The Astonishing Popularity of Jacinda Ardern

Or how a fawning media trades standards for status.

“Her decision has shocked the nation. Jacina Ardern’s leadership style based on kindness and compassion has gained her wide popularity both inside New Zealand and around the world.”

This is how the BBC reported the resignation of New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern. The 42 year old resigned overnight after five years and three months in the job, claiming she no longer has "enough in the tank" to continue in the job.

Listeners to the BBC’s flagship Today Programme were left puzzled this morning as to how such a universally loved figure could possibly have chosen to throw in the towel, less than ten months before the next election. Surely her stunning electoral appeal would be sorely needed by her party if it was to win yet another astonishing election victory?

Sky News’s Beth Rigby was positively fawning in her impartial tribute, tweeting “I’ve only ever seen political leaders forced out or voted out, but in Ardern we find a rare exception, who again shows us how to lead differently”.

Meanwhile the News Agents’ Jon Sopel very professionally gushed: “There’s the old Enoch Powell line that all political careers end in failure. This one hasn’t. Goes at a time of her own choosing, head held high.”

The superhero of Covid, lightening fast lockdowner, popular internationalist, and temperamental liberal will no doubt be sorely missed. Not by the people of New Zealand, but instead mostly by people who live thousands of miles away and are incapable of assessing politics using anything beyond lazy heuristics or ‘vibes’.

The intention of this newsletter is to provide a helpful corrective to the hard-of-thinking vibes-based analysis that is uncritically gushing from a surprising number of news outlets today. I think it might be helpful to contribute some facts that somewhat go against the received narrative:

1. Jacinda locked down New Zealand after Boris Johnson locked down the UK.

2. She first became Prime Minister after her party came second in the election.

3. She did a dodgy coalition deal with the nationalist New Zealand First party to seise power, making Trump tribute act Winston Peters deputy Prime Minister.

4. Her weak vaccine rollout kept New Zealanders locked at home for longer than was necessary.

5. A raft of policy failure has seen her plummet in the polls.

Let’s explore each of these points in turn.

1. Jacinda locked down New Zealand after Boris Johnson locked down the UK.

Whilst a narrative of a fast-acting and epidemiologically-supreme Prime Minister has taken hold in the Western world, the truth is quite different. As Covid ripped through the world in early 2020; as China locked down its major cities though January, as Trump closed the US borders, even as some European countries deployed lockdown policies, New Zealand was committed to what Ardern’s government described as “a strategy of mitigation” and with a policy aim to “flatten the curve”, not eliminate it.

New Zealand’s mitigation (herd immunity) strategy was abandoned on 31 March 2020, in favour of heavy suppression. That is over a week after Boris Johnson announced his own conversion from mitigation to suppression with the UK’s first national lockdown on 23 March 2020. In the UK, Johnson has since been slated by the media and opposition politicians (only after the fact, and rarely before) for not locking down soon enough.

(This is of course despite leading Labour politicians like Starmer’s first Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds fervently supporting Boris Johnson’s government’s early mitigation strategy in March 2020, opposing a switch to suppression. Even to the extent of arguing against fringe voices like then London Mayoral hopeful Rory Stewart, who advocated locking down. But I digress…)

One Year Ago @YearCovid

31 March 2020 New Zealand formally abandons mitigation (aka "herd immunity") in favour of "stamping out and eliminating" the virus within its borders parliament.nz/resource/en-NZ…

Yes, Ardern locked down later than Boris Johnson. Yet she is seen by many as Queen of the Pandemic. Primarily, she was helped by the fact that New Zealand is bloody miles away from everything. (My good friend Google tells me that the shortest distance between New Zealand and its ‘near’ neighbour Australia is 2,587 miles. That’s further than Lisbon to Moscow - which comes in at 2,427 miles. No wonder Jacinda’s slow reactions weren’t particularly noticed.) Meanwhile, Boris Johnson’s more speedy about turn was hurt by the fact the UK is a rich international travel hub.

And yet despite all this, the impression of premonition unknown to other world leaders somehow lives on in Ms Adern. Frankly, Jacinda locked down late and got away with it because she was so far away from everyone else. She had far more time to react than countries where the virus had seeded far faster. The fact of the matter is that anyone who had been Prime Minister of New Zealand at the time would have had the same early success. Although not everyone would have taken it as far as Ardern did, or made the same mistakes she did as the pandemic entered its second year. But more on that later…

2. She first became Prime Minister after coming second.