Even better, the British press once said "Len Cook was to British statistics what Rolf Harris was to art".
But to Mr Cook, it was just another day in the office of a public servant.
His career and life have been recounted by his longtime friend, author Les Hill, in a series of anecdotes and reflections in a book called South Dunedin to Whitehall.
The book was launched on Monday night at Bathgate Park School in South Dunedin.
"I was around at what I would call a really wonderful time to be in government, in the 1980s and 1990s here, and then in Britain with the Blair government — I’m not sure I’d enjoy being a public servant now as much," Mr Cook said.
Mr Cook met Mr Hill more than 60 years ago when they were both 14-year-old students at Bayfield High School.
Mr Hill said the long friendship meant Mr Cook was unable to hide anything in the interviews conducted to gather anecdotes for the book.
"Les also had the benefit of about 20 years of newspaper clippings that stimulated his intrusive questions," Mr Cook said.
Once information was gathered, it took about five years to bring the book together.
"I spent my whole life as a government statistician — these days we wouldn’t quite do that," Mr Cook said.
In the 1990s, then prime minister Jim Bolger told media "in his own brilliant way" that "it’s not true that I said Mr Cook cooks the books".
"I’ve still got the newspaper clipping from that," Mr Cook said.
"I think that typifies in a good relationship in a government ... you irritate ministers, but unlike now where there’s a brutality, there’s a much lesser sense of, ‘we’ll give you a beat in the book’."
Mr Cook joined the Department of Statistics, now Statistics New Zealand, in 1971. In 1982, he was appointed as assistant government statistician and, in 1986, he was made the deputy government statistician.
He was a member of the secretariat of the Prime Minister’s Task Force on Tax Reform in 1981 and 1982, and a member of the Royal Commission on Social Policy in New Zealand in 1987 and 1988.
In May 2000, Mr Cook moved to the United Kingdom to be the national statistician and director of the Office for National Statistics.
He completed his five-year term with the British government before moving back to New Zealand.
