Puff-piece profiler, writer Michelle Duff (it’s too much of a stretch to call her biographer of Dame Jacinda Ardern) scolds the political centre from her left-wing observation post in an explainer “How Dame Jacinda Ardern’s profile went from saint to witch” on the TVOne page.
As equally predictable as laughable, we learn from Duff that it was all imported politics and misogyny, apparently, what done Ms Ardern in. Miffed at having to re-write her 2019 Ardern bio, inventively titled ‘Jacinda Ardern’, by adding chapters to describe her Great Leader’s downfall, Duff is more than keen to avert her eyes from truth and lay the blame for Jacindamania’s souring on poisonous actors, misfits and misogyny.
The proof she provides for her claims:
(T)he fact the [Labour] party gets an immediate bump just by appointing a male leader in Chris Hipkins — with no policy changes — shows how far her stocks have fallen. One friend deems it the “misogyny bump.”
I would say: Michelle, get better friends. Because Ms Ardern was the quintessential lipstick-on-a-pig of New Zealand politics, giving the party a bump on her elevation to leadership with no new initiatives, nothing new to say, just a new face, and not Andrew. Maybe we could call it the “misandrist bump” that catapulted her to a distant second in the vote count of ’17, just as the “misogyny bump” supercharged Hipkins to distant second place in ’23.
Duff cultivates the idea of something called “identity politics” fouling Jacinda’s charisma, which is curious considering her one-time cult-like following, before the veneer, the facade of kindness peeled away and her line-by-line brute force and unkindness menaced so many good folks, breaking their hearts, homes and hopes in unilateral unkind diktats.
The author laments nasty cartoons, memes, and writings of Ardern’s detractors as further proof:
It was anti-feminist backlash.
No, it wasn’t, Michelle, it’s called politics – always ugly, always brutal, always held to derision and satire – and frequently very violent, since the dawn of time. History is littered with political crime scenes and cadavers.
No man, or woman, is immune to the ugliness of politics and, while Duff may have wept upon seeing the former prime minister portrayed as “a blackened, hollowed-out face and glowing eyes, rendered as a witch”, she might also want to consider the awful fates of Ms Gandhi and Mrs Bhutto, murdered in the name of politics, or Mrs Thatcher and the assassination attempt that killed five of her friends and colleagues, injuring thirty-one more, and she may want to remember how, on the death of the greengrocer’s daughter following a long period debilitated with dementia, the worldwide left verily celebrated in mirthful ‘Ding dong’s.
The ‘Dern’s downfall; Michelle, I hate to be the one to break it to ya’, had nothing to do with awful misogyny, but everything to do with awful leadership.
