Jacinda Ardern's memoir is a moving account of a career built with care

The former New Zealand Prime Minister's memoir is nothing like a political manifesto. It is an assured and often moving account of a career built with care - though not without frequent self-doubt

A Different Kind Of Power by Jacinda Ardern  Published by Pan Macmillan  340 pages ₹899  Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s memoir begins in an unusual place: Her friend’s bathroom, where she is waiting for a big reveal with bated breath. A pregnancy test lies on the sink. It’s several days after election night in 2017, a time of high political drama and tense negotiations to win a majority. Ms Ardern writes: “I was days away from learning if I would run a country, and now, I was seconds away from learning if I would do it while having a baby.”

 

The book then cuts to New Zealand’s famed countryside, as her family car makes its way through the dense forest to a town called Murupara, where Ms Ardern’s father served as a police officer and she attended school.

 

Decades later, when asked by a journalist where she “first became political,” she replied, “because I lived in Murupara,” where she witnessed poverty, inequality, and “the way circumstances can push a community into difficulty”. This early exposure to poverty, along with dozens of other experiences she recounts in her book, reveals what fuelled her commitment to social justice and helped shape the leader she chose to become.

 

A Different Kind of Power is a political memoir powered by a terrific selection of stories woven together in an absorbing narrative. The book does two things particularly well. It presents a sensitively-told, vividly-imagined personal story framed against a pivotal political era in New Zealand. It also lays down, without being preachy or overt, a compelling blueprint for empathetic leadership and is a call to bring more kindness into politics, channelling Ms Ardern’s trademark style, while both in power and in opposition.

 

A fierce debater, Ms Ardern has been a speechwriter most of her life, but to her credit, the book is nothing like a political manifesto. It is an assured and often moving account of a career built with care, but not one without frequent self-doubt. We travel with her from campaign to campaign as part of the Labour Party, as the story moves seamlessly between her deepest moments of vulnerability, grief, exhaustion, to her hard-won professional highs. It is also a thoroughly engrossing and often humorous behind-the-scenes portrait of the relentless demands of political life and being “conditioned to crisis”, while trying to date and then build a family and field all kinds of sexist questions from the media and in Parliament.

 

From the moment she was elected as Prime Minister, Ms Ardern quickly distinguished herself in global politics as a wholesome and progressive leader — while being the world’s youngest female head of state, only the second leader to give birth in office, and the first to breastfeed at the UN General Assembly.

 

Even as Ms Ardern walks readers through the policies she championed, including child welfare, climate change, and affordable housing, she shares intimate reflections on steering her country through crises. The most harrowing was the Christchurch mosque attack that led to a swift overhaul of New Zealand’s gun laws. A deadly volcanic eruption followed, and then came the Covid-19 pandemic, where her early response earned international praise for keeping the virus at bay. But as subsequent waves triggered fresh lockdowns and economic strain, public sentiment began to shift. Ms Ardern currently faces an inquiry in New Zealand into her government’s handling of the pandemic.

 

She is candid about deeply personal moments as well. She details the toll of undergoing fertility treatment after years of choosing “politics over family” and the joy of an unexpected pregnancy. She shares the challenges of being a new parent while doing the country’s top job: The pain of missing out, the effort to build a close-knit childcare circle with her partner Clarke and her family, and what happens when that support system suddenly collapses on important work days. There is the story of her stressing over baking her daughter’s birthday cakes from scratch, of Clarke’s marriage proposal at a special spot, security detail discreetly in tow, of her daughter’s unexpected questions about profound things that catch her off guard.

 

While the criticisms of her government overpromising and under-delivering on housing, inflation and poverty reduction don’t get much airtime, she does confront her waning popularity and growing fatigue in the months leading up to her resignation. Ms Ardern’s legacy continues to resonate: Through this memoir, a new documentary, and her public work, including her fellowships at Harvard University, where she also teaches courses on empathetic leadership. These roots had long been planted back home, as she writes in the book. During one of her many school visits across New Zealand as Prime Minister, she once asked children to describe what a politician looked like. The answers were bleak: Selfish, old, liar, bald. Near the end of her tenure, at another such visit, a new description emerged: Kind.

   

The reviewer is a Delhi-based freelance journalist who writes on policy, development, public health, gender and culture