Former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern has released her memoir, A Different Kind of Power.
Former Prime Minister Dame Jacinda Ardern has released her memoir, A Different Kind of Power.
Jacinda Ardern’s memoir reveals personal and political challenges, including a cancer scare and learning she was pregnant during coalition negotiations.
The book details her focus on empathy, a trait she observed in her parents when her father was a police officer in Murupara.
Ardern, now at Harvard, emphasises the importance of humane leadership and says she believes people want less combative politics.
Things a former New Zealand Prime Minister learned while writing a memoir: The rest of the world puts a plural on “chips”.
“No,” Dame Jacinda Ardern told the copy editor who had changed all her sentences. “It’s a fish and chip shop ... you can’t put an ‘s’ on it.”
Things New Zealanders will learn about their former Prime Minister (who once worked at a Morrinsville takeaway) when they read her memoir: she was a deputy party leader toting a green cooler bag full of injectable fertility hormones that would, ultimately, fail. She was in the closing stages of the coalition Government negotiations when she discovered, implausibly and unexpectedly, she was pregnant. A doctor found a lump in her breast.
The cancer scare was quick. Over in a week and traversed in less than two pages in her new book.
“Women go through this often. Some, multiple times and often with a far worse outcome,” Ardern says. “I didn’t want to overstate it, if that makes sense?”
And yet.
“It’s so difficult to characterise that moment,” she tells the New Zealand Herald. “It wasn’t the reason I considered leaving by any stretch, but it was the first time I thought about the possibility. The first time the thought entered my mind and really lingered like that. It wasn’t a reason, but more of a trigger.
“Because the ‘maybe I could leave’ moment was almost an instant thought. I suspect some people might relate to a moment like that. When you feel a huge responsibility in a role you have, the idea of departing is incredibly difficult. I guess that was the first time that the idea of leaving, where it wasn’t a choice but a necessity, came up. And that really made me think hard.”
January, 2023: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern hugs partner Clarke Gayford after she announces her decision to stand down at the Labour caucus retreat in Napier. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The Herald meets Ardern via a laptop screen. She’s dialling into this interview from an office at Harvard University’s Centre for Public Leadership in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was once occupied by David Gergen, a presidential adviser under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. His books still line the walls. There’s a globe on the shelf behind her. It is turned squarely to – Australia?
Ardern leaps to her feet and tilts the world slightly to the left.
“Don’t you worry. It’s there. I would have moved it into the hallway if it didn’t have New Zealand on it! It’s quite comprehensive. Gisborne is there. Hastings is there.”
Ardern moved to Boston in 2023. But ask how she feels about raising her almost 7-year-old daughter, Neve, in the United States, and there is genuine surprise in her voice.
“Oh, well, I’m not going to. New Zealand is home. For this period in time, we’re just away. In part because, logistically, it just means that I’m not as absent because of travel.
“New Zealand will always be home ... we’re just somewhere else at the moment.”
For the next fortnight, she will, specifically, be in New York, Washington, Clevedon, Evanston, San Francisco, Santa Monica, London and Oxford. The launch of her memoir, A Different Kind of Power, spans continents. Publishers tease it with the promise it will reveal “for the first time full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as Prime Minister”.
But there is no single shock-horror moment.
Across 340 pages, Ardern chronicles incremental turning points. Big stuff, like anti-vaccination protests and the occupation of parliament grounds. Smaller, more targeted moments like an airport public bathroom encounter with a hater. And the personal – witnessing her mother have a seizure in Wellington and then leaving her behind to fly to Rotorua; knowing that Neve could say dad and cheese and poo, but not, for a long time, mumma.
“The choices were all so binary,” Ardern writes. “You let one group of people down, or you let another down. When I chose work, there was always some part of me that was thinking about the trade-off. But when I sat at home with my family, trying to be present, I did the same.”
Jacinda Ardern with Clarke Gayford and daughter Neve, with former Defence Minister Ron Mark, photographed at the Devonport naval base in 2019. Photo / NZ Navy
If Ardern’s life has previously been reduced to bare bone bullet points – her dad was a cop who moved the family to Murupara, Ardern was a Mormon who eventually left the church, a phone call from Grant Robertson first convinced her to put her name on the Labour party list, Clarke Gayford was the broadcast star she met when he emailed to offer campaign assistance – the book puts living, breathing flesh on the skeleton.
