Having found herself in the midst of tough coalition negotiations after a closely fought election, Jacinda Ardern was facing far more than her political colleagues could have guessed.
Six days before becoming New Zealand’s prime minister-elect, the Labour leader discovered she was pregnant, but was desperate to keep it, and the accompanying morning sickness, a secret during the post-election maelstrom.
Asked how she managed, Ardern replied: “It’s just what ladies do”, evoking the sympathy of women the world over who just get on with it while struggling with first-trimester nausea.
The 37-year-old worried her staff might notice she was eating constantly, and only the same foods. “But no,” she revealed, “apparently people thought I was just a woman of odd habits,” she told stuff.co.nz.
No one, it seems, rumbled her. “None of them noticed I had pretty bad morning sickness while negotiating our government,” she told Sky News.
News that Ardern will give birth in June – shortly after which her television producer partner, Clarke Gayford, will become the primary caregiver – has been hailed as a thrilling landmark.
“Exciting news!” tweeted Labour’s Harriet Harman, the UK’s longest-serving female MP and the first pregnant candidate to win an election in 1982. “Pregnant prime minister & stay at home dad! New Zealand leads the way! Congrats all round.”
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said the announcement, though foremost a personal moment for Ardern, “also helps demonstrate to young women that holding leadership positions needn’t be a barrier to having children (if you want to)”. And the former UK Green party leader Natalie Bennett saw it as “another landmark passed for women in politics”.
Ardern said she did not think her position was that different to others’.
“I’m not a trailblazer,” she said. “I am not the first woman to multitask. I am not the first woman to work and have a baby. I know these are special circumstances but there will be many women who will have done this well before I have.
“And, New Zealand is going to help us raise our first child … I think it’s fair to say that this will be a wee one that a village will raise, but we couldn’t be more excited.”
Ardern, once a policy adviser to the former British prime minister Tony Blair, broke the news on Instagram and Facebook, posting a photograph of three fish hooks, two large and one small, in reference to Gayford’s passion for fishing. He is host of the popular TV show Fish of the Day.
