Dame Jacinda Ardern’s former press secretary says he argued with her in the back of a Crown car that her government was “doing too much” during the Covid pandemic era and needed to focus in on the economy.
Andrew Campbell writes about his years as Ardern's right hand man in a new memoir, In The Room. Campbell served as chief press secretary through much of Ardern's time in office, including during the Christchurch mosque attacks, the Whakaari White Island eruption and Covid.
What Ardern’s former top aide has revealed about the Covid years - watch on TVNZ+
He told Q+A that the setting for the argument with the PM during the pandemic era made it “very uncomfortable, cause you’re sitting right next to each other”.
“I was suggesting, in fact, that I thought the government was doing too much. It needed to do less. We needed to focus on the economy,” he said.
According to the book’s publicity material, Dame Jacinda told Campbell on his final day in the role: “Every Prime Minister needs someone who will challenge them – and that was you.”
Campbell said Labour “failed to pivot to the economic response of Covid anywhere near soon enough”. He said that by the end of 2021, “we were largely vaccinated” and the government should have “removed things like mandate[s] sooner”.
Though he qualified his answer by saying Dame Jacinda's government did "an incredibly successful job" on the things that mattered most, and that the problem was the cumulative weight of decisions rather than any single one.
Vaccine mandates for workers in sectors including health and education were introduced in late 2021, alongside the “traffic light” framework and vaccine passes.
'Removing liberty’
Campbell said he realised early on that the pandemic response would cost Labour votes.
“You can’t ask people to take these actions and then expect them to vote for you. Like, I mean, you’re removing liberty. And whilst in the immediate election after that, that didn’t come true, that eventually did,” he said.
Labour won a landslide in 2020 but was voted out in 2023.
“In order to win the battle against the virus, inevitably, you have to burn a huge amount of political capital,” Campbell said.
He said Dame Jacinda's daily briefings and constant availability drew public support at first, until people grew “sick of hearing the same message”.
The 1pm podium briefings, often alongside then-Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield, became a fixture of life during the 2020 lockdowns.
Campbell said Dame Jacinda was the one who pointed out that her level of exposure “was obviously ultimately going to have a consequence, and it did”.
He also rejected the suggestion that the media had been “on a string” during the pandemic, naming a list of stories exposing flaws with the response.
“My recollection of actually a lot of that period wasn’t that they were on a string, but they were exposing PPE problems, or breaches at the border."
'A conviction politician'
Campbell admitted he had misread the kind of leader he was working for. Dame Jacinda, he believed, had been trying to model “a different type of leadership”.
“One of my failings actually in the job was that I didn’t really fully appreciate that the whole time I worked for her, and I wonder whether we could have done things a bit differently had I kind of been more alert to that.
“Had I understood her as more of a disruptor, as someone who was really a kind of a conviction politician, [who] was wanting to change the status quo, not just manage it, I think some of the communications advice might have been a bit different.”
The warmth the public saw in Dame Jacinda was genuine, Campbell asserted.
“None of that’s manufactured. You can’t manufacture that. It was completely authentic. It is who she is. She’s a very warm, a very kind person.”
She was also a tough editor when it came to her communication. Speech drafts Campbell thought were “pretty good” often came back “with red ink through them”.
“I think it was a fundamental part of the success of the government, actually, was her ability to communicate effectively," he said.
“If you are needing people to take an action, they have to feel that. They have to be comfortable with taking that, and they’re not just going to do that because you tell them to or you give them a bunch of numbers that tell them to.”
He also rejected the notion that Dame Jacinda was now unpopular.
Her approval ratings were at times “astronomical”, and newer more recent polling still had her as “the most popular politician in New Zealand".
Campbell also weighed in on the existing political environment.
"The current government has actually made a very relatively benign environment compared to the six years we had look extremely hard. I mean, that's remarkable given they've had a much much easier hand than we had," he said.
His advice to today’s leaders went back to Dame Jacinda's “relentlessly positive” 2017 campaign.
“If there was one thing I would encourage all of the leaders to think about is to actually be less negative,” he said.
“I think there’s a negativity in politics at the moment. I think a politician that can come forward and actually be positive, and live those values and not buy into the negative, that would be powerful.”
Campbell had previously worked for the Greens and New Zealand Rugby. He now lives in the UK, where he works for a multinational renewable energy company.
Watch the full interview in the video above
Q+A with Jack Tame is made with the support of New Zealand On Air
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