Madeleine Chapman, who wrote the just-published biography Jacinda Ardern: A New Kind of Leader, says watching our prime minister handle the Covid-19 response is like watching an NBA star burst out from the pack. (Yesterday we published an extract). 

Rajon Rondo was the fourth-best player on the Boston Celtics roster in 2012. By nature of his position as a point guard he led the team on the court but to the average viewer, the Celtics were fronted by the three veterans, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen. 

After spending the season as a support player, Rondo came alive in the finals against the powerhouse Miami Heat. While the three veterans failed to perform, Rondo stepped up. In game two, he played every minute of the game, averaging a triple-double and showing a maturity and calm far beyond expectations. Had the Celtics not made the finals that year, Rondo may well have continued to be the fourth-best player on the Celtics, forever a supporter to the superstars on his team, even as they aged out of ring contention. The Celtics didn’t win a championship that year – LeBron James and the Heat were never going to be beaten – but if they had, Rondo would have won finals MVP, after barely scraping into the All-Star reserves during the regular season. 

The pressure of a playoff series draws the potential out of young players, and it drew a lot from Rondo.

In politics, as in sports, it often takes a Moment (capital M) to reveal the star players. In scrutinising her life and career in politics, one thing has become clear: Jacinda Ardern is Rajon Rondo.

Had Metiria Turei not admitted to benefit fraud, prompting a surge in the polls for the Greens, largely at the expense of Labour, resulting in then-party leader Andrew Little feeling he had no choice but to step down seven weeks out from an election, Ardern would not currently be making global headlines for how her government is handling a pandemic. It took a Moment in 2017 to reveal Ardern’s natural ease in front of the media for her first press conference as Labour leader. It took a tragic Moment in 2019 for New Zealanders to realise the importance of empathy and compassion in a leader. And in the middle of this Moment, we are reminded again. 

The regular season of business confidence, capital gains tax, and climate change legislation shows Ardern as a reliable support player, but not a star. Were her whole term defined by her performance during ordinary time, a vastly different picture would be painted of Ardern as a leader. But terrorism, natural disasters and global pandemics? These crises, so frequent in her first term as prime minister, have proven to be Ardern’s NBA finals. 

If you know anything about the NBA or Rajon Rondo you’ll know that Rondo went on to be traded again and again as each team struggled with his inconsistencies, bad temper, and general unpleasantness. But ignore all of that, because I chose this basketball analogy for a reason. Having spent years never fully understanding all the niche references in political writing, it brings me joy in this time of isolation to confuse veteran politics nerds by writing about “hoops” at the same time as writing about Jacinda Ardern. 

I was commissioned to write a biography of Ardern in April 2019, one month after the Christchurch terror attacks. International readers were enamoured by Ardern and her humanity in the aftermath of terrorism and the publishers wanted the story of the world’s favourite progressive leader. I signed the contract and went on sabbatical to write a book in four months.

I wanted it to be digestible and educational for people who weren’t familiar with the press gallery. I wanted it to be the story of one woman’s life and career as well as a crash course in New Zealand politics. And I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to appease overseas fans of Ardern because she was undeniably good and had mostly been on a roll since August 2017.

Two weeks later, Ardern ruled out a capital gains tax for as long as she was in office. Two months after that, Kiwibuild was ruled a failure. During this, little progress was made on resolving the land dispute at Ihumātao. In September, as my deadline drew near, the leading stories on the news were about the Labour Party and whether or not it was a safe place for young women. Ardern’s regular season was bad.

Ask anyone now to talk about Ardern’s time in office and little mention will be made of the day-to-day politics. Because in two years, she’s operated in a world outside of everyday politics. Leading a nation that’s just experienced its first terror attack is not everyday politics. Coordinating a united front in the wake of a fatal natural disaster is not everyday politics. And honestly, who knows what the world we currently live in is, but it’s certainly not everyday politics. 

There was never any question of postponing the book, at least not to my knowledge. Everything moves so fast and so often that postponing for one news event would turn into a never-ending cycle of additional chapters until it turned into a tome that nobody would want to read, not even Henry Cooke.

In 2017, when Ardern was revitalising a flailing Labour Party and looking set to pull off an election upset, no one campaigned on a “she would be a comforting and stable presence during a global pandemic” platform or a “she will make the right decision in introducing a police state for our own safety” platform. This crisis we are currently experiencing is inherently political. Its aftermath will bring about widespread scrutiny as the government of the day tries to steer the country and its economy back on track. But that’s all to come and will be everyday politics when it does. Right now, New Zealanders need coherent messaging and messengers we can trust. In Ardern and director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield, we have that. 

We have a leader who steps up in the playoffs. That’s what international readers are interested in and why Ardern is such a global icon, more so than in her own country. In her own country, we see the whole season. We see New Zealand First being a terrible teammate, we see MPs within Labour who can’t even catch the ball.

