I first met Barry Soper in 1981. Although a relatively newbie to the Parliamentary press gallery, Barry was a Stentor guarding over his private radio domain. With that gravel and glue voice, he admonished me for putting a media release in the wrong tray. As a newcomer from the Opposition Labour Research Unit I was put in my place.
I rose to become Chief Press Secretary and strategist to Prime Minister David Lange, and worked in various roles for three other Labour Prime Ministers. Now I am a humble olive grower. Barry grew in stature, told a lot of news to a lot of people, and is now the author of a bestselling memoir. One Last Question, Prime Minister is his take on those who occupied the Beehive ninth floor over five decades.
His sometimes kind, sometimes brash book reads like a Japanese narrative handscroll. His Ema kimono unravels to tell many a tale in chronological order of PMs. Early on, he sets out his ranking of Prime Ministers by what he terms their “significance”. Significance is not defined, nor the criteria for assessing it. Significant to who? Significant by achievement? Significance by repute? Significance to Barry?
Across the 12 chapters it appears that Barry prefers PMs who are politically savvy, last a while, know policy, get things done, have low national debt, have loyal Cabinets, play the media’s game, enjoy a drink and joke with journalists, travel well, get noticed, and take Barry’s advice. Helen Clark and John Key come out tops. A non-PM, Winston Peters also ranks highly. Making the country a better place for most New Zealanders is hardly mentioned.
Without definition or criteria for “significance”, readers need to entrust or question Barry’s judgment. He relies heavily on his experience, relationships and stories to arrive at his assessment of PMs. It makes for an entertaining read but it also raises questions of accuracy, completeness, and interpretation.
For example, Barry ranks Robert Muldoon a “larger than life” PM, and praises Muldoon’s Think Big projects. Muldoon brandished Think Big on the country in the early 1980s without proven business cases and requiring special empowering legislation. For the record, Muldoon behaved like an autocrat and imposed projects some of which failed court scrutiny and incurred massive intergenerational debt. He left the country nearly bankrupt in 1984. Barry does not mention these facts.
In a later chapter, Barry becomes strident and describes Jacinda Ardern as “the weakest of our significant PMs” in major part because her government increased debt, largely due to Covid. He remonstrates that Ardern did not have “the intellectual capacity to understand exactly what she was doing” and was not “suitable or capable of being PM”. An exasperated Barry, in a tirade against Covid lockdowns, accuses Adern’s government of imposing a “totalitarian state”.
If Muldoon, laced with alcohol, as Barry attests, could impose crippling debt and autocratic Think Big to “get things done” and gain high “significance” in Barry’s view, why isn’t Ardern’s Covid significant in saving thousands of lives while incurring debt?
Two further points on significance and completeness. Historians rate Muldoon’s greatest contribution to New Zealand as signing the Closer Economic Relations free trade agreement with Australia. Lange’s contribution was giving New Zealand an identity to the world. Barry mentions neither achievement. Are they significant?
Geoffrey Palmer is rated lowly as a PM. Barry fails to see Palmer as the most recognised legislator and legal reformer of modern New Zealand. On PM Mike Moore, Barry is complimentary, not so much of Moore as PM but his later roles as Ambassador to the US and joint head of the World Trade Organisation. He dismisses Palmer and Moore as insignificant PMs but apart from Helen Clark, few other modern PMs have gone on to achieve such significance.
There are factual quibbles. Barry states that Muldoon’s ministerial colleagues let down his car tyres to prevent him driving home inebriated. It was a public servant, private secretary Malcolm Fern, who deflated Muldoon’s tyres.
The Lange chapter contains several clangers. For the record, and well documented, deputy PM Geoffrey Palmer wrote the memo that provided the policy position for David Lange to reject the proposed USS Buchanan visit to New Zealand in 1985. Barry claims “Lange would have allowed nuclear-propelled vessels to visit the country but was overruled by hardliners in the party, led by Hamilton’s Margaret Wilson.” Wrong. First, Lange fully endorsed Labour Party policy to ban nuke powered and armed ships in 1983, not long after Lange became Labour leader. I wrote the statement. No Margaret involved.
