Barry Soper: Jacinda Ardern takes over

Jacinda Ardern and Clarke Gayford face the media with their newborn girl Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford. Photo / Greg Bowker

A year ago today Jacinda Ardern was pulling up her chair to the Labour leader's desk.

Today she is again pulling up a chair at the kitchen table as Prime Minister, taking over from Winston Peters, at her home in Sandringham with baby Neve in her arms.

If a crystal ball had predicted this a year ago it would have shattered at the very thought.

The safe hands of Bill English began to twitch uncontrollably, with Andrew Little at the helm he was confident he would finally pull it off, winning the job he failed dismally to win up against Helen Clark in 2002.

Who was to know that Ardern was about to give birth to the Jacindamania juggernaut, let alone just over nine months later giving birth to her first child?

Prepare in the coming months to hear a lot more of where that came from.

Today she'll be doing a round of heavily orchestrated interviews which will begin airing at an allotted time later in the day.

She'll be telling us how she's been coping with motherhood, how she's going to balance that with running the country and how she'll be spending more time in Wellington.

The rambling Premier House, sitting on the well manicured grounds a stone's throw away from Wellington's CBD, and just a street away from Parliament, will provide her easy access to her newborn being cared for by her partner.

Clarke Gayford will have to hang up his fishing tackle for a while as he goes about his fatherly duties.

The pushchair is expected to be a common sight around the Parliamentary precincts and he'll be spending more time than he's ever spent in her expansive 9th floor Beehive office.

She'll be touching down in the capital over the weekend so expect shots of the first family emerging through the airport gate with a few well chosen words from the Prime Minister before she's whisked to her residence in a limousine with the diplomatic protection squad, talking into their cuffs, in hot pursuit.

After settling in, it'll be down to the office on Monday morning to chair Cabinet and to greet the glare of more media publicity later in the day.

And on it'll go.

There'll be the magazine spreads of the happy family and when she's overseas, which she will be in a couple of months time, there'll be never ending appearances on television chat shows and the like.

To celebrate her first year as Labour leader they made a video, Jacinda meeting world leaders, excluding Donald Trump, Jacinda giving us her aspirations for the country, and Jacinda with a cosy shot of Winston Peters "forming a Government for all New Zealanders" but with not one shot or mention of The Greens!