Alcoholic benders, right wing vitriol, blatant sexism and Vogue magazine: Jacinda Ardern's former chief press secretary Andrew Campbell's new memoir is released today, traversing one of the most memorable epochs in New Zealand, from both a personal and political perspective. He talks to Emily Simpson.
In the book, you interweave an account of your work life with Jacinda Ardern with some of your own story and personal issues, and one of those was alcoholism. You got sober a few months before you took the role with her office in 2018. Do you think that whole massive chapter in your life – the Jacinda years – would have happened if you’d continued to drink?
No – I feel I can say that with absolute certainty. Quitting drinking really has felt like a miracle for me, because it was essentially a prerequisite for this incredible experience. Obviously when I quit, I didn't know that opportunity was around the corner, so they were unrelated in that regard.
But I do sometimes think back and just pinch myself because up until that point, my life was very much spiralling out of control. Stopping allowed me to get some agency, and it was this miraculous thing where, within six months of quitting, I managed to get this job that I’d coveted for years and years and years [as chief press secretary], though not necessarily for Jacinda.
Once I was in it, I often thought ‘gosh, imagine if I still drank’ and I very quickly came to the conclusion that I wouldn't have been able to drink in that environment which, by and large, was pretty dry, because it was just so busy.
And I guess partly also because of Ardern's phase of life, with her pregnancy and then being a new mother...
I think that did set the tone in a way. So things collided really well because it meant that I wasn’t in an environment where alcohol was significant, which sometimes in politics, it can be.
Yes, you write about the enormous benders you used to go on with the likes of Paddy Gower and Matthew Hooton (both sober now). And there’s another media figure you credit with putting an end to your drinking, can you tell that story?
Well, the chapter in the book is called Hayley Holt saved My Life, and I really believe that.
She said to me, if you carry on drinking you’ll get injured. And that was happening to me, I’d had three concussions in the space of a month. And then she said, you’ll lose your job, you’ll lose your friends. Basically, there is this very clear spiral and she was the only person who laid it out, I guess because she'd been through it herself.
She was also able to offer real hope because she was doing well, she was evidence that there’s life on the other side. She wasn’t someone I’d known for particularly long at that point, but it felt like she just showed up in my life at exactly the right moment.
So you sober up, you get your dream job. And then a couple of months later you’re charged with the announcement of the birth of Neve and updating the media on mother and baby, which you found confronting as a single man in your late 30s with very little experience of babies. Did that family situation, travelling around with Jacinda, Clarke and Neve, get more comfortable for you?
Yeah it did. But I mean, it's also worth noting, this had never happened before in the world. No other person in my job, anywhere in the world has had to do that.
[Former Pakistan prime minister] Benazir Bhutto of course, was the first to give birth in office, but she actually hid from the public that she was pregnant, whereas Jacinda's pregnancy was very much in the public eye.
You know what though, it was actually an incredible experience. I’ve looked back on some of those moments – I’ve an absolute mind’s eye of us sitting in her office, preparing for question time and media interviews; her sitting at her desk with all of her papers in front of her, reading intently, and Neve’s just sitting in her lap, and I’ve just thought, how wonderful is that actually?
It never impacted her ability to do the job. She took it all in. I can barely do one task well, let alone the level of multi-tasking that she was doing.
But I would have to say, I'm just not a baby person. I try, but I kind of feel like babies know it. They don’t seem too warm to me, particularly. Luckily there were more than enough other people in the office who made up for things on that front.
I think what Jacinda needed from me doing my job, not having a relationship with her child.
What did Ardern specifically require from you? Because as you say in the book, she was better at messaging than you are.
Well, unlike other prime ministers, particularly John Key and Helen Clark, she didn’t have a close relationship with the press gallery, she wasn't on the phone to them all of the time, so she left that to me.
I was focused on managing the communications across the entire building, coordinating with ministers’ offices and the other coalition parties. I write about the amount of time I spent in NZ First offices every day to make sure that the coalition ran well, and I certainly see a contrast between that and the current government and its relationship with NZ First.
There was teamwork with the speeches, particularly during Covid. Every day I’d produce the draft then she would cogitate on it, and improve it and add things. But I have to say, she was so good at it. I’d send speeches or notes up to her thinking I’d done a pretty good job and then it would come back with some edits and I’d be like ‘gosh, that's better’.
In his memoir published earlier this year, journalist Barry Soper accuses her of being essentially just a good communicator, but one who failed to understand power and politics at a deeper level. What's your response to that claim?
Well firstly, it's not true. On the substantive point about her not understanding power and how to manage it, I’d point out that she won an unwinnable election in 2017. Her job was to kind of save the deck chairs and she turned that into a win.
I talk in the book about how formidable she was in those coalition negotiations where National had a very easy hand to form a government, and she had the much harder job, and she did it.
I think there's lots of evidence, we forget, of just how good she was. She won an MMP majority – that’s no fluke. Then if you look at other policy areas... child poverty rates were reducing pre-Covid, and that was via her policy initiatives. Her government built more houses than any government since the 1970s.
On communications, the point I would make is that in the five years that she was Prime Minister, there was an unprecedented number of crises in such rapid succession: the worst mass shooting in our history; the worst volcanic eruption in over 100 years and the most deadly; and then of course the biggest global pandemic since the 1920s and the sharpest economic recession.
In order to get through all of those, you had to communicate a message that kept the country together.
You write that, like “a lot of white men”, you probably underestimated her before you worked for her. Was there a single moment when changed your mind about her?
I mean, her brilliance was there in plain sight. We just didn't see it. Even before she got elected leader, she was regularly showing up in preferred prime minister stakes, so maybe the public was onto her before those of us in the political establishment.
