UK-based New Zealand journalist Nicola Kean on Boris Johnson’s big victory, and the conundrum of voting under a FPP system.

Politics is a brutal business. My clearest memory in the sleep-deprived aftermath of New Zealand’s 2017 campaign was Te Ururoa Flavell weeping in the Mediaworks carpark after stepping down as Māori Party leader live on television. Beaten in their electorates and failing to make the 5% threshold, the party had just been turfed out of parliament. As I watched the UK election results come in, I imagined similar scenes playing out all over the country in the early hours of Friday morning.

At 10pm on Thursday the polling stations closed and the exit poll went live. That poll surveys voters at 144 locations around the country and is considered very accurate – it’s such a big deal it is projected on the outside of the BBC’s Old Broadcasting House in central London. Back in 2017 the former prime minister Theresa May reportedly cried when it came in, projecting that she’d lose her majority. But if any tears were shed at Conservative HQ on Thursday night they would have been ones of joy. Boris Johnson was going big, not going home.

If the scale of the Conservatives’ win was immediately clear, the extent of Labour’s loss would take a few more hours. The first constituency to declare was Blyth Valley, a former mining area. It has literally never had a Conservative MP. It does now. Likewise Bolsover, represented by Labour’s notorious bruiser Dennis Skinner for 49 years, turned blue. Laura Pidcock, tipped as a future party leader, gone.

The most brutal fate of all awaited the Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson. Only elected to the leadership in July, at one point during the campaign she insisted she was a viable candidate for prime minister. It was pure hubris. By dawn the day after the election she was out of parliament. Like Flavell, she immediately stepped down.

But unlike Flavell, Swinson had actually managed to increase the party’s vote share – by more than 4%. The UK’s first past the post system is an unforgiving one, and particularly so for the smaller parties. In contrast, the Conservatives increased their vote share by 1.2% and gained 66 new seats. The Electoral Reform Society tweeted that across Britain, it took 38,300 votes to elect a Conservative MP. For the Liberal Democrats it took 334,122.

It’s been a hot topic of discussion in my nerdy corner of the antipodean diaspora. For many of us it was the first time we’ve ever voted in an FPP election. Forget voting for a party that doesn’t run a candidate in your constituency. And no vote splitting, please, we’re British. For some antiquated reason that nobody seems to remember, elections take place on Thursdays and the count goes on all night, rendering anyone vaguely interested in politics an absolute wreck at work on Friday. And where, the Australians demand to know, are the democracy sausage sizzles?

A less recent member of the antipodean diaspora is the former New Zealand MP Darren Hughes, who now runs Britain’s Electoral Reform Society. He’s been doing his level best, churning out opinion pieces, but the idea of electoral reform seems quite far down the list of constitutional issues the UK is currently working through. There was a once-in-a-generation chance with a referendum in 2011, in the wake of a hung parliament and an MP expenses scandal. The question for whether to introduce the alternative vote – not even a proportional system, but a less blunt tool than FPP. The result was a resounding no. Or at least resounding by more recent standards.

The conundrum of voting under a FPP system was painfully clear in the east London constituency where I live. One of the safest Labour seats in the country, there wasn’t even the vaguest of hope for the Lib Dems, Greens or Conservatives. This year the long-serving MP stepped down and was replaced by a candidate from Momentum, the Jeremy Corbyn affiliated group in Labour. She had previously shared anti-Semitic content on social media – and when pressed for an apology offered more obfuscation than contrition. She was also at the centre of a council housing scandal which had featured in the red top press. After facing questions on these issues from concerned voters, she just stopped turning up to the public hustings. Friends of mine in the area were genuinely anguished – they wanted a change of government but couldn’t bear to vote for her. She won anyway, but I couldn’t help but wonder how she might have fared in a parallel proportional universe.

Tactical voting was definitely on the minds of the 3.5 million people who logged on to the Best for Britain website on election day. The remain-backing campaign group was providing advice on how to find the strongest non-Conservative candidate in each constituency. But figuring out how to vote tactically proved to be a minefield for voters – competing websites, some accused of being aligned with particular parties, were giving contradictory advice. The Liberal Democrats, Greens and Plaid Cymru had already agreed to withdraw candidates in certain seats to give anti-Brexit parties a better chance overall. None of it was enough to save Chuka Umunna and the others who defected from both Labour and the Conservatives over the summer. In the end, it may have been the decision by the Brexit Party to not run in Conservative-held seats that proved more decisive.

Boris Johnson – derided on social media on Wednesday for apparently hiding from reporters in a fridge – was soon making a play for the great unifier role. He promised the Labour voters he won over that’ll he’ll work hard to keep them. Meanwhile the ruling faction of Labour, having lost its traditional heartland in the north of England, doesn’t seem to be reflecting all that deeply on why it happened. Brexit was blamed almost immediately. But the swing in both strong remain and strong leave seats was only going one way – against them.

It is hard to remember a year in which New Zealand was so repeatedly in global headlines, writes Kamahl Santamaria, a Kiwi journalist based in Doha.

Time zones are a strange thing. You go to sleep, and then for eight hours or so, you miss out on everything happening on the other side of the world – just by virtue of the fact the earth turns while you snooze. Of course years ago this wasn’t a problem, but in our now-hyper-connected world the FOMO can take over.

