OPINION: Chris McVeigh KC.
A small part of me wants to take some pride in the bestowing of an honorary degree by Oxford University on our former PM, Dame Jacinda Ardern. However I can’t quite escape the feeling that I’m watching the equivalent of a Michelin star being awarded to our local Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. I know that’s a little unfair because their hot’ n’ spicy chicken wings with a side of potato and gravy is actually pretty damn good but I think that even that old huckster Colonel Sanders would agree that they’d be unlikely to trouble the gastronome’s inspectorate.
But not so Dame Jacinda. She’s happy to bask in the almost slavish devotion bestowed on her by the world’s pillars of higher learning, not to mention the equally fawning reception to her book and her movie and that’s before we even get started on the many speaking engagements and panel discussions featuring her ‘new kind of power’ (is it just me or does this sound suspiciously like a solution she’s peddling to global warming?).
And why shouldn’t she take advantage of the world’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for shameless self promotion? As the celebrated American journalist H.L. Mencken famously quipped ‘No-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’ Or as the showman and circus impresario P.T. Barnum perhaps more pithily put it ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’ If our erstwhile PM can use it to her advantage by trading in on this universal desire to listen to the siren call of someone’s solo trumpet being blown, then good luck to her.
For my own part I’ve never subscribed to the ‘isn’t she a wonderful and compassionate communicator’ school of thought. While I have no desire to take easy pot shots at the woman, I’ve always thought she overplays her hand. Like a lot of people whose sense of self importance doesn’t extend to a complementary sense of self awareness, she couldn’t see when her behaviour descended into, at times, almost comical parody. Exhibit A would have to be her parading on the world stage the day after the Christchurch mosque massacre wearing a hijab. Far from displaying solidarity with the victims, to my somewhat jaundiced eye it was rather more a shrewd attempt to make political capital out of the event. And, what was even more dispiriting, it worked. The general public lapped it up. From that moment on a legend was born. The Jacinda Ardern juggernaut was on the move and there was no stopping it.
And look where we are today. A friend who has spent some time in the States recently tells me that, almost without exception, the two things that Americans know New Zealand for are Lord of the Rings and Jacinda Ardern. And both, one could argue, are the product of well lubricated publicity machines.
And similarly, people whose only information about her is derived from the image promoted by an almost entirely uncritical foreign media simply cannot believe that her feet are made of clay and her sudden resignation was prompted as much by self interest and a recognition by her that, as far as the New Zealand voting public was concerned, the game was up.
While self awareness may not be Dame Jacinda’s long suit, self preservation certainly is. Hence we have the rather poignant situation of the only New Zealand Prime Minister who, after leaving office, chooses to live out of the country. Could there be a more eloquent testimony to her fall from grace? But because distance, as it so often does, lends enchantment to the view, her overseas reputation is seemingly undiminished. Her lustre is undimmed and the Jacinda legend lives on.
For this jaded scribe however it does make me question just how many of history’s favourite sons and daughters have similarly been the product of carefully staged campaigns of unstinting praise and lavish adulation. And by the same token, how many of history’s villains have been the object of ceaseless villification? My guess is plenty.
And so it may be that yet again we can learn from history. Or, in Dame Jacinda’s case, earn from it.
Chris McVeigh is a retired KC living in Christchurch. He was previously President of the Canterbury District Law Society and, in an earlier life, a scriptwriter and performer for the satirical TV programme ‘A week of It’.