She grieves that Robertson never led the Labour Party (and is scathing of David Cunliffe’s performance); writes that Gayford’s marriage proposal on the top of Mokotahi Hill came off the back of a “rubbish week” (the capital gains tax, etc) and details exactly how to hide a 12-week pregnancy scan from your diplomatic protection squad (pro tip – carry a bottle of wine).
“People used to ask me whether I’d had enough time to process things and the truth is, you don’t,” she says.
“I tried to put on the page that there are some things you don’t, you won’t, move on from. You are fundamentally changed as a person.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meeting with members of the Muslim community the day after the Christchurch mosque attacks.
“Really, really hard to recount. I wanted just so much for just two objectives . . . saving people’s lives, but also keeping people together. One we achieved and, you know, the other we didn’t.”
Don’t expect neat conclusions, Ardern warns.
“I couldn’t just say ‘Well, I would have done these five things differently and that would have had these six consequences. You don’t know. All I can say is how I feel in the aftermath.
“I’m very aware that when you’re putting out a memoir, you’re not just having people comment on your writing – ultimately, that content is your life. It’s very hard to separate a review on a work versus a review on a life. But perhaps politics has prepared me for that.”
A lone protester and police officers in front of burning tents on day 23 of the Covid-19 Convoy protest at Parliament, Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The book is chronological. Ardern shifts from being a reluctant leader, to leader of the country, to becoming a leader who wondered whether the country still wanted her.
“I had the privilege of leading at a really difficult time, globally,” she says. “Some of the issues we had to tackle were polarising ... the same issue that would cause someone to cry because of how strongly they believed you had saved their life was the same issue that would cause someone to scream.
“And I don’t know if there was a way through that wouldn’t have brought out that depth of emotion. I don’t know. But I know I’m not alone. I know a lot of leaders through that period have had that same experience.”
This is the story of a woman who gave it up – but has not given up.
Jacinda Ardern, aged 5, on the trampoline in the backyard of her Murupara home.
Ardern is currently an Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders fellow at the Hauser Leader Centre for Public Leadership, a senior fellow in the Women and Public Policy Programme at Harvard University, patron of the Christchurch Call Foundation, a board member for The Earthshot Prize, and a distinguished fellow for Conservation International and Oxford University’s World Leaders Circle.
She’s one of 12 world leaders who received US$30 million ($50.1m) from Melinda French Gates for distribution to charitable organisations working to improve women’s wellbeing and health. Last June, she founded the Field Fellowship for Empathetic Leadership, introducing it as “a network of like-minded political leaders who use pragmatic idealism, speak to people with hope and optimism rather than fear or blame, and want to unite, rather than divide as we look to solve the challenges ahead”.
It was, she cheerfully told her social media followers, “All part of my ongoing mission to rehumanise leadership, and just be useful!”
Things New Zealanders will learn about their former Prime Minister when they read her book: she knew, weeks before lockdowns ended, that we could no longer beat Covid. She told Donald Trump, “you can show sympathy and love for all Muslim countries” when he phoned and asked if there was anything America could do after the Christchurch mosque attacks. And she absolutely 100% loves a school visit.
2001, and an Arizona-bound Jacinda Ardern is photographed with mother Laurell at the McDonald's at Auckland Airport.
What would today’s high schoolers ask Ardern? The Herald collected questions from a handful of Auckland senior students. What did she learn? Are there regrets? Would she have banned cellphones in the classroom?
“I made a commitment when I left office that I was not going to be a commentator on the day-to-day politics of New Zealand.”
But, okay: “We have this immediate assumption of self-interest in young people, that I have never seen. I actually think if you sit down with young people and say ‘Tell us what’s going to make the burden you bear in this modern age easier ‘– I think we’d be surprised.
“Yes, we do want to focus people’s learning in the times that they’re in the schoolyard. But we need to think about how we look after our young people generally, not just from 9-3. I worry for them so much. Their lives are far, far, far more complex than ours were.”
Is she more at peace not being Prime Minister?
“Yes. The weight was instant. As soon as I walked out of the Governor General’s [office] and I no longer had that title – it was gone. You almost don’t realise how much you carry that in the background. ‘What will the next phone call bring?’ Particularly after the five years we had. Pandemics, natural disasters, the terror attack ...
