In 2017, she became the world’s youngest female leader. Ardern’s inspiring story makes us yearn for an era of courage and hope
Jacinda Ardern’s deeply personal memoir is fascinating and engaging. It also triggers – or, at least, it did in me – a yearning for a political age that feels long gone, even though it is a mere two-and-a-half years since she left office as New Zealand’s 40th prime minister.
Ardern was born in 1980 and grew up in rural New Zealand. Her father was a police officer. There is a sense throughout the book that the instinctive empathy that came to define her leadership was inherited from him. He was, Ardern explains, always more interested in why someone committed a crime than in the bare facts of what they had done. Her mother – whose mental health struggles are touchingly recounted – worked in jobs that she could fit around caring for Ardern and her older sister. She had always wanted to be an accountant but lacked the means to go to university.
Ardern’s childhood was ordinary – though in the extraordinary sense that often characterises the lives of working-class families – but it was not scandal-free. Her paternal grandmother – “the most Scottish woman to have never visited Scotland” – had an extramarital affair with a family friend. Ardern discovered only after her nana’s death that the friend was actually her dad’s biological father.
She was, by her own admission, a reluctant and unlikely politician. She suffered from debilitating nerves, which meant that, though she loved public speaking, her mouth would dry up a few minutes into a speech. She thought herself too thin-skinned for the frontline, preferring to work behind the scenes for a series of Labour politicians. When she was eventually persuaded to stand for parliament in 2008, as a “list” candidate in New Zealand’s proportional representation system, she told herself it was only to give her a rallying cry in the expat voter registration campaign she was organising in London.
Her story is that of many women in public life. Riddled by self-doubt, constantly questioning if she was good enough, she had to learn to live with deeply gendered criticism about how she looked, what she wore, the tone of her voice. Did she want children, was she pregnant, didn’t voters have a right to know if she might need to take maternity leave while in office? As I know from my own experience, these are the kind of questions that stalk young women in politics. In my case, as I got older, the queries around my childlessness – questions never asked of men – evolved from “when” to “why not”. The thinly veiled implication was that I had sacrificed motherhood in ruthless pursuit of my career.
And yet, like many women, she responded with hard work and determination: “My fear of failing, of letting people down, was overshadowed by a grinding sense of responsibility. And so, as unlikely as it had once seemed, I became the deputy leader of my party, then leader, and now, possibly, the next prime minister.”
It was in the interregnum between a general election (in which she turned around the fortunes of an ailing Labour party) and the conclusion of coalition negotiations (which would determine whether, just months into her leadership, she would become prime minister) that she found out she was pregnant with her little girl, Neve.
Suddenly, it seemed that emotional intelligence could be a strength not a weakness
In October 2017, Ardern became, aged 37, the world’s youngest female head of government. Her account of balancing motherhood with the responsibilities of being prime minister is brutally honest. She doesn’t claim to be living proof that it is easy for women to have it all. Yes, she copes, but only with the help of a stay-at-home husband and a vast support network. It is society’s failure, not Ardern’s, that for every woman who reads her book and thinks, “If she can do it, so can I,” there will be another who recoils from how utterly impossible it sounds.
Back to my yearning for a bygone age. Maybe I am biased, as her term in office coincided with my tenure as first minister, and many of the issues she championed were high on my agenda, too, but for me, Ardern represents an era of political leadership – achingly brief in retrospect – when hope seemed to be up for the fight with despair; when there was a genuine will to tackle the big issues of our time, from the climate crisis to growing inequality.
She says about new oil and gas exploration: “My rationale was simple: if we needed to transition away from fossil fuels, then we needed to stop searching for them.” She is right. Today, there is a rapidly diminishing number of politicians with the care or courage to say so.
Ardern recounts her push for an economy driven by the pursuit of wellbeing as well as profit – a notion now derided by populist leaders who derive political benefit from broken economies. She tells of championing LGBTQ rights even though it drove her away from the Mormon faith she grew up in, signifying a steadfast commitment to equality that seems almost quaint these days.
However, it was the style of Ardern’s leadership, as much as the substance, that seemed to offer a different template for politics. Suddenly, it seemed that emotional intelligence – empathy and kindness, attributes more often associated with women – could be a strength not a weakness. Even she recognised the departure: “I had not been everyone’s first image of a leader, including my own.”
History will remember Ardern for two main reasons. Her leadership of New Zealand through the Covid pandemic is one. Her zero-Covid approach initially brought her adulation and a landslide re-election victory, but later shrouded her in conspiracy theories that hastened her exit from politics. The other is her response to the terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, when she wore her heart on her sleeve and refused to allow hate to divide her country. She recounts a telephone call with Donald Trump in the aftermath of the attack in which he seemed to question her use of the word “terrorist” to describe a white man who had deliberately targeted and murdered Muslims. In describing how she stood her ground, Ardern makes us wistful all over again for a time when global leadership was less craven to bullies.
She demonstrated that leadership could be kind and unifying, and yet her resignation in 2023 was sparked by a fear that, in the wake of Covid, she had become a divisive figure: “Leaving might make our politics feel calmer, less polarised.” How much better the world might be now if we had leaders with an ounce of the self-awareness that, alongside her empathy, courage and intelligence, Jacinda Ardern has in abundance.
A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern is published by Macmillan (£25). Order it at observershop.co.uk for a special 20% launch offer (ends 11 June). Delivery charges may apply
Photograph by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
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