‘Jacindamania? I’ve got enough on my plate’

Left-wingers are keen to find out Jacinda Ardern’s magic formula but she’s got enough on her plate without being the anti-Trump of the west.

Theresa May greets Jacinda Ardern outside 10 Downing Street. Picture: Mega.

When Neve was born last year Theresa May sent over the works of Beatrix Potter and a posh onesie. Jacinda Ardern’s daughter has since outgrown the romper suit and it will be a while before she’s reading Peter Rabbit, but there’s no mistaking the bond between the two prime ministers.

“Politics is absolutely brutal,” says the leader of New Zealand before Mrs May’s latest gruelling session in parliament. “It’s incredibly difficult, you’ve been delivered an incredibly difficult situation and left to fix it.”

We’re on a sofa talking meat, power and babies and she looks, unlike the rest of the global political class, as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. There’s something about a leader who hasn’t forgotten how to laugh.

Brexit matters, of course, to New Zealand. “No deal suits no one,” says the 38-year-old, “and it doesn’t suit New Zealand at all.” If Britain does crash out, London and Wellington would probably sort out a free-trade agreement quickly. There are 60,000 Kiwis in Britain; they would carve out a path. In the meantime there would be disruption. Brexit deadline, March 29; Good Friday, April 19: so what happens to the Easter lamb? Will Welsh sheep farmers divert meat destined for the European Union to the home market and thus push down sales of New Zealand lamb? Will there be chaotic clearance procedures at the border points?

“New Zealand lamb has omega qualities and plenty of health benefits,” Ms Ardern says, having just arrived at the High Commission in London from a session with Kiwi exporters. New Zealand lamb will hold its own and she says that her government has no fears of working out a decent free trade deal. “After all, we worked our way through all the complexity of negotiating a free-trade agreement with China.”

However, we both know that the speed with which she seeks to glide away from Brexit suggests that the big Brexit unknowns are about something else: whether Britain will open itself up and show itself capable of listening to and learning from smaller countries once it is out or even halfway out of the European Union.

Ms Ardern is turning New Zealand into a social laboratory, putting up a raft of legislation that will change the way that Kiwis look at themselves and treat each other. If it works, it could put Ms Ardern at the helm of a leftist resurgence not just in the South Pacific but in Europe too. Across the continent so-called progressive parties are in the doldrums. In Germany the Social Democrats are level-pegging with the far-right Alternative for Germany. In France the Socialists were crushed in the presidential election. Only five out of the 28 nations of the EU are under centre-left managements and populists of all shades are on the up and up.

The Jacinda plan addresses some of the questions that defecting socialists want answered. Sadly, there was no time for a meeting with Jeremy Corbyn on her London stopover, but at the Davos talkfest this week Ms Ardern will be surrounded by left-wingers anxious to discover if she has the magic formula. She argues that she has enough on her plate without becoming the anti-Trump of the western world and there isn’t really room for Jacindamania. “I think carrying the weight of my country’s expectations is sufficient,” she says. “You don’t really think that much beyond meeting the expectations you set yourself.”

She says this not with self-regard, but coolly as if she has a checklist: 1) keep Neve safe; 2) make New Zealand child-centred and open to change; 3) save the world from populist craziness. She has another election next year and the clock is running. Yes, setting debt and budget targets, but also persuading the public that increasing GDP is not an unalloyed measure of success if it comes with social suffering. Her benchmark: making New Zealand the best place in the world for children. Apart from prime minister she is also the minister for child poverty reduction.

The women enter No. 10 for talks. Picture; Matrix.

Theresa May and Jacinda Ardern have a warm relationship. Picture: Matrix.

That’s why she went into politics at the age of 17. When she was growing up in a small town on the North Island, the daughter of a Mormon policeman and a school catering assistant, she remembers seeing children walking barefoot in the street and going hungry at school. Her agenda means social spending on better education, on cutting the cost of visiting a doctor, on family mental health and on affordable housing.

Her so-called wellbeing budget for 2019 earmarks money for these goals. If she can keep down public debt to below 20 per cent of GDP, as she has promised, she may introduce new thinking into the increasingly stagnant western political class. Critics say she won’t be able to pay for the half of it: new taxes, perhaps a capital-gains tax, are not going to be rolled out until after the 2020 election. Proposed water and pollution taxes have prompted noisy protests from farmers who brand the prime minister a “pretty communist”, but her overall popularity remains high.

Ms Ardern is a multinationalist on climate change, but her governing coalition with the Greens has promised to cut the number of new immigrants from 70,000 a year to about 30,000. The point being to protect local infrastructure, keep control over the availability of low-price housing for natives, maintain a grip on health services and, although she doesn’t say this out loud, to shield her flank from any populist challenge.

