This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
The following article was one of the best-read Premium articles in 2023. The story originally ran in February.
On Friday, January 13, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told one of the very few people who knew she was thinking about resigning that she had made her final decision.
She was at her home in Sandringham, Auckland, having spent the summer between Gisborne with her fiance Clarke Gayford’s family and Tairua with her own parents.
Her chief of staff, Raj Nahna, flew up, as he did every year, to talk through the plan for the year ahead with her: the usual caucus retreat, the start of Parliament, the focus for the year and the election.
This time Nahna had brought two plans: one for if she was staying and one for if she was going.
Her Deputy PM and closest friend Grant Robertson was usually at that same January meeting, but this year was not able to get there because of an appointment in Wellington.
He arrived later that day and went out for dinner with Ardern to Cazador in Dominion Rd, ahead of a day at the tennis the next day.
At the table next to them were a couple of tourists who had no idea who she was. Other customers told them it was the Prime Minister after Ardern left.
Those other customers had no idea Ardern had just decided to quit the job.
The circle of trust
Nahna and Robertson were the first of a tiny group of people to know Ardern was thinking about resigning by the end of last year.
Ardern had told Robertson of her final decision the day before she told Nahna.
Ardern has always been somebody who chews over issues and decisions with others before coming to a decision. Nahna and Robertson have both long been her primary sounding boards: highly trusted and close friends as well as colleagues.
Nobody can recall when it was first broached – but it was around October. It started to be discussed seriously by November.
In November each year, Ardern, Nahna and Robertson – along with other senior ministers and advisers – started work on the plan for the year ahead. This time it was for an election year.
As they worked through it, Ardern told them she didn’t think she had another four years in her.
Running in the election – which would inevitably require answering whether she would commit to staying for the full term – only to quit straight afterwards wasn’t her style.
Both Robertson and Nahna tried to talk her down repeatedly, questioning to make sure it was not just a temporary slump in her energy and talking over what could be done to ease the load.
There were discussions about the ramifications if Ardern left: whether it would help or hurt Labour’s chances, whether the Covid-19 angst would dissipate if she stepped down, or whether her departure would ruin what chance they still had.
Nahna raised concern about the great political risk for Labour and said he thought she would come out best in a head-to-head with National leader Christopher Luxon.
However, they got to the point of agreeing with her that unless she was all in, she could not do the job.
Robertson then also told her he was not certain whether he wanted to take over the job if she did go.
It was at that point Ardern suggested they needed to tell Chris Hipkins – to give him warning of what might be asked of him.
Telling Chris Hipkins
In the week before Christmas after Parliament rose, Chris Hipkins was asked to Premier House to see Ardern. Robertson and Nahna were also there.
It was then Hipkins was first told she was thinking of leaving.
Ardern used the words at that meeting that she would later use when announcing it publicly: “I’ve got nothing left in the tank.”
Hipkins’ initial reaction was “a long silence”, one of them said.
Hipkins asked her to put a number on the likelihood she would go. She replied “I’m 90 per cent of the way there.”
There were no tears at that meeting. “It was a very calm kind of affair,” one said.
They again discussed whether there was a way to ease the job for her, whether anything could be done – and what it would mean for Labour’s chances at the next election.
Proceedings were occasionally interrupted by Robertson, who had a ruptured disc in his back, dropping to the floor to do stretches.
All of them thought there was still a chance a rest over summer could restore her.
Ardern was acutely aware she couldn’t draw it out any longer. She had a window of time within which to decide – leaving it any later than the start of the election year would be unfair on her successor.
So she set herself a deadline. She decided to take the summer to think about it, but no longer.
But why?
Ardern said when she made her announcement that there was no specific time or event that triggered her decision. Those around her say that was true.
None of those who were in the loop can pinpoint when it moved from an occasional muttering at the end of a hard day to something more serious. Even Ardern cannot say when it took root in earnest.
2022 was supposed to be better for Ardern. The lockdowns were over, the country was vaccinated, the mandates that had caused her so much grief had been dropped.
