Lady of the Rings: Jacinda rules
When she took office last October at 37, Jacinda Ardern was celebrated with sunny abandon as New Zealand’s youngest prime minister in 150 years and only the second world leader (after Benazir Bhutto in 1990) to give birth and the first to take maternity leave. Vogue ran a piece christening Ardern the “Anti-trump,” with a picture of the prime minister in a cream trench coat on a craggy beach that was so dramatic and glamorous that some on the internet mistook it for a publicity still for a TV detective show. She is part of the club of young, progressive leaders, along with Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron, trying to counter President Donald Trump’s ugly impulses against the environment and multilateralism. In a sartorial triumph, Ardern wore a feathered Maori cloak to meet Queen Elizabeth at a black-tie dinner in London.
“It was highly coveted among the princesses at the dinner,” Ardern’s partner, Clarke Gayford, told me.
As “Jacindamania” swept the globe, Ardern was hailed as an exciting avatar of women’s future in politics. In the United States, where a stampede of women — including young mothers — is seeking office in 2018, it seemed almost a preview of what could be possible, albeit one with much better scenery.
She was going to be able to run a country and nurse a baby at the same time — without a nanny or a wedding ring! The boyish and charming Gayford, the 40-year-old host of a TV fishing show, would be the stay-at-home dad who would show the way for modern men.
Why had it taken us so long to realize how seamless it could all be?
Then Ardern took her first official trip since she gave birth to her daughter, Neve, 11 weeks ago and the fantasy of easy equality evaporated.
She has been forced to justify abbreviating her trip to the Pacific Islands Forum on the island of Nauru from three days to one, flying separately from her foreign affairs minister — at a cost of about $50,000 in U.S. dollars — so that she could breast-feed her daughter. Neve was too young to get the vaccinations necessary to go along. Even though Ardern had to fly there in the middle of the night and f ly back a day later in the middle of the night, she wanted to attend because all Kiwi prime ministers consider it a can’t-miss; and also because she didn’t want to seem like she was shying away from an ongoing debate with Australia, as she tries to rescue refugees from the hideous holding facilities in Nauru, the shame of Australia.
Critics said Ardern should have gone for the whole three days or just stayed home. Never mind that in a nation dependent on tourism, Jacinda is the biggest thing to hit here since Frodo dropped the ring into Mount Doom. Her ministers defended her.
“This is an aircraft and a crew who would be working anyway,” Grant Robertson, the finance minister, told the press. “We allocate a certain amount of money to them each year, so it’s either this flight or another flight.”
And Peters told me that he knew of an instance when a man in government here “with less authority and status who did that and no media beat him up. She should ignore the craven, cowardly trolls.”
But she is not ignoring the trolls. When I met her at her gray frame bungalow she was handing off her big black briefcase to an aide at the door, breast-feeding her daughter and anguishing about what she calls her “damned if I do, damned if I don’t” moment.
“What surprised me the most is how hard I took that, being given a hard time for going, but actually it did upset me a bit,” she said.
Ardern met Trump in November at the
East Asia summit in Vietnam. It came out that at first Trump mistook Ardern for Sophie Trudeau. When he realized who she was, he playfully told someone standing near her, “This lady caused a lot of upset in her country.” She retorted, laughing, “No one marched when I was elected.” She did not tell Trump that she herself joined the global women’s march the day after his inauguration. She said she is not fearful because she believes the checks in the American system will hold.
Trump will be presiding over the U.N. Security Council when the General Assembly meets in New York later this month. The prime minister will be trying to combine mothering and traveling again, this time hopefully with less ludicrous commentary. She will be juggling more than 40 events in seven days, with Neve and Gayford as part of the entourage.
I wonder if she worries that she will do something to evoke Trump’s wrath and get a nickname hurled at her.
“I’ve been given so many, it’d be quite hard to come up with a new one,” she said.