But right now New Zealand is in the finals and Jacinda Ardern is a finals MVP.

Jacinda Ardern: A New Kind of Leader, by Madeleine Chapman (Black Inc Books, $40), is usually available from Unity Books. For now, we recommend buying it as an ebook. 

In our new series The Lockdown Letters, some of New Zealand’s best writers chronicle Covid-19 alert level four. Today, Dunedin-based author Fiona Farrell.

Tonight she’ll go into work. Eleven till 8am in General Medical. My younger daughter will strap on her helmet, kiss the kids who will be in bed but probably still awake, say goodbye to her partner and cycle off down Forbury Road, across the silent city to the public hospital.

I don’t know what awaits her there. Maybe a quiet night. Let’s hope for that. She says sometimes it’s too quiet and the time till morning drags and she feels a bit bored. But tonight, let’s hope for a degree of boredom. Or maybe a busy night with just the customary admissions.

Or perhaps this will be the moment they arrive: the tiny beings I’ve looked up online that look so deceptively fuzzy like little balls of tangled felt, blue and pink and yellow. Maybe this will be the night of their triumph. They will invade. They will have breached all the defences we have erected to try and keep them at bay: the testing, the tracing, the hand sanitisers and the masks, the checks at the border, the self-isolation. They will have bypassed all that, made their alliance with the host organism that enables them to multiply and they’ll be piling in. And out will come the PPE gear, the goggles and masks and white coveralls.

And all across the city as she bikes toward them, others will also have got on their bikes or climbed into their cars or shut the front door and set off on foot to do the same. The doctors and nurses and auxiliary staff who have somehow kept our public health system going through the decade of neglect by the Key government, the billion dollars amputated from the health budget. How ridiculous they seem viewed from March 2020, how negligent, those wee men, boasting about their glitterball, rockstar economy.

I spoke to my daughter. “Are you anxious?” I asked. I tend to fret. It’s a family thing. But then we all know the statistics. The 37 Italian doctors who have already died, the thousands of Italian nurses and medical staff infected. “Yes,” she says. “But I can’t think about that. I just have to get on with it.”

As do we all. We are so completely outnumbered in this contest, able to put up no more than a temporary resistance to one invasion before another sweeps through.

I’ve always been fascinated by the microscopic beings that are our companions here. Loved those books of photographs showing the hordes that make their homes on my body, the mites for example, with their funny little faces and translucent caterpillar bodies that are walking about as I write this, on my eyelashes. Loved books like Hans Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History that demonstrate so compellingly the power of those tiny fluffy balls to direct the course of human affairs.

It’s easy in the quiet intervals to forget their power. There is a photo somewhere in the chaotic applebox which holds all our photos, of my mother seated with some other nurses on the windowsill of one of the wards at Oamaru Hospital. They had volunteered to be locked in with children suffering from one of the polio epidemics that used to sweep through this country with terrifying regularity. I’m not sure which one: maybe the 1937 epidemic that infected 816 and killed 39 in a population of only one and a half million. Maybe 1943. Whichever it was, the nurses were there for a long time. One of them caught the disease and died. That was how it was, our mother told us. Nursing was not a job, but a vocation. You were like a soldier, like our dad who had fought his way through the German lines at Minqar Quaim, an event remembered in a dramatic painting of trucks careering through flame and gunfire. He’d been there, he told us, running for his life.

Our mother’s service was not commemorated in any painting but it coloured every part of our childhood. We were surrounded by hostile yet invisible forces bent on our destruction, and her vocation was our defence. That was why we ate up our soup, why the house reeked of Dettol, why we were forced at the slightest whiff of warmer weather into our togs for a swim. Never of course in a public pool, for they were reservoirs of infection. No. We swam in North Otago’s rivers or the waves at Kakanui, “building up our resistance” in the chilly waters. We were small stout citadels under constant siege.

And here we are again, under siege.

Am I anxious? Of course I am. For my daughter strapping on her helmet this evening and for her family. For my other daughter who is dedicating herself to maintaining a calm and happy routine for her family, in their tiny cottage in Aro Valley. I am anxious for them all, and the way I deal with anxiety is always to write, to try and understand what exactly it is that is ranged against us. How it operates. How people have dealt with such things in the past. That’s the way I dealt with the anxiety consequent on the Christchurch quakes. It is how I am dealing with this.

And then there is my husband. My current co-citadel. He is several years younger than me and does the supermarket shopping. This morning he set off, freshly shaven. He has never been that keen on shaving, and for the past couple of weeks of isolation he had let it go for a happy primate stubble.

“Why have you shaved?” I asked. And he said he thought it might make it less likely the viruses could land on his face. His plan, evidently, was that they would fly past, those little wooly balls, and instead of tangling in the bristles they would simply slide right off his smooth razored cheeks.

Genius.

I knew there was a reason I’d married him.

Tomorrow: Ashleigh Young