Prime Minister

With run-down houses covered with graffiti, and violent protesters setting fire to part of the parliamentary estate, this presents a far cry from the Peter Jackson imagery of a pristine New Zealand as it really quite engagingly follows Jacinda Ardern from her first election to Parliament through successive general election defeats, her own first coalition, the horrendous Christchurch mosque massacre and then, finally, COVID. There are also some more lighthearted moments as she becomes only the second elected leader to give birth (to Neve) whilst in office; she meets Queen Elizabeth II at a Commonwealth conference and shares in a giggle at the UN when Mr Trump makes another of his grand assertions. A passionate environmental campaigner and internationalist, it looks like she has allowed her partner, Clarke Gayford, to do a lot of the photography here and so we do get quite some intimate, fly-on-the-wall, coverage as they both deal with the peaks and troughs of raising a child whilst she runs a nation that might only have five million people, but these are proud and vociferous folks who don’t always make her life easy - privately or politically. Now some of it does come across as if she’s playing to the camera, and the more we see of her obvious, if self-deprecating, publicity skills the easier it is to be more cynical about her long pensive looks out of the window, or her impassioned pieces to camera, but I think she still comes across as an inherently honest and decent woman who does care about the things for which she was elected. Moreover, there are scenes towards the end when a section of the population begin to rebel against the lockdown and vaccine mandates, that do go some way to shining a light on the problems faced by all of the unqualified politicians around the globe who found themselves completely out of their depth as the virus took hold. She’s also remarkably candid about her approaches to the job, the decisions she made and the repercussions she will have to live with in the future. She’s clearly a principled lady adept at spinning plates and I’d be quite surprised if her tenure as Prime Minister of New Zealand was the last we saw of her.