Jacinda Ardern was tougher and more hard-nosed than the public gave her credit for, suggests her former chief of staff, who says he watched her sack ministers with "steel" even as empathy defined her public image.
That is the assessment of former journalist and senior political staffer Mike Munro, who served as chief press secretary to Helen Clark and later chief of staff to Ardern, in his new book Ringside, charting his decades around the Beehive.
Ardern led the country from 2017 until her surprise resignation in January 2023, when she said she no longer had "enough in the tank" to continue. Speaking to Q+A this week, Munro said her sensitivity was real - but so was a harder edge the public rarely saw.
"The thing about Jacinda is that she was tougher than people gave her credit for. I sat in the room with her and saw her making decisions about sacking ministers.
"I'm thinking here of Meka Whaitiri and Clare Curran, and she could be quite hard-nosed and hard-headed," he said.
Whaitiri was stripped of her ministerial portfolios in 2018 following an inquiry into an alleged altercation with a staff member, while Curran resigned from Cabinet the same year after controversy arose over her failure to disclose meetings.
Munro said the then-prime minister still handled those conversations humanely, but had to have the resolve to carry them out.
"In doing so, and making those decisions, and having those conversations with ministers whom she's about to sort of send down the road, she was still able to do it in a very human way, but boy, she made herself very plain too," he said.
"She had to have steel to make those sorts of decisions, and she certainly had it. She was quite remarkable in that regard."
But Munro said a quality that would most surprise people was how sensitive Ardern was, describing her as "quite a thin-skinned politician" whose empathy came through after the Christchurch mosque attacks and throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said Ardern's account of suffering imposter syndrome was "very real", and that becoming PM while learning she was pregnant "was a hell of a time for her".
Why did many people's opinions turn?
Asked why opinion turned so sharply against Ardern in some groups, Munro said historians would wrestle with the question for years, but pointed to prejudice and resentment at the international acclaim she attracted.
"There's a big dollop of misogyny involved in that," he said.
"People resented the fact that she was getting all this praise heaped upon her at home and abroad for the way she'd managed it. It was quite a dramatic change."
He said the mood shifted "over a matter of weeks" around the second Auckland lockdown. "She was never able to recover from that."
Auckland's second major lockdown, in the second half of 2021 as the Delta variant spread, stretched for months and tested public patience with the then-government's elimination strategy — which was ultimately ditched.
Though a poll from last December still found the former prime minister remained the country's politician with the highest favourability ratings.
Munro rejected the suggestion that too much of Ardern's premiership went into communications rather than substance.
"The communications was the key to it. It was all about communications... and she was putting a huge amount of work in behind the scenes to the policy side of it."
He said Ardern worked "up to all hours of the night" during the pandemic, reading about what was happening abroad and phoning public health contacts around the world.
Managing Winston
The former senior political staffer also said prime ministers should invest serious time in getting to know Winston Peters, having arranged private dinners between the NZ First leader and Jacinda Ardern when they went into coalition nine years ago.
Munro said Peters had "got a lot worse in terms of his cantankerousness" and was "quite a standoffish person" when it came to personal relationships in politics.
"You just have to spend a lot of time with him, sort of getting to know him," he said.
Peters anointed Ardern as PM in 2017 when NZ First held the balance of power, and became her deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Munro said that when he chose Labour, Ardern barely knew Peters, so dinners were organised for the pair.
"We actually organised a couple of dinners, just Winston and Jacinda, where they sat down and chewed the fat, and I think they were quite valuable," he said.
"I don't know whether the current Prime Minister has done a lot of that."
Munro said NZ First was "sitting pretty" ahead of the election as National's vote softened, picking the party could reach 12% and putting Peters "almost certainly... in the box seat again" as kingmaker - though he said the rising Opportunity could challenge that role.
On his own move across the divide from journalism to political staffing in 1996, Munro said it was "almost accidental", and that former colleagues warned him Clark might not survive as Labour leader. He said the public perception of Clark as cold was "very untrue".
"Helen had a wicked sense of humour... she could be very funny, very witty, and quite edgy in some of her observations about life and people," he said.
Munro, who later worked in government relations, also pushed back on concerns about the revolving door between politics and lobbying.
"I think there's a lot of hysteria about it myself," he said, arguing former insiders "monetise that knowledge" and that anyone could approach an MP or protest on Parliament's lawn.
"Could there be more regulation around it? Yes, there probably could be. There could be a bit more openness around it, but lobbying is not going to go away."
He said security around politicians had transformed since his first day working for Clark, when her office received a round of live ammunition.
Parliament in the 1980s had an unlocked back door off Museum St, he said, "compared with the fortress we've got today".
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air
SHARE ME