“I said, ‘Can you please call 111. Speaking to The Hits hosts Laura, Sam & Toni, Gayford revealed what life is like as the partner of Ardern and stay-at-home dad to their daughter, Neve, who turns 2 in June.

There was one photograph the media did miss, however – one of those awkward nappy changes.

), Ardern says she has been taken aback by the volume of press coverage over the past weeks, the scrutiny of her every word. Ardern’s fellow panellists commented on how peaceful Neve was waiting backstage with her father and Ardern joked that she “wasn’t at 3:30 this morning”.

What did it mean? She had, though, seen the shooter’s manifesto, the 74-page screed he posted online. I pointed this out when we met again in Auckland, and Ardern leaned back with a sigh, knowing where this was going. It’s 10, 11 o’clock each night, going through cabinet papers. In the shoe.”. On Sunday, Ardern gave her first speech in New York at Unicef’s social good summit, restating her commitment to ending child poverty and making her country the best place in the world to be a child. “She used to kick me a lot, but I would especially notice when I came on to marae [a Māori meeting place], probably because of all the noise, the haka and performances. It felt very deliberate: was it? Neve was still on New Zealand time, leading Gayford to tweet, two nights earlier, “We’ve watched so much bad late night tv together that her mum came out at … But for the time being they feel like the concerns of another time, another galaxy. A fight was brewing over the possible introduction of a capital gains tax. “No,” she said, bluntly. “These are my notes for the first press conference,” she explains. I haven't had too many international trips on my own anyway so this is just the way we're going to do them now. A handful of words have been highlighted in bright orange. Towards the end of her Waitangi speech, she had quoted Michael Savage, the venerated Labour statesman who led the party to government for the first time in 1935: “We don’t claim perfection, but what we do claim is a considerable advance on the past.” It’s a line that Ardern had rolled out in at least three big recent speeches, and felt, in part, like a plea to dial down the Jacindamania – a call to pragmatism. Not today. She highlighted recent reforms to help disadvantaged Māori, to lift children out of poverty, most notably in the form of a “families package” that boosted assistance to low- and middle-income families. In the past weeks, New Zealand has reckoned with its own history. “The elements of that surprised me,” says Ardern today. Gayford posted a photo on Twitter on Monday of Neve’s security pass, which reads “first baby”. “There is no question that [the] ideas and language of division and hate have existed for decades, but their form of distribution, the tools of organisation, they are new,” she said. Succinctly, steelily, the prime minister framed what had happened in her own terms.

Ardern is wearing a traditional Māori cloak and, even before she begins speaking, is given a standing ovation. Ardern outlined the exceptional circumstances that make it possible for her to raise Neve while continuing as prime minister, which she has frequently stated she hopes will one day be the norm for all women wanting to balance a career and parenting. “My belief in the humanity of New Zealanders has strengthened. “We have more to do,” she said, words she would repeat throughout the day, “but I am an optimist. "She's really good; she lets you know when shes a bit over it but she's really good. “[Peters] said ‘I think we need to be there,’” says Ardern. Earlier that decade, she lived for two and a half years in London, where she worked in Tony Blair’s Cabinet Office.

Asked by the Today show on the US NBC network if it was harder to govern New Zealand or take her daughter on a 17-hour flight, Ardern responded with a laugh and said “It felt at the time on par” and said she had apologised to her fellow passengers in advance. Gun law reforms, intended to ban all semi-automatic firearms, were expedited, with cross-party support. “Now I’m finding out what every parent finds out: it’s not about what’s possible or what’s not, it’s about making it work. Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford, centre, networks with dad and NZ first bloke Clarke Gayford, right, during a day out in Ratana, New Zealand. Those interviews took place in early February, and I followed the prime minister as she commemorated the 1840 signing of New Zealand’s founding treaty, between the British Crown and the Māori chiefs. I have been asking Ardern about her immediate response to the attack, which from the outset put a clear emphasis on inclusivity and solidarity. “Let’s do this,” went the slogan. "Probably one of the reasons we get through as well as we do is we don't have any expectation around how it's going to run and we just try and roll with it and always be prepared. “The information was patchy and it was very difficult to decipher exactly what had happened,” she recalls. “For me, it’s implicit now,” she says. A crescent moon hangs in the blue sky above. “Really, upholding the community standards that they’ve set themselves, I think, is what people are asking for… We’re asking for them to invest in ways to prevent the kind of harm we saw in the aftermath. There cannot be a case of all profit, no responsibility.”, “This isn’t a New Zealand issue, this is a global one,” says Ardern today, carefully choosing her words. “We each hold the power, in our words and in our actions, in our daily acts of kindness,” she says. He will be going to some things, but he’s primarily travelling to care for Neve,” Ardern told the New Zealand Herald. There is no nanny. It was shortly after 11am and the speeches, from local elders, from politicians, echoed back and forth across the lawn. Here she's been travelling with us ... that's just been a consequence of [not having an office] way from home.

Welcoming Woman’s Day into the modest Auckland home she shares with partner Clarke Gayford, Jacinda says her mum’s arrival from Niue, where dad Ross is the high commissioner, couldn’t have come at a better time. By then, I had interviewed Ardern twice already: after a breakfast meeting at an Auckland hotel, and a few days earlier at Waitangi, on the northern tip of the North Island. But it was not all plain sailing. That’s it.

(I spoke to Clark a few days after the Christchurch attack, and she told me Ardern’s response had resonated because it was authentic. His tweet went around the world. Ardern gave birth to Neve Te Aroha at Auckland Hospital on 21 June and returned to work in early August after taking six weeks maternity leave. “Very little of what I have done has been deliberate. Will she be speaking to him about his xenophobic rhetoric? "You hear parents say I can't remember what life was like before. You think of Tony Blair’s period, now, and what do people talk about? And women and girls around the world will be the better for it.”, From a closer proximity, and speaking before the Christchurch attacks, Gayford told me that what he found most impressive was his partner’s grip on the minutiae. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

It does feel as if the passage of time has extended.” When I ask her which day last week a particular foreign dignitary spoke to her, she says, “Time’s a bit of a blur for me,” with a sardonic laugh. “There was a real sense of hope at the time Blair was elected,” she continued, “because people were ready for things to be done differently. But there might be some time to catch their breath before they fly out on Saturday New York time. Within hours, Trump was doing the opposite, throwing his weight behind a Fox News broadcaster who had questioned the patriotism of a Muslim congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, because she wore a hijab. I’m only in government because two parties decided to work with us.”, Ardern alighted on the benefits of New Zealand’s system when I asked for her take on Brexit. “There is no set plan, it’s just whether or not she’s getting enough sleep, where I am for feeds. The prime minister was deep in conversation with her press secretary when she arrived for the formal part of our interview at Waitangi in February.