Meet the ‘First Bloke’ New Zealand leader’s partner on baby duty
When PM Jacinda Ardern gives birth, her partner Clarke will take on stay-at-home-dad duties, writes Julia Llewellyn Smith
Clarke Gayford, partner of Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, is scrolling through his smartphone, eager to show a photo that made the cover of every New Zealand newspaper.
“Here it is!” he exclaims, showing me the snap of him in a dinner jacket on one knee, in front of a bevy of smiling women in glamorous evening dresses, spouses of the Commonwealth leaders attending the recent London Heads of Government Meeting. It looks like a promotional shot for television dating show The Bachelor.
“Hilarious!” Gayford grins. “My sister sent it to me, saying ‘You needed to be wearing more silk!’ The fact that I’m wearing a suit is amazing enough,” continues New Zealand’s “First Bloke”, gesturing at his current outfit of chinos and a flowery shirt. “Before Jacinda got the upgrade, I didn’t own one. I had to rush out and buy one. Now I have four on rotation.”
Gayford and Ardern made world headlines in January when, just a couple of months after she’d been sworn in as prime minister, she announced that she was pregnant. The baby’s due in June (they know but won’t reveal its gender), when Ardern, 37, the second prime minister in history to give birth in office after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, will take six weeks off work. When she returns to running the country, baby duties will be assigned to Gayford, 40, a former radio host who now presents television fishing programme Fish of the Day.
“We’ve just moved into a new house, which is rapidly filling up with stuff. I can’t believe something so small requires so much equipment,” says Gayford, who – so far
– has never changed a nappy. “Of course I’m not prepared mentally. I don’t think anyone is, though what’s great is a lot of my female friends have babies and they’re pretty excited about us hanging out together for coffee club in activewear.”
In the meantime,
Gayford has been accompanying
Ardern (the couple are tight-lipped on marriage plans though he’s previously said he’s “no doubt it will happen at some stage”) on his first official foreign visit and her last before the baby is born, packing in Paris and Berlin, before three days in London, during which she and fellow leaders discussed global warming, trade and Prince Charles’s appointment as Commonwealth head. Meanwhile, he enjoyed a “spouses programme” that included a boat trip down the Thames and lunch at Somerset House.
“I kind of bonded with Philip May – he was the only other male partner,” Gayford says, sitting in the penthouse reception room of New Zealand House in Haymarket, with its panoramic views of the capital, just hours before boarding their return flight. He also met several members of the Royal family. “What was cool is whichever member of the family we met – Charles or Camilla or the Queen – all were really interested in New Zealand, far beyond the superficial level, they really had an understanding of what was going on.”
At dinner at Buckingham Palace the week before last, Ardern sat next to Prince William, no doubt comparing her pregnancy with Kate’s. “She said they had some good chats. I was next to Princess Anne, she was really good fun. Still, I was nervous. New Zealanders are so relaxed by nature and suddenly you’re told the protocol and you’re like ‘Right, do I shake hands first? How do I address them?’ You don’t want to embarrass yourself.”
The pregnancy, Gayford adds, has been an excellent icebreaker. “It means people have heard of us and I’d far rather ask for baby tips than discuss the weather – I’ve asked everyone from Obama to the Royals. I can’t reveal what they said, but it’s all good common-sense stuff.”
Such conversations, Gayford continues, have been just some of the “surreal” moments in a string of extraordinary events that started in October when, days after the General Election, Ardern, who’d only taken over as Labour Party leader in July, called Gayford with her pregnancy news.
“I was in the remote north in a fisherman’s hut, filming, and she kept trying to call when I couldn’t pick up, and I was thinking ‘Why is she calling? What’s wrong?’ When we finally spoke, she said: ‘Are you alone? Hide in the bathroom.’ We’d been told [the pregnancy] wasn’t going to happen without medical assistance and obviously we’d put thinking about that on hold because there was far too much other stuff to be dealing with, so the surprise was huge,” he says.
The couple kept their secret as Ardern coped with severe morning sickness (when asked about how she coped, she replied “It’s what ladies do.”) “It’s such a terrible and inaptly named affliction, it’s not just morning, it’s afternoon, evening, when you’re asleep,” says Gayford, shaking his head. “Jacinda had a couple of really heavy days negotiating a coalition government when she did not rest for a second but no one noticed what was happening, only the two of us knew it. Then she had the APEC (Asia-pacific) summit and was surrounded by all these world leaders when she was feeling sick all the time. But she was so incredibly calm, I thought if she can get through this she can get through anything and, luckily, after 16 weeks it went.”
Along with all this, the couple were having to organise Ardern’s move into the prime minister’s residence in the capital, Wellington. “I packed up her shoebox flat there, putting all the stuff into six boxes, and called a taxi to take it to Premier House, where they fitted into a corner of one of the spare bedrooms,” Gayford recalls. On their first night in residence, Ardern ordered a takeout curry from a local restaurant. “Someone went to collect it and they looked amazed, they said: ‘That call was real? We thought it was a prank.’”
Ardern now spends the weeks in Wellington, returning to the couple’s suburban home 400 miles away in Auckland on Fridays. It was there she took her first call from Donald Trump, on speakerphone to the background noise of their cat’s miaows. “It was so funny,” he smiles. They used to split cooking (“Though it’s probably 80/20 to me now”), but Gayford is in charge of washing “because Jacinda is just not very good at it”. Sounds like a smart dodge to me. “Yeah, you’ve got to be suspicious when a red sock gets flung in with your whites.”
The couple’s easy-going style and small-town backgrounds (her father was a police officer, his a farmer) sparked nationwide “Jacindamania” but inevitably she has her critics. Does Gayford feel defensive of her? “Oh yes, it’s really hard when you see your partner having a hard time,” he says. “I know in the long run she’ll be on the right side of history, but I also know in the short term things aren’t going to be easy – she has to make some unpopular decisions but they’re decisions that need to be made.”
The couple met four years ago when Gayford contacted her as an “enraged voter” concerned about changes to privacy laws. They discovered a shared love of drumand-bass music; to woo her he took her fishing. “It was one of those ridiculous days when the sea was flat, a pod of dolphins showed up around the boat, then a whale and every time she put a line over she caught a 12lb snapper, a huge John Dory…” He sighs. “That’s the kind of thing we can’t do now, we went fishing in the summer but the security boys had to be in a boat behind us and that killed the buzz.”
He’s clearly far more bothered about this loss of privacy than the impending challenges of fatherhood. Though he accepts the childcare buck stops with him, he also intends to continue working (“Luckily, we have two sets of grandparents who are very keen to help”), filming the third series of his show, which combines fishing lore with travels around the most beautiful corners of the South Pacific and New Zealand. “Our country has so much, from the alpine stuff in the South to the white-sand beaches in the North,” he cries. “People always say to me they tagged New Zealand on to an Australia trip but in hindsight wished they’d done it the other way round.”
He’s equally proud of his country’s record on gender equality: Ardern is New Zealand’s third female prime minister and reactions to his stay-at-home dad news have been “overwhelmingly supportive. So many dads have said to me: ‘It’s the best thing you’ll ever do, you’ll have such a good relationship with your kid’”.
He’s excited to spend time with his baby but it’s not, he says, as if there was a choice. “When you’re in a relationship, you’re a team. Whether you’re buying a house, or getting a cat or a dog, you’re constantly making decisions to exist together, so when it comes to one of you going for a pretty unique opportunity and to achieve some incredible things that will stand the test of time, why wouldn’t you support them? It would be selfish of me to do anything else.”
‘I kind of bonded with Philip May – he was the only other man on the spouses’ tour’