There is good and bad luck in politics, and good luck for a leader is when their strengths perfectly fit the circumstances.

In Jacinda’s case it was her empathy – or at least her perceived empathy (perceived because I don’t know her personally and I’m aware of the fake personas usually adopted by politicians) – that fit perfectly with the 2019 mass shooting and then the C-19 pandemic.

In his TV series, A History of Britain, Simon Schama said the following of Winston Churchill in 1940:

The qualities which made him so impossible – his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history – were now, in the black days of May, exactly what the country needed.

Something even Labour voters appreciated at the time. But in 1945 those were not the qualities needed and so he and his Tory Party got booted in a landslide.

I see something similar here with Ardern, when it came to actually getting things done, and I think she knew it too, as did others like “Bomber” Bradbury and Chris Trotter:

She never appeared to grasp that announcing policy is not the same as implementing it. Press releases do not build houses. Speeches do not end poverty. In the end, it was Jacinda’s constant failure to deliver that made it impossible for her to go on.

If you say “Let’s do this!”, then, Dear God, you have to do it!

But even with the empathy super power I think it began to turn against her with the announcement of the vaccine mandates. Not only had she said a little earlier that there would be no such thing, there was no empathy this time as there had been during the lockdowns. Not even a grim, reluctant admission that this was a terrible breach of civil liberties but something she felt necessary to do. Even in disagreeing with her, I would have appreciated that she at least saw the dangers.

Instead we got the breezy, almost amused, announcement that one class of citizens would have rights that others did not as a way of coercing people: the now infamous, “That is what it is.. so …Yep. Yep”. Even the reporter asking her had not expected that: in fact he hesitatingly suggests that she won’t agree with his take on creating two classes of people:

Polling is not conducted frequently enough for us to ever know if that was the inflection point of her popularity vs unpopularity, and of course she was by then nowhere near as popular as she had been in 2020. But that was more a gradual slide and since empathy was her main power it should surely have been significant in the eyes of the citizens when it was so noticeably absent at the very moment when it was most needed. As I said in this post in December 2021:

Politicians rise and fall, and it’s surprising how often in history you find that the things they won on are the very things that kill their careers in the end.

And among many things she did that should not be forgotten….