New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Ardern emerges from this documentary portrait the way she did when she was in power from 2017 to 2023 … as a human being. More than any politician anywhere in the world in my adult lifetime, she looked like an actual member of the human race who was catapulted to office too fast to have acquired the defensive carapace of the professional politician. She was vulnerable and scrutable and likable in ways utterly alien to everyone else.
Obviously this sympathetic film has been edited in such a way as to omit most of the hard business of internal politics and to foreground this humanity, although there is one fascinating moment at the very end when her partner Clarke Gayford gently asks if she might be doing too much; with a tiny flash of temper she asks if he is telling her to “delegate”. Gayford got his Denis Thatcher closeup there. Did we see a subliminal moment of the non-niceness vital for all successful politicians?
Ardern was the target of misogyny – like Australia’s Julia Gillard – but never seems hardened, embittered or even changed all that much. The film, with intimate access, tracks her life with Gayford as she became the smart and personable new leader of the New Zealand Labour party in 2017 and then, in short order, prime minister – first in coalition and then on her own, the world’s youngest female elected leader. (She even gave birth to a baby while in office.) Ardern dealt with the Christchurch mosque shootings with utter sincerity and compassion; she spent her political capital shrewdly at that moment by banning assault rifles. The world loved her for it.
Then when Covid came along, Ardern had not only political skill but what Napoleon famously valued in his generals: she was lucky – at first. New Zealand seemed to have been miraculously spared the worst of the outbreak, but then a new wave struck, Ardern’s poll numbers dipped and an ugly new far-right anti-vax mob made their encampment outside parliament. The film shows how they were succumbing to the delicious thrill of bullying a woman. The sad thing is that there doesn’t appear to be much space for someone like Ardern in modern politics; less space than ever in fact.
Prime Minister is out in Australia now and on HBO Max in the US, and in UK and Irish cinemas from 5 December.