Seven years and one stomach-stapling operation after entering Parliament in 1977, David Lange became PM a month before his 42nd birthday. The baby-boomers had ousted Robert Muldoon’s RSA generation and Lange’s youthful Cabinet ‘heaved and bubbled like a Rotorua mud pool with new ideas, some equally volcanic.’

The son of a Christian socialist doctor, Lange got through university by working at the freezing works. He described himself as a lawyer who had ‘adventures in smart-alec advocacy.’

Source: http://www.nzhta.org.nz