5 days ago
The Telegraph review of the Ardern book
Tim Stanley is a former UK Labour Party candidate, and writer for The Telegraph. He reviews the recent autobiography by Jacinda Ardern:
Don't read this book. You won't, anyway: it's by Jacinda Ardern. But if I tell you that it's a memoir dedicated to 'the criers, worriers, and huggers,' you'll have an idea of the nightmare you've dodged. A Different Kind of Power reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session: 'My whole short life,' the author writes, 'I had grappled with the idea that I was never quite good enough.'
Regrettably, she persisted, rising through the two or three ranks of New Zealand society to become prime minister at the age of 37, from 2017 to 2023. And yet the practicalities of the job don't interest her: this book hinges on how everything felt .
A fairly brutal introduction.
As for what drew her into politics: was it Marx? Or Mahatma Gandhi? Well, one influence came early on: she saw a newspaper cartoon of a Tory stealing soup from children and thought, 'that definitely didn't feel right.'
Few people know this, but this is factually correct. In the 1990s, teams of Young Nationals roved the nation breaking into the homes of poor people, and stealing soup from them.
she wants us to know, too, that she replied to every child who wrote to her
As did John Key, just that he didn't feel the need to tell everyone about it.
By contrast, the anti-lockdown crowd Ardern describes protesting outside New Zealand's Parliament, wore 'literal tinfoil hats', flew 'swastikas' and 'Trump flags'.
This is exactly how centrist dads (and mums) subtly vilify their opponents: set a perfect example and imply a comparison. I am so kind that anyone who disagrees with me must be nasty; so reasonable that my critics must be nuts.
There were a few fringe figures there, but the vast majority were just people angry that they had lost their jobs on the basis of vaccine mandates that turned out to be based on an incorrect assumption that they would stop transmission.
A poll of around a third of the protesters done by Curia staff found that 27% of the protesters were Maori (so unlikely to be Nazis!) and 40% of the protesters voted for Labour, Greens or Te Pati Maori in 2020.
Post-office, Ardern became a fellow at Harvard University, teaching a course in… you guessed it: 'empathetic leadership'. The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice. How does that work with Vladimir Putin or the boys in Hamas? On the contrary, true leadership is about making tough judgments, guided by sound philosophy: St Jacinda bungled the former, lacked the latter. By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity – a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions.
Ouch, and a final jab:
But there is one wonderful moment of zen. It comes when Ardern meets the late Queen in 2018, and asks whether she has any advice on raising children. 'You just get on with it,' said the monarch. It must have been a put-down; it sounds like a put-down – and yet Ardern is too naive to notice.
The Queen of course became Queen at age 26, and had two children while in office.
