Jacinda And The Bard.

Always The Right Words: When words fail you, Shakespeare's are always there to say what you want to say - only more eloquently. Our new Prime Minister possesses qualities the Bard knew well - and well described.

THE THING ABOUT SHAKESPEARE, is that he has already said everything you could possibly want to say – only more eloquently. Never was this more obvious to me than during the thirty-six hours between Andrew Little’s public admission that Labour’s dire polls had made him think about stepping-down; and Jacinda, reluctantly (?) stepping-up.

Before setting out to share my thoughts on the rapidly unfolding political drama with the AM Show’s Duncan Garner that fateful morning, I’d Googled “there is a tide in the affairs of men” and hurriedly printed-off the result. Half-an-hour later, in TV3’s Green Room, I attempted to commit Brutus’s famous lines from Julius Caesar to memory.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”

For Jacinda Ardern and her fortunes were, indeed, afloat upon a full sea. Never had her party had greater need of a leader of courage and imagination than on that day, Monday, 31 July 2017. That she was the leader Labour needed could not be disputed. The polls confirmed it. Her colleagues knew it. The country wanted it. The question was: Would she do it? Could she, like Hotspur in Henry IV Part One, step forward boldly to declare:

“Out of this nettle – danger – we pluck this flower – safety.”

The country would have its answer within twenty-four hours.

Watching Andrew Little announce his decision to resign the Labour Party leadership and nominate Jacinda Ardern as his successor, I once again found myself indebted to the Bard. This time for his rendering of Malcolm’s report of Cawdor’s death to King Duncan in Macbeth:

“Nothing in his life

Became him like the leaving it. He died

As one that had been studied in his death

To throw away the dearest thing he owed

As ’twere a careless trifle.”

But the country was granted only a few minutes to muse upon the death of Little’s ill-starred leadership. The doors to the Labour Party’s Caucus Room swung open and there she was, striding down the corridor towards the waiting cameras and the microphones of the assembled journalists.

And what a performance she delivered! In 40 years of participating in and writing about politics I have never seen the like of it. Jacinda’s first media conference confirmed the pollsters’ numbers, her colleagues’ hopes, and the public’s intuition – in spades.

So perfectly did she time this astonishing demonstration of her brilliance, that I could only think of Prince Hal’s shrewd, if somewhat calculating, speech in Henry IV Part One:

“I know you all, and will awhile uphold

The unyoked humor of your idleness.

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,

Who doth permit the base contagious clouds

To smother up his beauty from the world,

That, when he please again to be himself,

Being wanted, he may be more wondered at

By breaking through the foul and ugly mist

Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.”

For if Jacinda Ardern had hardly smothered up her beauty from the world, she had, most assuredly, concealed from it the sheer magnitude of her talent and the full scope of her ambition. In this she was aided by the “foul and ugly mist” created by her predecessors. Among the “contagious clouds” of Labour’s repeated failures, it turned out, had been the perfect place to hide!

But now Mt Albert’s princess is New Zealand’s Sun Queen. And, in the grim tradition of all who assume national leadership, Jacinda must undergo the painful alchemy of power. Her base metal days of deejaying the night away among Auckland’s bohemian set are over. Her golden days as New Zealand’s prime minister begin.

In Henry IV Part Two, Shakespeare has Prince Hal – now King Henry – dismiss his former friends with brutal finality:

“Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self”.

In the Coalition Agreement she signed with Winston Peters, Jacinda promised to lead a “transformational government”. Only slowly, I suspect, is she beginning to understand who is being transformed – and to what degree.

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 December 2017.