A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir (Macmillan) by Jacinda Ardern
Jacinda Ardern was the 40th prime minister of New Zealand, but the first to become an internationally recognised figure – certainly, Keith Holyoake and Robert Muldoon never appeared on the cover of Vogue. Ardern became an instant object of fascination because – at least when measured against her fellow national leaders, an overwhelmingly male, middle-aged-and-upwards and mostly somewhat dreary cohort – she seemed different: a 37-year-old woman of generally cheerful demeanour. As the title of her book suggests, Ardern also sees herself as different, in substance as well as style.
Ardern is, at the very least, a different kind of political memoirist. A Different Kind of Power is short on wearisome policy minutiae, and petulant score-settling. The book’s strength is that it depicts, very capably, the human experience of national leadership – its pressures and dilemmas, its drama and slapstick, its gravity and absurdity. The prologue captures the moment amidst the post-election negotiations which brought her to power in 2017 when Ardern discovers she is pregnant.
After which, Ardern starts at the start: her childhood in small rural towns where her father served as a police officer. Ardern clearly believes this was the making of her: the conscientious, empathetic child becoming a prime minister of similar qualities (if the book has one minor but recurring fault, it is an over-emphasis on the “if anything, I just care too much” schtick).
Ardern grows up a Mormon, but drifts from the church in her twenties. It is always illuminating to discover why people reject the faith in which they are raised. It is not an easy call, risking as it does the ostracism of family, friends and community.
Her departure from the Church of Latter-Day Saints is admirable in motivation and execution. She reaches a point at which she cannot accommodate both her belief in equal rights for gay people and the LDS’s institutional animus towards them – but she moves on without bitterness, while maintaining admiration for the good the Mormons do, and the good people among them. She also drily notes that the experience of knocking on strangers’ doors, trying to interest them in new ideas while they’re trying to eat dinner or watch the match, is excellent practice for becoming a campaigning politician.
The most gripping sections of A Different Kind of Power are those that recall the two worst moments of her premiership – neither of which any incoming prime minister of New Zealand would have imagined likely. One was the predicament that confronted everybody in a job like hers in 2020. Though Covid-19 menaced New Zealand less than it did most countries – far-flung islands had a considerable advantage – its prime minister still faced excruciating choices. “For each decision we made,” Ardern writes, “hundreds of new ones presented themselves.” This summary of the infernal complexity of politics would be lost, regrettably, on the sorry mobs of social media-addled bozos who besieged New Zealand’s parliament, having convinced themselves that they were subjects of a tyranny, as opposed to the supernaturally fortunate citizens of a lavishly blessed nation. (“At one point,” Ardern deadpans, “I even saw the glint of literal tinfoil hats.”)
The other defining crisis of Ardern’s term was the terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, in which 51 people were murdered and dozens more injured, by a lone maniac. Ardern deserved the plaudits she received for her calm and thoughtful leadership in the hours and days immediately following this atrocity, but as she tells it here, her initial reaction was less composed. “All of the confusion and frustration I felt,” she writes, “turned into one singular emotion: blinding rage.” A pertinent reminder that despite the perennial voters’ complaint about politicians not saying what they actually think, there are times when it really wouldn’t be helpful, or appropriate.
When Ardern stepped down in 2023, citing exhaustion, cynics claimed that her polling ahead of that year’s election may have been more of a factor. She was, by this time, one of those leaders vastly more popular abroad than at home, and her Labour Party were duly clobbered. But if she was tired, she was entitled to be. The great service A Different Kind of Power performs is that it reminds us that politicians are people – people to whom we give impossible jobs, and of whom we demand impossible results.
This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.
