I Never Wanted to Be New Zealand PM Anway – Guido Fawkes

Jacinda Ardern: I Never Wanted to Be New Zealand PM Anway

Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart have just given ex-New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and former progressive heroine a typical softball interview on their Rest is Politics podcast. Ardern is promoting her new memoir “A Different Kind of Power” which is apparently “powerfully evocative and refreshingly open, it is for anyone who has ever questioned themselves, or has wanted to make a difference.” Campbell said he picked up no “yearning political drive” from her memoirs. Look how that went…

Ardern said she never wanted the job:

“I had political drive I didn’t have personal drive. Now that’s not to say I had no ambition for myself –  I wanted to be good at my job, I wanted people to believe I was good at my job. But that did not in my mind need to equate to a particular level of office. I certainly didn’t have the ambition to lead my party and I absolutely therefore did not have the ambition to be prime minister.”

The ex-PM then went on to congratulate herself for slugging it out in opposition: “a fairly brutal place to be for nine years – because I was highly motivated by issues and and change.” Ardern quit with her New Zealand Labor Party tanking in polls, the country on the brink of recession, at the lowest business confidence in the OECD, and inflation at the highest level for a generation. The public didn’t fancy her as leader either…