Not all heroes wear capes. Sometimes they carry umbrellas. 

Make a note. Shortly after 7am on February 16, 2026, at Eden Park, in the Auckland suburb of Kingsland, Christopher Luxon changed everything. He saw rain beginning to fall from the sky. He saw a man getting wet. No, he seemed to say, his mind palace pinging like a supercomputer. No, this will not do. This will not do at all.

With half the country knee deep in rainwater and human excrement, yearning for something to lift them from the muck, the prime minister took action. He held an umbrella over a man and said, very simply, “Carry on.” Rarely in human history has a diem so thoroughly been carpe’d. 

The scene was captured best by Nancy Lu, a National Party list MP, who posted immediately on social media network Facebook. 

“This is the Christopher Luxon I know,” she wrote.

“While people were scrambling for umbrellas, the prime minister grabbed one and walked straight onto the stage – holding it over the speaker mid-speech,” said Lu, adding: “☔️”.

She continued: “No cameras called. No drama. Just instinct.”

The speaker, for what it’s worth, was Gary Weiss, a New-Zealand-born symphony of silver hair with a man attached. Variously described in the Australian media as “corporate Australia’s top bulldust detector” and a “corporate raider with heart of gold”, and a former guitarist in a band called The Asset Strippers, he was here to announce that a sporting contest pitting people born in Queensland against people born in New South Wales would be staged in Auckland. 

But not even Weiss, for all his breaking news, fairytale hair and jolly pallbearer fit, could distract attention from the man of the moment, the man with the umbrella clenched in his fist like a small miracle. 

In her headline-making dispatch, laid out like the climactic stanza of an epic poem, Lu put it like this:

That’s leadership.

Kind. Grounded. Energetic. Action-oriented.

My leader. Our Prime Minister.

Sometimes the smallest gestures say the most.

She concluded: “#ChristopherLuxon #NZPolitics #Leadership #EdenPark #auckland”

All around Eden Park, a scuttling sound was heard. That was the ghosts of 2011, who had been enjoying a long, lovely laugh ever since John Key’s three-way handshake at the Rugby World Cup brought shame upon that hallowed turf, especially when it comes to things being held in politicians’ hands. That humiliation was exorcised at last, the ghosts retreating with their ghost tails between their ghost legs, shrieking pathetically about assertive umbrella deployment. 

More than that, this was a moment when Christopher Luxon stood up. He stood up and in a kind and action-oriented manner he opened an umbrella, which is not always as easy as it looks, especially under pressure, and especially when you’ve got right in front of you a known bulldust detector with a head of hair that looks like it might well go full Mogwai in the rain. 

Make a note. As Luxon, a keen reader of political biography, knows as well as anyone, there are sometimes moments that make the statesman. Think Lange, when he said that line about uranium at the Oxford Union debate. Think Trump, when his ear was grazed by a would-be assassin’s bullet. That was Luxon today. One man. Pure instinct. And an umbrella. 

When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Today he showed us he is a man who understands rain, understands umbrella technology and understands how to deploy it to intercept the rain. And we all – Nancy Lu especially but also the rest of us – believe him.