George Orwell insisted memoir is trustworthy only when it reveals “something disgraceful” about the author – a typically Orwellian test, rooted in his conviction that our inner lives are mostly records of defeats. Andrew Campbell, sparing with literary quotation unless the author in question is Jacinda Ardern, just about passes the disgrace test in his newly published political memoir as a former spin doctor. But the harder question is not whether he can make himself look foolish. It’s whether he can make his admiration for Ardern yield to scrutiny.
Start with what works. New to the book-writing lark – although no stranger to editing or publishing, having founded the Godwit Press – Campbell arrives on the page with a likeable authorial voice, as courteous in print as he was to deal with as Ardern’s right-hand guy. (An under-appreciated truth about Labour’s comms people is they tend to be a more professional bunch to deal with than those of their centre-right counterparts.) He is candid, up to a point, politically literate, observant, and capable of a dry, self-deprecating turn as he spins out a kind of number-eight-wire romance about crisis leadership.
His best passages work because they generally combine insider access to Ardern with flashes of personal vulnerability, not so much reporting on what happened in the Beehive and out on the political road (although there’s plenty of that) but trying to show what it meant to be “in the room” while also being, by his own account, flailing out of his depth. The opening chapter frames this neatly: a childless political operator, and gay besides, tasked with managing the communications around a Prime Minister giving birth.
All this gives the book legs for someone whose early proximity to power unfolded in a boozy political culture where insight and idiocy often share the same bar tab. A one-time chief of staff for the Greens, he switched to Labour to work for Grant Robertson before becoming, unsteadily at first, chief spokesperson, speechwriter and strategist for Jacinda Ardern for five years.
An early episode catches the tone. After a night out, Campbell writes, he woke to find Cabinet minister Paula Bennett’s office key in his rumpled pocket, along with “a hazy recollection” of shimmying behind her – “me on one side and then-Labour leader David Shearer on the other”. Gosh. A saucy sandwich dance, as they say, and “definitely not my proudest moment”. Just the sort of disgrace Orwell had in mind. Campbell would soon quit the booze, but not the insights it offered.
“To be fair, it probably isn’t all that different to any workplace Christmas party,” he writes, “where a few people get too drunk and lairy, other than that those drunk and lairy people are charged with running the country or are the people holding those in charge to account”.
Getting routinely pissed as a newt can play tricks with one’s memory, too. In another passage, he recalls getting confronted by a friend about his drinking problem one afternoon in 2017 while he was “nursing a hangover on the balcony of my Wellington flat, sunken deep into a beanbag, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights”. Oops. As every good Labour policy guy ought to remember, this particular cigarette brand ceased to be available in New Zealand in 2008. Helen saw to that. Perhaps he was smoking, um, something else.
That is where the memoir begins to narrow, even as the page count swells, and not just because the author muddles the fags. Campbell is deft on the comic disgrace of proximity to power; he is much less willing to turn that same sceptical eye on New Zealand’s 40th Prime Minister. In the Room is overlong, but not when it comes to offering dissenting or even particularly analytical views. It moves instead through the milestones of Ardern’s tenure, most already familiar in the retelling: the volcanic eruption at White Island, Brenton Tarrant’s bloody rampage in Christchurch (like his old boss, Campbell eschews using the anti-Muslim maniac’s name), trips to England and the UN. And – but of course – Covid, which Campbell devised the muscular comms strategy for.
Not to mention her undisputed moment in the sun, in 2020, when she led Labour to a historic election win as the first party ever to win outright under MMP. During that campaign, I was doing some work with Jim Bolger, who ruefully noted that it was probably just as well New Zealand no longer used first past the post. Ardern, he thought, might have won every electorate. Jim was only half joking.
That was the height from which the later questions fell.
Her political decline and resignation are there, too, and here again Campbell’s room is vivid – his analysis rather less so.
The book’s uneven chapter headings suggest another part of the problem. Some of them work fine as titles in a memoir. Others, such as “Entering Parliament,” “Negotiations,” “The Early Days”, “The Covid Election”, and “Reflections” look more like placeholder files on an office computer. But all headings need to carry a book’s emotional arc.
The book has plenty of where-we-were and who-said-what, plenty of late nights and plane trips and five-star hotel suites, but less of the harder work of deciding what the heck any of it finally proves. The best scenes in Campbell’s stateside yarns – the late-night speech editing, a television spot with Stephen Colbert, the UN speech, the hotel-room exhaustion – show her stamina well. But abstract descriptions like “preternatural ability” or “embodiment of modern New Zealand” land without context. Preternatural? Oh, don’t be a goat. In the New York stories, the closing scene with Ardern sipping coffee is too anecdotal for the scale of the chapter supposedly about her relentless competence under pressure. Daintily drinking a coffee only tells us so much.
The treatment of the dreadful pandemic years is often saddled with the same relentless need to show how New Zealand “couldn’t have been luckier” to have had the leadership of one so capable, progressive, insightful, eloquent, clear-eyed, brainboxy, culturally attuned, good humoured, fashionably dressed, down with the kids, camera ready, kind to the animals, visionary, etc. Perhaps that’s correct, and maybe she was all of those things. But making the case wouldn’t have suffered from a few critical reappraisals, assuming Campbell thinks she is not beyond them.
Much the same could be said of the yet-unresolved question of Ardern’s legacy. If her administration performed so flawlessly during Covid, then why was the government she led ultimately so economically inauspicious? Campbell mostly ducks the issue, though he does make a reasonable fist of putting some needed context around the KiwiBuild fiasco.
Almost as important as the economic ledger is the leadership style Ardern ushered in: what the commentator Josie Pagani calls “feel-good politics rather than do-good politics”, where making people feel cared for matters more than the hard yakka of governing.
In my own book on Ardern, Pagani argues that Ardern’s “politics of emotions” ultimately collapsed because it made Ardern a love-her-or-hate-her proposition, something that spectacularly backfired later on when the last Auckland lockdown and a tanking economy made the first option less viable. Doubters too often found themselves dismissed as “unkind” by a media establishment much in the leader’s thrall, which paradoxically played a part in bottlenecking the disturbing and sometimes disgusting anti-Ardern mania that broke in the final act of her premiership.
More’s the pity, because parts of her record have held up notably well. She was a terrific brand ambassador for the country, generally sure-footed on foreign policy, and possessed an inspirational religious back story – something she adroitly universalised in her core politics – that this 320-page work barely touches on. The politics of kindness has since acquired a very nice driveway at Ardern’s new multimillion-dollar mansion in Oz. Still, the house is not really the point. Campbell’s reluctance to test the legend is the point, and “she’ll be right” is no way to write political herstory.
The closing chapter has the same problem. It stops being a sprightly memoir and becomes a long drum solo about democracy. The abuse Campbell writes about is real, to be sure. But he blurs abuse with criticism, and is slow to admit that some of those with serious misgivings had a point. Not all of us were trolls.
“If there’s one call to action from all this,” he writes, it is to “build defences for public figures – especially women – against networked, transnational abuse”, and to treat such abuse as “a structural threat to democracy”. Otherwise, he declares, “values-driven leaders” may simply stop standing for office.
As a warning, fair enough: hard to quarrel with as far as it goes. As an argument about Jacinda Ardern? Yeah nah. Good leaders are heckled. They also fail, disappoint, overpromise and experience pratfalls, sometimes – ask George Orwell – disgracefully so. A book from inside the room should have room for both.
In the Room: A first hand account of the Jacinda Ardern Years by Andrew Campbell (Allen & Unwin, $37.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.
The post Book of the Week: Jacinda’s spin doctor, still spinning appeared first on Newsroom.