The borders were re-opening. It was hoped things would feel normal again as soon as possible.
But one of those close to her said 2022 had been particularly bruising.
The occupation at Parliament started it on a bad note that lingered. “That was so horrific in so many ways,” one senior minister said.
“The adrenalin of 2020 and 2021 had dropped away a bit. It was a real grind.”
The economy was turning to custard and the public mood with it.
Ardern had begun the year warning of a grim winter as Covid-19 marched across the country, along with the flu which Covid restrictions had largely kept at bay the two years before.
The winter took its toll: the strain on the health system in particular.
Ardern also set herself a gruelling agenda of international travel to try to make up for the two lost years of Covid-19. And while Ardern thrived on them, the buzz did not stay back home.
There had been rumours circulating toward the end of the year that she would resign, including in the National Party.
Ardern dismissed them right to the very end of the year, even as she was talking to those around her about leaving.
She could hardly admit she was thinking about it.
“I thought if she had a restful summer she could do it. But I also knew going into the summer that it was going to be 50-50.”
Most of those who had not known in advance were shocked when she said she was resigning - but not surprised. They had noticed she was exhausted.
She had been getting Robertson to do more and more of her weekly radio and television slots and was having more days without public events or media standups.
There was a theory she was pulling out of the public eye a bit because of concern about the over-exposure during the Covid-19 period.
But one of her staff (who had not known she was contemplating quitting) knew she was at the end of her reserves by the end of last year.
“I thought if she had a restful summer she could do it. But I also knew going into the summer that it was going to be 50-50.”
Breaking the news
Then came telling everybody else. They decided to announce it at Labour’s caucus retreat on January 19, when all MPs would be there.
On Tuesday January 17, Ardern flew to Wellington and called a handful of her key staff in one by one: deputy chief of staff Holly Donald, senior private secretary Le Roy Taylor and chief press secretary Andrew Campbell were among them. Campaign manager Megan Woods and the president of the Labour Party, Jill Day, were also told.
Taylor had gone in thinking he was sorting out her diary. She sat him on the sofa and said “this won’t take long.”
Another staff member was called in on the excuse of a planning talk. She got suspicious when she saw Donald’s eyes were red. Donald tried to convince her she was tired.
Andrew Campbell was also suspicious by then.
Nahna had annoyed him by changing the media advisory for the caucus retreat – including closing the venue completely to the media for the morning session.
He knew the media would not like it, and said he would discuss it with the PM. “You do that,” Nahna said to him.
That didn’t take long either.
Those few staff had to keep it a secret from the rest of the staff for two days.
“It was a strange burden to have,” one noted.
They tried to pretend everything was normal, doing work that would be irrelevant in two days’ time, while also surreptitiously working on the nuts and bolts of the announcement.
Some staff had suspicions. A Zoom meeting was organised ahead of time so Ardern could tell the rest of the staff on the Thursday before the public announcement.
Staff who were still on holiday had been asked to come on the Zoom – and one had replied “this is ominous”.
“We had to pretend it was just a check-in. That was an unusual couple of days,” one of those in the know said.
Campbell kept a heroically deadpan demeanour over that time.
Campbell was aware some of the political editors were still on leave and not attending the caucus retreat. After Labour’s was cut back to just the press conference, others were weighing up whether it was still worth going.
The National Party had their caucus retreat in Napier as well, so one journalist could potentially now cover both.
Campbell rang some, to try to persuade them it was worth going without giving the game away.
It had mixed success in getting them there, but he couldn’t nudge it further without raising suspicion.
The excuse given for closing the morning to media was that MPs would be discussing election strategy and the walls were thin so they did not want media to overhear.
The first part wasn’t exactly a lie: although it was not quite the election strategy anybody expected. The real reason was they didn’t want the media to see staff or MPs wandering about shocked and crying before the announcement.
When the media arrived an hour ahead of the announcement, the MPs were all closed away in a room.
