‘I think we deserve a medal for it,’ says Tim Groser of his role in the great Triumph sabotage of 1984.
On the evening of June 14 1984, Sir Robert Muldoon called a snap election. Then he got drunk. But when the prime minister went to drive his own car home to Vogel House in Lower Hutt, he was stymied: his beloved Triumph 1500 had a flat tyre.
Don McKinnon, who had then been Muldoon’s senior whip, told the story 16 years later, in his valedictory address to parliament.
“There was a certain night in June 1984 when suddenly we realised we did not have a majority,” said McKinnon, who would go on to serve as deputy prime minister and foreign minister. “After long discussions with our then leader, Rob Muldoon, and many discussions with a lot of other people, it was decided that we would have to go to the country.”
McKinnon thought that was “a pretty simple sort of decision to make”. More concerning was Muldoon sticking around for drinks with MPs including Gisborne’s “great loquacious member, Bob Bell”. After Muldoon “had shaken everyone’s hand and had had a drink with everyone there, finally I knew we really had a problem on our hands”, said McKinnon.
By then it was 2am, and as well as the alcohol, the PM was also on medications that might have altered his mood: for diabetes, for high blood pressure, and for a bad back, according to his biographer, Barry Gustafson.
“I knew that Rob Muldoon had a fixation with driving home in a blue Triumph. I did not think it was a very good idea to go into a general election without a leader,” McKinnon continued. “I rang a couple of people, and we walked on down to the basement, just praying that a tyre was going to be flat by the time we got there. We turned the corner and saw the blue Triumph slightly tilted on one side, and thought, whew.”
Muldoon stared at the flat tyre. “He looked at it for so long that I almost thought it was going to reflate itself”, said McKinnon. His driver and car were ready to go. “We got him into the Crown car, and another crisis had passed.”
But who was it that took the air out of the tyre?
In 1982, Tim Groser had been recruited into Muldoon’s team of advisers – a foreign policy expert in the PM’s “think tank”. Groser’s main role became one of “essentially a speechwriter, trying to tone things down”, he said, speaking to the Spinoff for an episode of the podcast At Large with Toby Manhire.
Like McKinnon, he was there in the Beehive on June 14 1984, but he has a different take on Muldoon’s primary motivation. “My own personal belief is that it was political cover for the fact that he’d imposed this wage and price freeze,” said Groser. Muldoon had started dishing out exemptions, and it wasn’t sustainable. “You can’t, in a market economy, impose a wage and price freeze without incredible distortions following … I think he knew he was going to lose.”
Muldoon was clearly not drunk when he made the decision to call an election, said Groser. Though by the time he went on TV later that night “he was out of his mind”. Along with Muldoon’s private secretary, Malcolm Fern, Groser encouraged the prime minister to take the crown car.
“He just refused. So the private secretary and I went down and let out all the air in his tyres … Our motive was the protection both of the prime minister and somebody else he might have wiped out if he was driving back in that state to Vogel House.”
Asked if it was McKinnon that had dispatched them, Groser said: “No, but it’s possible the two stories are consistent, because I can’t recall who was the first conspirator. Was it the young private secretary or was it me? So it may well have been conveyed to the private secretary by Don … . But we let the air out. I think we deserve a medal for it.”
Groser would go on to lead trade negotiations for New Zealand around the world, later becoming an MP and minister for trade in John Key’s government. In the podcast, Groser also recounts his time in Washington as New Zealand’s ambassador during the first term of the Trump presidency.
It was clear in 2016 that the Trump team “were not expecting to win themselves”, said Groser. “They were not prepared, they didn’t have people lined up. So the difference between Trump 101 and 201 is not so much in terms of Trump’s position on trade … but rather he was better prepared in 201 than he was in 101.”
And as if that weren’t enough, there are other stories to tell. About a tense time in Moscow after being recalled from trade talks by John Key as Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea. Or performing as a child actor alongside Paul Holmes and Sam Neill.
The full episode is here.
For more from At Large with Toby Manhire, follow here for Spotify, or here for Apple. For YouTube, subscribe to the Spinoff here and find all the episodes here.