But two things that stood out for me: that first press conference after she got elected Labour Party leader. She said later that the most important thing she felt she needed to do was convey confidence. I think she conveyed more than confidence – in one appearance, Labour was reborn. That's a phenomenal thing. That’s not luck.
The second thing was in the coalition negotiations. When we were discussing the measure for emissions. James Shaw, the leader of the Greens, was saying it was one thing, Jacinda said ‘oh no it’s not’. We went back and forth for a while, and then she opened her binder with her notes and showed us. I mean, the fact that she knew the Green Party policy better than the leader of the Greens and the future Minister of Climate Change is pretty remarkable.
You had had a front row seat to one of the biggest nationwide mood shifts that’s ever occurred – from Jacindamania to Jabcinda. Can you tell me about witnessing that dramatic change in temperature?
Well, she herself was very aware that what goes up must come down. She knew that the 2020 election was always going to be a high watermark.
But also, I think everyone in government was very conscious of the fact that the longer Covid went on, we would inevitably lose more and more support. It was just the cumulative weight of governing through Covid and everything just being very, very, very hard for people for a very, very, very long time.
And I think there are some things we could have done better, like I thought we should have ended mandates a little bit sooner. I think we should have completely pivoted to an economic message in 2022. But ultimately, I think these things are on the margins.
If you look over her terms, she banned semi-automatic weapons, legalised abortion, and advocated mass vaccination. And in terms of a lot of the organised and increasingly transnational, organised, right wing: those three are kind of the holy trinity of what that group opposes.
So she really was, globally, a target. For the first time in New Zealand politics, there was actually a lot of international organising against our government and against her. I think it's really important that we don't just blame the individual and say it's their misfortune that happened, when it is a wider system thing. She was a young woman, she was progressive, and she was elevated globally. She was somewhat of a beacon for people around the world. And it made her an outsized target for a lot of those international movements.
That’s not to say she didn't make mistakes, clearly by her own admission, near the end. She was less curious, she was in a bit of a bunker mentality. She was exhausted.
But if you step back and look over the aggregate of the five years, on all of the most important big decisions, she not only got it right, she knocked it out of the park.
And let’s not forget she is actually still popular. According to one poll, she is still the most preferred prime minister in New Zealand. Her book was the biggest selling book in New Zealand last year. Her documentary did really, really well at the box office.
Do you think the fact that she was a young woman played a role in the level of vitriol she experienced in New Zealand?
Yes. Because I saw it. This is certainly not Chris Hipkins' fault, but he and I went to a meeting with business leaders in Auckland soon after he became the prime minister and everyone in the room was like, ‘oh, I'm so glad, finally, the government's listening to us’. And I’d literally been in a meeting with Jacinda and that same group of people only a matter of months before.
I would sit in meetings where people would talk to me, not her. I think that's not an unusual experience for women, but it happened to her. She has never said it and I don't know if she believes it, but I observed on a number of occasions a kind of low-level or casual sexism, and I do just think there was a view that she was a young woman and the job was maybe too much for her. And I just think, look at the result.
Do you think she made a mistake that time she was asked in a press conference if the mandates meant there would be two classes of New Zealander, and she said “that is what it is, yep”.
I mean, no other New Zealand Prime Minister in modern history has had to make so many consequential decisions that affected every person in the country. And no recent Prime Minister has had to make so many media appearances. I think inevitably in there, unfortunately, you might say one or two things that you kind of walk away from the podium and go, I got that wrong, or I shouldn't have said it that way.
If you look at that as an individual thing, should she have said that? Probably not. Especially given the overarching message around Covid was unity.
You actually made the move of reducing her presence in overseas media. But then you later thought that might have been the wrong call?
On reflection, when writing, I thought it was the wrong call. I certainly thought it was the right call at the time. A lot of people sort of think that she courted those interviews. But it was testament to her international pulling power that they all came in. We never went and said to Vogue, can we be on the cover? They were all requests that came in. She didn't particularly like doing those things, which would probably be surprising for people. She was actually more than happy when I suggested, hey, let's stop it. Let's not do any.
But now I'm overseas working for a major [multi-national renewable energy] company, I see that New Zealand's bandwidth in the international media space is tiny, infinitesimal. And we rely on it for our biggest exports and our tourism. So actually, if you've got a prime minister who can be out there raising New Zealand's profile the benefit to the country is huge.
Were you surprised when she resigned?
I was actually. In the lead-up to that period quite a lot of people asked me if I thought that she would resign, and I said ‘no, no, no, she's extremely competitive’, which is – people don't know that about her, but she's very competitive. And she's also very duty bound. And given those two things, the fact that she did still fall on the side of resigning is just testimony to how intolerable the role had become by the end.
I just think the level of vitriol in opposition to her was out of all proportion to anything she did. And I just think it was exhausting.
Do you think she'll live in New Zealand again?
I would imagine so. She's doing a number of international roles and I think there's probably some ease in being based in Australia, but she's always made the point that New Zealand is home. I hope she is able to come back someday.
Did you have a period, after you resigned, of missing that level of daily excitement?
I mean, I was exhausted. By the time I finished, I really needed a break and a change of scene as well – just something that wasn’t related to government. Obviously no one would want any of those terrible episodes in New Zealand’s history repeated, but it did mean that you were operating on this constant adrenaline.
Since I’ve been back in New Zealand everyone has been saying to me, ‘oh you look really healthy’. So obviously the job took a toll.
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December 27, 2025
This interview has been condensed for brevity.
In the Room, by Andrew Campbell (Allen & Unwin Aotearoa NZ) is released today.
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