But it’s even stranger when your home is on that other side of the world, because that first bleary-eyed scroll through Twitter at around 6am can result in some pretty rude awakenings.

And so it has been for the past 12 months. New Zealand – that “rugged individual, glistening like a pearl, at the bottom of the world” – has made global headlines in ways and in frequency it hasn’t before. I can’t imagine how challenging it’s been for all of you back home – but I assure you from where I sit, eight time zones westward, some of those 6am wake ups have been pretty jarring.

Grace Millane

It should have been a name the world never knew. Grace Millane should have come to New Zealand, enjoyed herself, and gone back to the UK when she was good and ready. Instead her parents had to repatriate her 21-year-old body after she was killed by a man whose identity, for some reason, is still protected. She became the unwitting poster-child for the threats faced by women everywhere, and though much has been made by the media and courts of her sexual preferences, that is absolutely no reason a bright young girl should have lost her life on our fair shores – or any shores, for that matter.

The #HerLightOurLove hashtag, although brief, was a lovely way to see people connect with Grace. Sunsets and sunrises filled my timeline, with people posting the most thoughtful and uplifting messages during a time of grief. Hashtags don’t always make a difference – they are symbolic by their very nature – but sometimes a sense of community is all we need.

There was also something incredibly moving about the way Jacinda Ardern addressed Millane’s death by saying, “On behalf of New Zealand, I would like to apologise to Grace’s family. Your daughter should have been safe here and she wasn’t and I’m sorry for that.”

In no way did she need to offer the apologies a nation for the actions of one man, but she did. As someone who has the job of reporting the news and views of the world’s leaders every day, I was struck by the compassion and and humanity she showed – qualities sadly missing in so many of her counterparts. Not only that, it reinforced our international reputation as a good and humble people.

Of course she didn’t know it then, but the prime minister was to face an even tougher test only three months later.

The Christchurch mosque attacks

On March 15, all I was looking forward to was, for the first time in seven years, seeing a friend from the BBC who was visiting Doha. I went to check her flight status, but instead the 6am social scroll said things like #PrayforChristchurch. My immediate thought was, “God not another bloody earthquake,” but it soon became apparent this event was going to be a very different challenge.

The mosque attacks were surreal to watch from afar. Because as we all “knew”, these things don’t happen in New Zealand. Only now, they do. One of my colleagues asked me, “Why would they attack a place like New Zealand?” And my simple answer was “because they can”. In hindsight our quiet little country, tucked away from the rest of the world, was an easy target.

But once again, we stepped up. I was so impressed by the many New Zealand reporters I saw not only on Al Jazeera but on many international news networks, telling the story calmly and clearly. The response from the public, who put love and inclusion over hatred and anger, was inspiring. And without wanting to turn this into a PR piece for Jacinda Ardern, her response was truly inspiring. Some world leaders ban Muslims from entering their country; our leader literally wrapped herself in their culture and embraced them. You don’t get your image projected onto the world’s tallest building for nothing.

It was a surprisingly cold afternoon in Doha that day, but as I welcomed my friend to the Middle East I proudly sat outside wearing my black New Zealand t-shirt. It was a tiny defiant stand from 14,000 kilometres away, against the cold evil winds that had swept through Christchurch. I shed tears for my country that day, but a lot of them were tears of pride.

The cricket world cup final

Is a sporting defeat worthy of consideration in this review? Of course it is trivial measured against tragedy, but we’re New Zealanders, it’s going in. And once again, it’s because of the way we – in this case, the team – conducted themselves.

I see no point in rehashing the details of the Black Caps agonising loss to England in the Cricket World Cup final. It’s up there with Emirates Team New Zealand’s loss in San Francisco in 2013, and the All Blacks’ knockout defeats in the World Cups of 1999 and 2007. We just don’t need to go there.

But the character shown by Kane Williamson and the team in not actually losing the match but still not winning the trophy was exemplary. I work with people from all over the world – 70 different nationalities at last count – and anyone with even a passing interest in cricket has massive respect for New Zealand, and the way we play the game.

Whakaari / White Island eruption

There’s been much disbelief about how this could happen, with many asking me, “why would you be visiting the crater of an active volcano?” A fair question, and one I didn’t really have an answer to. All I can remember of White Island is that it seemed to always be gently puffing away, and that it was pretty normal.

I think, in this instance, New Zealand and its leadership have reacted in a manner anyone would – with a commitment to recovering the bodies and to finding out what warnings were missed. Goodness knows by the end of this year, the police and political leaders should be well versed in how to keep the public informed and the media sated.

Maybe that’s the legacy of the past 12 months. An ability to react quickly to a crisis, and to do so both in an empathetic and humane manner, and in the the knowledge that the rest of the world is watching. Because there’s nowhere to hide in this world anymore – not even at the bottom of the South Pacific, where the only thing beyond you is ice.

I haven’t lived in New Zealand for nearly 20 years. But let me tell you, I’m still damn proud to be a Kiwi. And every event which has thrust the country onto the world stage this past year – even the ones which have left us hurt, confused, or desperate – has made me even prouder, because of the way people have responded.

Kia kaha New Zealand. #SoProud.