On the Buchanan invitation, I took Palmer’s memorandum and other material to Lange in Pago Pago, American Samoa, and met him on his return from Tokelau. Lange had not decided on the Buchanan request but on reading Palmer’s memo, and in a very frank discussion with me on the merits of rejecting the request, he made up his mind. No government has dared change that decision and its empowering legislation. PM Luxon is a prime recent example.
On India, Barry says Lange never returned to India after meeting Mrs Gandhi, a trip Barry was on. Lange returned a matter of weeks later to attend Mrs Gandhi’s funeral following her assassination, a trip Barry did not go on.
Barry seems confused on Lange’s significance. He says Lange was “picked up and carried by the tide, wherever that would take him – and where it increasingly took him was the world of Rogernomics”. Later, on Lange’s legacy Barry writes: “Lange was the lever puller of the entire operation. He was a populist Prime Minister in that he was extraordinarily well thought of by the public, through sheer force of his personality rather than policy governance.”
In fact Cabinet under Lange never took one vote. It was governed by consensus. Further, Barry never mentions Lange’s Tomorrow Schools policy, that lasted nearly five decades. And then there is the matter of Lange finally cementing PM Norman Kirk’s dream of New Zealand being nuclear free and having an independent foreign policy. Both are lasting policy.
In the same Lange chapter, Barry attributes to Roger Douglas changes in how press secretaries were and are employed in the Beehive. Roger would be surprised. Journalist David Exel wrote a report on Beehive press secretaries’ employment. That became the basis for the revolution in how all New Zealand governments communicate – and the employment of press secretaries. That was my doing, and each week I reported to Cabinet on coordinating communications, including media releases and paid advertising.
I was the first press secretary employed under that new regime and went on to manage Lange’s historic re-election campaign in 1987. I was not a member of the Labour Party.
Barry naturally uses his experiences for his narrative. But is this sufficient? For example, Barry decries Lange’s policy credentials and says the Fourth Labour government spent the first term “largely on ideology”, whatever this means. He then goes on to describe the first term and probably the most significant economic and foreign policy changes made by any New Zealand government since Michael Joseph Savage in the 1930s. They have largely lasted.
In Barry’s chapter on PM Helen Clark, Barry opines that despite what most economists and historians think, his view is that Clark and finance minister Cullen were greater reformers than the Lange government. They have a proud record but the Clark and Cullen reforms did not fundamentally change New Zealand’s economic and foreign policy settings. They did, however, vastly improve social and economic protections for most New Zealanders.
A reader may get the impression that Barry seems more at ease with National PMs. And yet in terms of significance, avuncular Jim Bolger’s contribution is hard to fathom. He was largely defined by his ministers Ruth Richardson, Bill Birch, Winston Peters, Doug Graham, and Jenny Shipley.
John Key appeared easy going and popular. The question is how do his achievements stack up against those of PMs Ardern, Clark, Lange and Muldoon? Key’s achievements seem to be handling the global economic crisis with calmness, taking New Zealand into the Paris Agreement on climate change, accepting the advice of a taxi driver to build cycleways (the latter two not mentioned by Barry) and lasting nearly three terms.
Knowing what makes a significant PM is important. It’s one of the toughest jobs there is. The ones I have known and worked with are multi-talented and motivated, often lonely at the top, work extraordinary hours away from their families, and are constantly on show, on the go, on guard.
Surely, significance should be equivalent to public service contribution to make all New Zealand a better, more prosperous, fairer place to live, work and, to use the term Barry hates, for New Zealanders to enjoy a sense of wellbeing that brings social and economic betterment, hope and happiness.
One Last Question, Prime Minister by Barry Soper (HarperCollins, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
