Robert Muldoon’s volatile political career had many remarkable days, perhaps none more so than Thursday, June 14, 1984. In the course of that day, he drank too much, dragooned the National Party caucus into believing an early election was a good idea, snarled at one of his MPs that she was a “perverted little liar”, disrupted a black-tie dinner at Government House, called a snap election (which he would go on to lose) and then teetered into the Beehive garage to discover that a tyre on his car had been let down. In the 40 years since, no other prime minister has come remotely close to experiencing such a day of ignominy.
I was among a handful of press gallery journalists who hightailed it to Government House late on that winter’s