Ardern had told Cabinet first, in a morning meeting. Soon after that the rest of Labour’s caucus were told. There were tears – Ardern’s and others – at both.
“She did it in a very Jacinda way, calmly but quite directly. It was quite similar to the way she said it publicly afterward,” one MP said.
“It was pretty emotional. For most it came as a bit of a bolt from the blue. She had made a pretty major decision after a tough year. So the first reaction was at a human level, rather than a political response.”
Ardern did the Zoom call with the rest of her staff to tell them. It was a tearful session. Ardern cried, and that prompted Nahna to cry too.
Back in Wellington, the staff watched the public announcement on a livestream.
One raided Nahna’s whiskey cupboard in his absence. They got through about four bottles that afternoon.
There were some phone calls to others just before that public announcement. They included an attempt to call Australia’s PM Anthony Albanese. She did not want him to see it in the media first. She couldn’t get him, so messaged him instead.
Ardern announced it publicly soon after that.
Ardern came into the press conference with Gayford, who sat in the front row next to the media.
She started by saying she had two announcements to make. The first was the election date.
Then she started on the second.
It was obvious what she was going to say from the moment she said she had been reflecting on her position.
One reporter gasped out loud. Another, sitting next to Gayford, grabbed Gayford’s arm in shock.
But nobody could write it until she said the words. The preamble to that point seemed like a year.
Robertson was not in the room – he had stayed to watch the livestream with the rest of caucus. Soon after, a couple of MPs emerged, among them Nanaia Mahuta and Kiri Allan.
“Shocked” was the word most used.
One Cabinet minister says now he did not have an inkling it was going to happen. “In hindsight, it seemed a bit obvious. I knew it had been a hard year. But I hadn’t registered it was potentially coming.”
They did not have long to recover. Ardern had called a caucus meeting to vote on a new leader two days later.
It would be the first time the new change to Labour’s leadership election rules were used - a rule change that allowed caucus to elect the leader, rather than giving party members and unions a vote, if 60 per cent of caucus could agree. That rule change was made at a time when Ardern did not anticipate quitting: but to allow a tidy leadership change at times when Labour was in government, and a PM was being replaced as well as a Labour leader.
The primary concern now was to avoid a contest or messy handover that would put that tidy move at risk.
The shock and aftermath - the rise of Chris Hipkins
Hipkins had not given the prospect of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins much thought up until that pre-Christmas meeting at Premier House.
Ardern and Robertson had both made their final decisions by that January 13 meeting and both then told Hipkins. Both believed he was the person who should take over, although neither said so publicly.
Robertson’s decision had come as a surprise to Hipkins – like others, he had assumed Robertson was the natural successor and would want to do it.
So Hipkins had to ponder his future a tad more quickly than the others.
Even then, Hipkins waited to see how caucus would react before deciding whether to put his own hand up.
He was aware there was a chance the mood in caucus would be for a complete reset from the Ardern team, rather than somebody in the line of succession – a “next generation” move.
The bigger concern was that caucus would be split between the two and a contest happened.
Hipkins wanted to gauge that mood before making up his own mind. He told some that if there was a clear indication caucus wanted that change, he would have opted out rather than force a contest.
Caucus was reeling from Ardern’s bombshell: most were 2017 or 2020 entrants to Parliament and had not known any leader other than Ardern. One of the 2020 crew said a month later that it was a bit like grieving.
They did not have much time to digest it.
Hipkins talked to other potential candidates - although Michael Wood was the only real other possibility of a challenge.
Kiri Allan had been talked about in the media – to her horror. She told caucus very early on that Thursday that she had no intention of going for it. However, in a bid to try to keep speculation on the down-low, caucus had decided that no MP would comment publicly on whether they were or were not thinking about it.
So the speculation around Allan kept whirling. She eventually decided to make it known publicly that she would not go for it – telling the NZ Herald on Sunday morning ahead of the caucus meeting that she would not have her hand up for either leader or deputy.
