Labour leader Chris Hipkins has announced his engagement to partner Toni Grace, saying he feels like he has hit the jackpot.<\/p>\n
Hipkins first confirmed the relationship during his concession speech on the evening of the 2023 election.<\/p>\n
Announcing the engagement on Instagram, Hipkins said “I didn’t win the Powerball over the weekend but I did hit the jackpot.”<\/p>\n
Hipkins, who has often been reluctant to talk about his personal life, said Grace had remained calm, optimistic, and caring through the ups and downs of politics, parenthood, and life.<\/p>\n
“You’re my rock, and I’m so excited about our life together. There simply aren’t enough words to express how much I love you and how lucky I am you’ve agreed to marry me,” he said.<\/p>\n
Hipkins said he proposed on Thursday, Grace’s birthday.<\/p>\n
“She said yes and I was very happy about that, as you can imagine,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We were in the Botanical Gardens on a park bench and I sort of twisted around, but I didn’t quite get down on one knee, no. I kind of panicked a little bit at the last minute.”<\/p>\n
Hipkins said they had not set a date, but it was likely to be after the election.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon congratulated the pair.<\/p>\n
“Congratulations, it’s fantastic news, and I wish them both incredibly well.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour leader Chris Hipkins has announced his engagement to partner Toni Grace, saying he feels like he has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-141405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}