“You have that constant thought of at any moment, at any moment, something devastating could happen to the people you’re there to serve and you feel so deeply responsible for everyone. You carry that. I don’t see how you could feel any way other than lighter. Having said that, I would not change having done that job ... but I also don’t regret my decision to leave. It was the right decision. In my mind.”
Jacinda Ardern, aged almost 2, with her mother, Laurell, and sister Louise.
A Different Kind of Power spends a long time on the lead-up to “official” leadership. The groundwork for her governance style is in the stories about family, school teachers and early colleagues. The book is more than halfway through before Ardern accepts the Labour Party leadership.
On the campaign trail, she refuses to be photographed in an inflatable river raft because she knows how the lifeboat optics will play. She runs screaming down the hallway to Gayford – “two more seats!” – when she realises special votes have put a Labour-led coalition within reach. And then, in the middle of those negotiations, finds herself in a friend’s bathroom staring at two double lines on a white stick. Not many days later, she is Prime Minister.
Ardern tells the Herald she would have stayed on, regardless of which party Winston Peters had chosen.
“I was only made leader in August of that year, and to have come that close to taking office – well, I think I would have felt a duty to stay and to try and get us into government the next time.”
She recalls the meeting to tell her now coalition partner leader she was pregnant. Peters served club sandwiches; the conversation was “very cordial, warm” and, maybe, not entirely unexpected.
“I had not ruled out the idea of being a mother. I felt like I’d done enough for that to be in the realm of possibility. But it’s not something you can schedule ...”
Ardern would be only the second elected head of government to give birth while in office. It made headlines for a minute but then, largely, the country got on with it.
“It was the reaction that you would hope for,” says Ardern. “That you would absolutely hope for. But it actually exceeded, probably, my hopes. The thing that I remember very vividly is being very worried that I couldn’t share the context.
“You know, ‘You’re a 37-year-old woman, your timing is not amazing’, but I couldn’t really give the context that I now have the ability to give.”
The failed IVF rounds?
“Yeah. That it was just not something that I’d come to believe would be possible for me. And so I feel like New Zealand gave me a lot of grace.”
When Ardern resigned, she said: “I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice”.
Dame Jacinda Ardern, who is now based in the United States, photographed during a recent speech to Yale University graduates.
The book means a return to media interviews. She must, once again, answer questions about cats (“this is a sore point. We did look at whether or not there was such a thing as sabbatical cats. Like, are there people that go away and need you to look after cats?”) and Clarke’s fishing conquests (“he’s gone up to Maine, he has found people”). She’s comfortable with the renewed scrutiny.
“I want to be a champion for people who believe in leading with empathy. I want to demonstrate that you can do it successfully and I want to support people who may otherwise exclude themselves from leading. It’s worth putting myself back into the public eye to talk about those issues.”
Does anybody still trust a political leader?
“Historically, we’ve equated trust and confidence with this idea that you need to assert absolute knowledge at all times. That you need to exert a certain type of confidence or power. That you can leave no room for doubt or humility, because people won’t have confidence in you ... that they therefore won’t trust you.
“I don’t think that actually follows. Trust is built out of people believing you and people seeing, I think, your humanity and your human side. And yet we’ve excluded so much of that from leadership – and not just in public office, but in leadership generally.”
The global pandemic was “horrific, destabilising, frightening” and created long-term economic consequences and financial insecurity, “but my time in dark periods also showed me the level of humanity that still shines through. In the long term, I believe in people’s inherent humanity ... I’m not sure how well the things that are grabbing our attention and that are amplified right now, are really a reflection of where people are sometimes.”
She doesn’t name names, but acknowledges “a particular type of leadership” is currently dominating world politics. But she also notes that both Canada’s Mark Carney and Australia’s Anthony Albanese spoke about kindness in their election night speeches.
“So, yes, there are some very high-profile leaders who are using a particular style, but there’s others who are not ... my view is that [people] want to see politics that is less combative. That is focused on solving problems. That tries to take a bit more of the politics out.”
A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern. (Penguin, $59.99)
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior reporter on its lifestyle desk and the 2025 recipient of Gordon McLauchlan award for best lifestyle journalism.