Wood had some conversations with MPs and sought advice.
Among those he spoke to was Grant Robertson. And Hipkins.
One MP said it was all done fairly openly and directly - MPs were all stuck in the same room for much of the time that day, and at the caucus barbecue that night with families.
There was not much time or space for secret back-room talks or phone calls.
Within 24 hours, Wood ruled himself out, having decided it was not the right time for him.
It almost certainly helped Wood get the front bench promotion.
Things might have been different had Labour been in Opposition, or even earlier in the term. The recent travails of the British Conservative Party were fresh in the mind.
The critical factor that clinched it for Hipkins so easily was that they were in Government: he could take over as PM without completely disrupting the boat at a critical time.
One MP said Wood “took a very mature approach to it”.
“There would have been some people who thought, yep, now is the time for the next generation. But everybody took being in government seriously and knew there wasn’t much time before the election to do anything other than march forward. So people coalesced around that.”
On Friday morning at about 10am Hipkins boarded a plane to Wellington.
As the plane doors closed he got two texts: one was from Michael Wood and the other from another MP. Wood asked him to call. The other MP told Hipkins that Wood was not going to contest it.
The job was his.
In a bid to show there was unity, Wood was also one of the seven MPs listed as nominating Hipkins for the job: about 20 MPs nominated him, although only seven were recorded (the minimum under Labour’s rules).
By then the deputy role was also all but sorted. Hipkins had talked to Carmel Sepuloni very soon after Ardern announced it to Cabinet.
He told her if he ended up as PM he would want her as Deputy Prime Minister, and for Kelvin Davis to stay on as deputy leader of Labour.
He told her that would be the case, regardless of whether she supported him or someone else to be leader. He later made that clear to Davis as well. Davis took a day to think about it and then said yes.
Ardern out
On February 9, 14 days after resigning as PM, the last of Ardern’s boxes were moved out of Premier House. The rules require a departing PM to vacate it within 14 days of a change - and rules are rules even if your successor doesn’t plan to move in and probably wouldn’t mind you squatting there for a while.
It left many wondering what had prompted Ardern to quit five years in. But only those who have been Prime Minister would know just how gruelling it can be.
One of those with the best understanding of that was former PM Sir John Key – who had done the job himself and reached a similar point. He even used a similar metaphor when he resigned.
If you get to the point where you start measuring your day in sacrifices, then you very quickly know that you shouldn’t be in the job anymore.
When he quit, he said he had “left nothing in the tank”. Ardern’s was that she had nothing left in the tank. They have different meanings, but in both cases the tank is on E.
Key says now he was surprised when Ardern quit when she did – but not at her reasons.
“There is no off switch or off day in the job. There’s no room for anything other than 100 per cent commitment and you can’t fake it. There’s too many people relying on you.
“If you get to the point where you start measuring your day in sacrifices, then you very quickly know that you shouldn’t be in the job anymore.”
In the wake of her resignation, Ardern brushed off questions about whether the protests, heckling and abuse she had been faced with over the year was a factor in her decision.
Ardern said at the time that the good things she had experienced far outweighed the bad.
Some remain adamant it would have had more of an impact than she was admitting – that it had “hounded her” out.
One of her staffers said she was far more resilient to it than those close to her. “She carried it stoically. She just shouldered it. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met in that regard. She thought the job was to just carry on. And she didn’t want to give the arseholes their due.”
Others close to Ardern point to the demands of the job as the more likely reason, though the anger would not have helped matters.
One such senior minister pointed to the hours and the stress.
“It’s that way for every Prime Minister. You have to be super-human.”
And as Ardern said when she stepped down: “I am human, politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time. And for me, it’s time.”
A few days after she resigned as PM, one of her former staffers carried a large box from the Beehive to Ardern’s new office among the other MPs.
It was some of the thousands of cards and letters Ardern has been sent since her announcement.
The staff had done one last job for their old boss.
The box contained only the good ones – the arseholes were not to get their due.