Meanwhile the fat dunce, the kid who couldn't see his shoes to tie up his laces, the form clown, the emotional wreck who wasn't able to concentrate for five minutes, the weakling who refused to impose his own views on anyone else, the lightweight who read Wilbur Smith instead of Marcel Proust, the loner who never learnt to drink with the other boys behind the bike sheds - not only did he get to be head prefect, but he was made dux, too.
And if that were not sickening enough, he became famous. He was popular.
The glory sat on his shoulders. It is his name that history celebrates.
Oh, yes, and did I mention? He got the girl as well.
You'd find it hard to recover from something like that, wouldn't you? That little knot of envy rubbing up against incomprehension, dislodging splinters of bitterness, working their way into the bloodstream . . .
Why him? Why not me? I'll confess that I am not on intimate terms with the everyday particulars of the David Lange years.
I wasn't personally there - taking notes.
I know enough to know he certainly had his faults, but like most other ordinary people, I have to take more detailed cues from the historians.
So let's have a closer look at the foibles and failings of David Lange - "the least securely anchored, both intellectually and emotionally" of all in his cabinet (the dunce, the emotional wreck) - as portrayed by Michael Bassett; Dr Michael Bassett, historian, author, distant cousin, and former cabinet colleague of Mr Lange.
Mr Lange's "political ascendancy came too easily".
Where others "had spent years mastering the party apparatus . . . and had wrestled with policy goals", the fat man obviously just blagged his way into the job.
The nerve of it.
I mean, "he possessed none of the brow-beating skills displayed by earlier Labour leaders to direct the party apparatus towards his own ends".
As arrogant, power-hungry authoritarians go, you don't even get to first base if you don't have those sort of qualities.
Furthermore: "Sustained concentration on any issue was foreign to Lange and led many [Dr Bassett excluded, surely] to dismiss him as a policy lightweight."
And then there were his cultural tastes, if you care to describe them as such.
"He had always preferred light fiction and stories about human frailty to substantial works of non-fiction."
Not to mention the unforgivable faux pas of never learning to drink socially - instead preferring the company of a "cheap novel or a video".
Heavens. Imagine being stood up for a cheap novel.
The class clown did, of course, display a certain Churchillian capacity for "rotund phrases and striking word images" - come again? - but had little interest in the political process or history, apparently.
And when Mr Lange, the leader of the Labour government, the prime minister no less, "began to conspire against Roger Douglas" . . . (Sorry, I must have misread that. Let me check . . . No, I stand corrected, that's what it says), it was clear that he had fallen under the spell of that evil jezebel Margaret Pope - his speechwriter and lover "who hated everything that the Rogernomes [including Dr Bassett, perchance?] stood for".
Ah, it's all entertaining, mythical stuff isn't it? The good but essentially weak man, brought low by the attractions of the flesh and the willpower of a strong woman.
Michael Bassett, who along with Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble attempted to push the radical reforms of the 1984 Lange government so far that they might have destroyed the Labour Party itself - and who were only prevented from doing so by David Lange's famous pause for a "cup of tea" - has written a 600-page memoir called: Working with David: Inside the Lange Cabinet.
It has already been described as "acerbic".
But doesn't acerbic imply at least a degree of subtlety, a suggestion of wit, and the fine thrust of the rapier? The published extracts I have so far read lend it a certain flavour: what we have here is more akin to a mugging with a sock full of cold porridge.
Working with David: Inside the Lange Cabinet, by Michael Bassett (Hodder Moa, $59.99).
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