If any country can carry this off it is New Zealand, which is a society prepared to take risks. It gave women the right to vote more than a century ago and was one of the first to introduce old age pensions and unemployment benefits. In the 1980s and 1990s it liberalised the economy faster than others, deregulating entire industries and lifting many restrictions on foreign investment. That radical course was achieved under Labour and National governments.

Ardern says she has broad social support for what she is trying to do in the latest Kiwi swivel. And she may be right: even the conservative strata of New Zealand seem to have accepted the idea of same-sex marriage. She is planning to bring in assisted suicide legislation, decriminalise abortion and hold a referendum on the use of cannabis. There is extraordinary momentum behind her; an easy acceptance too that she is an unmarried mother.

Her transition from policy adviser, first to the New Zealand Labour prime minister Helen Clark and subsequently in the British Cabinet Office under Tony Blair, to her own style of leadership began in 2017. Until then she had worked as a member of parliament on the party list for almost a decade, but had never faced an election (the country has proportional representation). There she had developed strategies for combating child poverty and neglect. In February of that year she won a by-election, the next month she was elected deputy leader of the Labour Party and by August she had become outright leader and head of the opposition. In the September general election Labour, under her leadership, won 46 seats. That was behind the National party, but in a reshuffle of alliances she emerged as the head of a coalition that included the New Zealand First party and the Greens.

And that autumn she became pregnant. “It was quite a year,” she says and not much more than a year later she conveys a sense of vertigo, the discipline of a mountaineer, says one observer, but also occasionally the dizziness that comes with thin air on the summit. New Zealand operates on a three-year election cycle, which has the effect of accelerating politics and forcing parties to form coalitions fast, dump underperforming ministers and just press on like a forced march across the Brecon Beacons.

Suddenly the political and the personal intertwined. Becoming a woman leader raised no eyebrows in New Zealand. There have been two previous female premiers including Clark. “I’m not remarkable, the third woman PM,” Ms Ardern says. What was remarkable was her youth - the youngest since 1856 - and the speed of her ascent. And the birth of Neve.

The combination of young motherhood and active leadership, she concedes, is indeed remarkable. “Only 5 per cent of world leaders are actually women, so of course the number of young mothers is not going to be high.” In fact, she is only the second leader to give birth in office, the first having been Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan. Ms Bhutto kept her pregnancy secret, gave birth in the middle of a crisis, and was at work the next day. There are a few strange coincidences. Ms Ardern’s baby was delivered on June 21, the day that Bhutto was born 65 years earlier. Ms Ardern was 37 when she gave birth, the same age as Bhutto when she had her daughter.

That’s just about the end of the cosmic similarities, however. Ms Ardern announced her pregnancy six months before delivery date and took six weeks’ maternity leave. She made no secret of her morning sickness. And she has turned what could have been a moment of political vulnerability decades ago into an advertisement for modern living.

It was in the first instance a practical challenge. Since she was breastfeeding, travel became an issue. “I expressed the milk, put it in a bottle, to be warmed up later either by my partner or by myself. Sometimes I breastfed in meetings. What did the men think? I don’t know, I didn’t ask and they didn’t tell me.”

Her partner, Clarke Gayford, the host of a television fishing show, is a big part of the deal. Whereas Ms Bhutto had an elaborate network of domestic servants, Ms Ardern and her partner are getting by without a nanny. That has meant a high-profile role for Mr Gayford, who was seen applauding his wife’s speech while clutching the infant.

“People come up to me and say they’re doing the same thing, but the big difference is that we’re doing it in public. Like them, we’ve got the support of our families; our mums have helped. So we’re taking each year as it comes - and we’re enjoying doing it on our own,” she says. Ms Ardern hasn’t brought Neve to London or Davos - the trip is too short - but her baby caravan has left its mark, encouraging MPs such as Jo Swinson, the Liberal Democrat who found herself caught in the crossfire for breastfeeding her 11-week old son in the House of Commons. Some colleagues treated her with sympathy; others regarded it as a disgrace; some insisted she stay home; others complained she wasn’t taking work seriously. Ms Ardern has helped to cut through this cant and has put a normal activity in its proper context. That’s good old-fashioned leadership.

Ms Ardern flicks through a book by Mary Beard, Women & Power, as we chat. It contains an old but still valid cartoon depicting a boardroom full of men and a solitary woman. The chairman is saying: “That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here might like to make it.” Ms Ardern understands the basic political algebra: giving a public voice to women is the first important step towards restoring the eroded centre ground.

The Times