The world’s media is lining up to interview Dame Jacinda Ardern about her memoir, A Different Kind of Power – CBS, BBC, even Oprah. But as the former prime minister sits down to talk to Seven Sharp, she insists the impression she makes on Kiwis matters most. “I’m sweating just as much as I did with Oprah,” she tells Hilary Barry in a conversation that traverses fertility, public hostility and the cancer scare that sparked her decision to resign.
“The question for me was, could I keep going and do the job well?” – Watch this story on TVNZ+
In the middle of 2022 Dame Jacinda Ardern was standing by the stalls in an airport toilet when a member of the public approached her and delivered what initially sounded like a compliment.
“I just want to say thank you,” she said to the then Prime Minister of New Zealand. And then came the punchline: “Thank you for ruining the country.”
Hilary Barry quotes the passage to Dame Jacinda from her new memoir. “People who thought ill of politicians had always been out there, I’d known that, but it felt as if something had changed recently, as if people’s restraint had slackened.”
Dame Jacinda picks up the thread. “It’s certainly not the case that I felt like I was in any personal danger but… there you are on your own by a toilet stall and someone comes in and has a go.”
She didn’t mind challenge or debate, she says. “Those are the things you expect, but there was an extra layer that I just noticed in the latter part of my time in office, and I think other politicians, not just in New Zealand but around the world, globally, would say that they’ve noticed this as well…
The former Prime Minister was asked by Seven Sharp’s Hilary Barry whether she could return to New Zealand without being given a hard time. (Source: Seven Sharp)
“Was it the stress and the anxiety and the difficulty of Covid? Maybe… All I can say is, in the 15 years I was in office, I did notice a shift.”
Covid 19. Vaccines. Mandates. The angry 23-day occupation of Parliament. Looking back, 2022 can seem surreal to any of us. But as Dame Jacinda tells Barry, Covid was far from the only challenge in an intense five years in office that included the Mycoplasma Bovis, the eruption of Whakaari/White Island with its devastating consequences, and the most horrific act of terrorism the country has ever experienced, the Christchurch Mosque massacre.
“It was a really hard five years for New Zealand and for those who had the privilege of leading New Zealand at that time,” she says.
“I’ve said many times, I could have kept going. But the question for me was, could I keep going and do the job well?”
When a doctor discovered a lump in her breast toward the end of 2022, a thought that had probably been brewing for some time suddenly loomed large. “Maybe this will be what allows me to leave,” Dame Jacinda remembers thinking. Although she adds: “I want to be careful about not wanting to overplay it. Because women have these kinds of scares all of the time.”
It wasn’t cancer. That anxiety passed, but the other big question remained: “What kind of state was I in if I was seeing cancer, not just as a devastating possibility, but as a ticket out of office?”
IVF and secret Sunday scans
When the prospect of being our next prime minister first arose in 2017, Dame Jacinda was 37 and, unbeknown to most, undergoing fertility treatment with her then-partner-now-husband Clarke Gayford.
By the time Winston Peters had made his fateful choice of coalition partner, making her the world’s youngest female head of state, Dame Jacinda had known for six days that she was pregnant.
Two dizzying, life-changing moments happening within the space of a week – one nationwide news, the other still a fragile secret. It was “fairly overwhelming,” she tells Barry. “I tried my best to describe it on the page.”
Dame Jacinda’s first pregnancy scan took place on a Sunday night, her obstetrician booking her in under a fake name. “It was like a covert operation, the whole thing. There were very few people who knew,” she says.
“It was a strange time. You want to be really joyous, but I also knew that I had to demonstrate that my key focus was doing my job. The fewer people who knew the better.”
When the reality of balancing new motherhood with a massive role first hit home, Dame Jacinda did as anyone would do and turned to an older woman for advice. Except, in her case, it was Queen Elizabeth II. “She just very matter of factly said to me… ‘Well, you just get on with it’. And to a certain extent that’s absolutely true,” she says. “The only thing to do was just put one foot in front of the other and just get on with it.”
The weight of the world
Covid 19 came along in the final year of Dame Jacinda’s first term in office and her high-profile handling of the situation was widely credited for her landslide victory in October 2020.
But two years later the “shift” she describes had occurred. The pandemic had now divided New Zealand and even Dame Jacinda’s ardent supporters could see a change in the once charismatic leader.
“You told your chief of staff before you resigned that you felt like you’d become a political lightning rod, a flashpoint,” says Barry. “Do you still feel that way as far as New Zealand is concerned?”
Dame Jacinda doesn’t quite answer the question, returning instead to the “flashpoint” era following the height of the pandemic when she felt she’d become “a reminder of a really difficult period for everyone”.
“I did believe, rightly or wrongly, that perhaps if I removed myself, that might bring down the temperature,” she says. “And then that would be good for politics, it would be good for my party and perhaps it would be good for the election as well.”
And maybe good for Dame Jacinda too. She resigned at the beginning of 2023 and is now based at Harvard University in Massachusetts, where she occupies a range of educational and international roles.
“You look like someone, and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, who no longer has the weight of the country on their shoulders,” Barry tells her. “Does it feel that way?”
Dame Jacinda agrees it does. That feeling of a heavy load off was immediate, she says, happening the minute she walked out of Government House. “That’s not to say it hasn’t taken a bit of time to decompress.”
She’s still not good at relaxing. “I don’t really sit still but maybe I’m coming to terms with the fact that might just be my personality… Worrying about the world, thinking of what I can do to be useful… But that’s very different from carrying the day-to-day responsibility.”
And worrying is something Dame Jacinda has always done. Her memoir tells of her mother taking her to the doctor as a thin-skinned child who experienced anxiety-related tummy aches. She once, to her embarrassment, cried in the classroom when the teacher played the children Peace Train by Cat Stevens. Decades later her tears would roll again when Stevens (now Yusaf Islam) sang that song in Hagley Park after the Christchurch Mosque Massacre.
It was definitely not the only time she cried as prime minister. But that’s the key message of A Different Kind of Power – leadership no longer needs to be associated with poker-faced stoicism.
“A goal of the book is to try and encourage people who may have those character traits to stop necessarily seeing them as weaknesses,” Dame Jacinda tells Barry. “If you over prepare, it’s going to make you a better decision maker; if you bring in a bit of humility, it’s going to mean you bring in the best advice.”
The book is dedicated to “the cryers, the huggers and the worriers”.
Hilary Barry, happy to identify to at least two of the three, says after the interview that she reached for the tissues a few times while reading the memoir. It was a particular story from Dame Jacinda’s childhood that got her.
She was also fascinated by Ardern’s apparent issues with a certain former Labour leader.
And, Barry says, she laughed too, particularly at Ardern’s account of practising at home for her job in a fish’n’chip shop by wrapping cabbages in newspapers.
As the book makes clear: nothing wrong with a bit of anxious prep.
“The question for me was, could I keep going and do the job well?” – Watch this story on TVNZ+ or catch it on Seven Sharp tomorrow night.
