Nicola Sturgeon should take a leaf out of Jacinda Ardern’s book, and quit

At the peak of her popularity, New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern was regarded in some circles as a latter-day saint. If you dared admit you didn’t worship at her altar, people recoiled in shock as if you’d confessed to being a kitten-killer.

Leaders rarely unite the world, or so much of it, as positively as Ardern, who announced this week she is to stand down as PM. Her political obituaries have focused on her strengths and she was undoubtedly charismatic and gifted as a politician.

Her global appeal soared in the wake of the Christchurch mosques massacre, which saw 51 gunned down by a white supremacist, bringing terrorist horror to the peaceful country.

Ardern, with a hijab-style head scarf, embraced the national grief and proved herself a beacon in troubled times, with the spontaneous empathy of a Blair or Obama.

She was also heralded, initially, for having her country’s best interests at heart during the Covid crisis when she pulled up the drawbridge with a level of draconianism other countries, bar China, wouldn’t countenance.

But Ardern turned out to be human after all. She is quitting in February because, after five and a half years, she hasn’t “enough left in the tank” to do the job.

Her ruling Labour Party must now rush to find a replacement to lead it into the general election in October, when it faces defeat by the centre-right National Party.

Cynics suggest that Ardern is departing now to avoid humiliation further down the line and thus protect her legacy.

New Zealanders have become less enamoured of her, post-pandemic, as the fall-out of her zero-Covid policy – including a dire labour shortage – hits home.

With decades high inflation and the rising cost of living, polls show her popularity has plummeted to a record low and only 30 per cent of voters think the country is going in the right direction, compared to 70 per cent in early 2021.

Kindly commentators have cast Ardern’s dropping out in the broader context of female leaders everywhere, as if she is proof that it’s tougher for women at the top.

While certainly it must be especially difficult to combine new motherhood with the premiership, as Ardern has done, singular women, like her, are an exception to the rule and should be judged accordingly.

Liz Truss failed spectacularly because of her incompetence, not her sex. And, to be fair, her rise to the top was plotted with political skill, not feminine wiles.

And Margaret Thatcher won three consecutive elections because, love her or not, she was the most outstanding political operator of the day.

But governing Britain, with a population of more than 68 million, is a different ball game to running New Zealand, population circa five million. It would be more useful, perhaps, to measure Ardern’s fate against the leader of a similar size nation – say, Scotland.

Although Ardern is on the Left, her sudden departure has close parallels with that of Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson, who put personal happiness before political ambition when she resigned in August 2019.

Davidson cited the conflict over Brexit and her desire to spend more time with her baby son but, credited with reviving her party’s fortunes north of the border, she rather left them, and the Unionist cause, in the lurch.

But the western leader who would most like to be mentioned in the same sentence as Ardern is, of course, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

The Scottish Nationalist supremo fashioned herself on the progressive Ardern to a risible degree. There were moments during Covid when Sturgeon seemed to think Scotland was the New Zealand of the north, even attempting to impose a unilateral travel ban, which quickly backfired.

Fortunately for Scotland’s long-term economic health, Sturgeon lacked the power of the New Zealand PM to sabotage her country by turning it into a fortress.

But the SNP leader was gushing towards her Antipodean hero and, following Ardern’s election victory in 2020, said Scotland could learn from New Zealand. How frustrating for Sturgeon that her independence dreams have been thwarted and her pursuit of her inner Ardern curtailed.

But she could, in the end, be more Jacinda if she chose to. The New Zealand premier has no one but herself to blame for her party’s downturn and has had the good grace to accept that.

Sturgeon remains in denial about Scotland’s domestic problems and, even after nearly nine years as first minister, she refuses to shoulder any responsibility.

She is unlikely to find the humility to admit her tank is empty, but maybe Ardern’s exit will make it easier for her to go, by offering the precedent that even great (by their own estimation) leaders have their limits.

If that proves to be the case, then Jacindamania will not have been in vain.

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