from parliamentary friends Roger Douglas and Michael Bassett, challenged Bob Tizard for the deputy leadership.

[26] In 1980 Lange and a group consisting of Douglas, Bassett, Richard Prebble and Mike Moore tried to remove Rowling as leader of the Labour Party.

[35] The currency crisis and devaluation of the New Zealand dollar spurred on the reform drive of Roger Douglas, who Lange made Minister of Finance in the new government.

[37] Upon coming to office, Lange's government was confronted by a severe balance of payments crisis, as a result of the deficits fuelled by Muldoon's imposition of a two-year freeze on wages and prices, and stubborn maintenance of an unsustainable exchange rate.

[39][40] Their first move was to hold an Economic Summit on 14 September 1984, similar to the one held in Australia by Bob Hawke the previous year, to create a feeling of consensus and to lay out the underlying problems in New Zealand's economy.

[43] Margaret Wilson, the Labour Party's president, was deliberately not invited to the summit,[44] a sign of the speed and intolerant approach to opposition that would characterise Rogernomics.

In February 1985, Lange famously rejected the arrival of the USS Buchanan, supported by a recommendation from the acting prime minister Geoffrey Palmer.

[57] Relations with France became strained when French agents of the DGSE bombed and sank the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985 while it lay moored in Auckland Harbour, killing photographer Fernando Pereira.

In June 1986 Lange obtained a political deal with France over the Rainbow Warrior affair, presided over by United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.

On 8 August 1986, the Lange government enacted the Homosexual Law Reform Act which legalised consensual sex of males 16 years and older and allowed them to enter into sexual relationships with one another without the fear of being prosecuted.

[61] Unusually, Labour did not produce a manifesto for the election, primarily due to disagreement between Douglas and Lange over the direction the government would take if re-elected.

He stated that he gave himself the portfolio to "draw a line in the sand" against the influence of the "Treasury troika"[67] (Douglas, Prebble and David Caygill), and in accordance with his wishes to emphasise social policy in his second term.

[69] Later, in his autobiography, Lange stated: There was never any question that New Zealand might use force to restore the democratically elected government, since we were not asked to intervene by its representatives and had we been, we did not have the military resources.

[70] The stock market crash of 19/20 October 1987 damaged confidence in the New Zealand economy, which went into a prolonged recession from December of that year, and remained so until June 1991.

[71] Lange noted with bitterness that Douglas took advantage of the crash to "rubbish" his stated ambitions to have the government focus on social policy, and push for more economic reforms.

[75] In 1988 consensus on economic policy amongst the Labour leadership finally broke down, with Douglas resigning after Lange overruled his radical flat income-tax and universal basic income proposal.

[82] During his tenure as Prime Minister, Lange engaged in competitive motor racing,[83] appearing in the New Zealand One Make Ford Laser Sport series.

[86] In 1991 and 1992 he wrote a Monday column in The Dominion, published alternately with Simon Upton who, Lange commented, "writes erudite obfuscation tempered by occasional attempts to explain the arcana of the health reforms.

You could not imagine two more unlike rides to the top as I had and Helen Clark had: hers the principled, extremely hard-working, fearless really persistence in the face of all sorts of adversities and personal assaults.

I'd never been a tract writer; I'd never been a philosopher; I'd never taken part in extraordinary industrial dispute activism; I'd not been in any of that background, but I was able to mix it in what had become, conceived to be, the new front line of politics — the ability on television to convey confidence and assurance without saying anything.

And that is very important....""[I was] plunged into this extraordinary awareness of a crisis in foreign exchange and reserves and having to take steps that were the absolute antithesis of anything that I would ever have expected the week before.

In a 1998 judgment, and on appeal in 2000, the courts affirmed a new qualified privilege for the media to discuss politicians when expressing the criticisms as the "honest belief" of the author.

[95] The release of the document prompted a high-level inquiry to investigate how the top-secret report ended up in Lange's personal papers, in breach of security protocol.

On 12 November Naomi Lange named his speech-writer, Margaret Pope,[100] as "the other woman" in a Sunday Times article, and said that she had been told by her husband five or six months beforehand that he planned to leave the marriage.