A review of the new documentary “Prime Minister”
Whatever omniscient cab drivers think, I can tell you, as someone who has worked for a national government, that governing a country is hard. It is even harder if you’re young and a woman – and pregnant. It’s harder still if you’re prime minister of a country when the entire world is suffering a pandemic of a previously-unknown virus and when your nation has a terrorist attack on a mosque and a volcanic eruption on an island – all these incidents resulting in fatalities.
This was what faced Jacinda Ardern when she was Prime Minister of New Zealand for just over five years from October 2017 t0 January 2023.
This remarkable documentary tells this story by skilfully knitting together clips from contemporaneous broadcasts of all those events and many other challenges faced by Ardern, incredibly personal video made at the time and behind the scenes by Ardern’s partner (and later husband) Clarke Gayford who is a professional media presenter, and voice-overs from Ardern herself thinking back over those traumatic events.
What comes out of this film – and her memoir – most powerfully is that Ardern believes in, and tried to practice, a different style of leadership: one that is kinder and more inclusive, one that is less bombastic and more evidence-based.
Jacinda Ardern and Clarke Gayford represent a case study of a different kind of politics, even – dare one say it – a feminist version of politics.