An uncomfortable truth for our leaders: there’s a limit to how ‘human’ we want you to be | Gaby Hinsliff

The camera catches Jacinda Ardern in her pyjamas, bleary-eyed with exhaustion. It follows her wiping crumbs off the worktops, breastfeeding, trying to take a phone call while simultaneously retrieving something her curious toddler has picked up off her desk. They are scenes many frazzled, distracted working parents will recognise, except that at the time she was the prime minister of New Zealand and these home movies – shot on her husband’s phone, originally for family consumption – have since been turned into a documentary premiering in British cinemas this December.
Prime Minister, the movie, is the latest step in Ardern’s campaign for politicians to be allowed to reclaim their humanity, which broadly means the public accepting that they are grappling with the same private pressures as the rest of us (and no doubt similarly making a hash of it at times). It was the message of her recent memoir, A Different Kind of Power, and in some ways of her time in office, made only more urgent lately by the avalanche of violent threats and abuse heaped on anyone in public life – as if by getting elected they had become instantly dehumanised.
Of course, politicians are only flesh and blood; of course they get sick, have children or elderly parents who need them, slip up sometimes or need a break. (Though that does not, Boris Johnson please note, mean a delightful-sounding few days off bumbling around Chequers on your new motorbike with your now wife in the middle of what turns out to have been the crucial February period for pandemic preparation.) Without the kind of latitude that Ardern is asking for, leadership roles would effectively be restricted to robots and sociopaths, which doesn’t seem in anyone’s best interests.
Yet the suspicion remains that sometimes in politics, “only human” is deployed as a plea for forgiveness or attempt at distraction, shifting attention away from the political and controversial to the more disarming (and often more easily spun) personal. It’s hard to be angry with someone you have watched rocking a Moses basket while trying to do their paperwork, as Ardern does in the film. But what if there is reasonable cause to be angry? And are politicians still allowed to be lovably human during an existential crisis calling for superhuman efforts?
Both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, though naturally reserved and private people, have shown a little of their softer undersides ahead of what looks bound to be a monumentally difficult budget: he by publishing a fond open letter to his teenage son on International Men’s Day, she by venting her frustration at newspaper columnists mansplaining economics to her. Both interventions seemed designed to make them more relatable, perhaps even to raise a defensive shield against the flak likely to be flying on Wednesday.

But people who are struggling themselves don’t tend to have much sympathy to spare for those nominally in charge of the economy in which they are struggling. And even Ardern’s film, which won an audience award when it premiered at the Sundance film festival earlier this year, perhaps hits a little differently back in her native New Zealand. Critics have complained that it skips too lightly over hard questions about what she actually achieved in office, for all the talk of leading with kindness and empathy.
Helpfully, there is a more objective if slightly less gripping way of assessing her record. New Zealand’s royal commission on lessons learned from the pandemic published its first report this summer and in comparison with the British Covid inquiry’s withering “too little, too late” verdict on the Johnson government’s handling of the pandemic, Ardern emerges practically glowing. Her “be strong and be kind” strategy, which involved sealing borders early to keep the virus at bay, was judged effective in public health terms, holding back infections until a vaccine was ready and allowing the country to spend less time in strict lockdowns than others around the world.

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But the report also found that the strict quarantine requirements – which effectively kept non-citizens out for almost two years, and meant even native New Zealanders were sometimes uncertain whether they could leave and get back in – had stranded foreign students and separated families, causing lasting psychological distress to some. Ardern’s decision to make vaccination compulsory for some jobs and social gatherings was also, the inquiry found, reasonable on public health grounds – but it cost some vaccine refusers their jobs and left others feeling socially ostracised, fuelling resentment and a distrust of medical authority that may have long-lasting consequences.
The report is hard to read without feeling once again that Britain would have fared better through the pandemic with an Ardern in charge rather than a Johnson. But it’s still harder to read without recognising that nobody gets everything right; and that in a crisis where what is best for the country as a whole is bound to be tough on individuals, getting it right for everyone was a mathematical impossibility.
To be human is to accept that there are times when even someone’s best isn’t always enough. In life-threatening situations, the idea that leaders are not all-powerful is a terrifying concept, which perhaps helps explain why so many people would rather rage against politicians’ failings than accept that everyone has their limits.
And that’s what, I suppose, Ardern’s film is really up against. It’s not just that the woman up in lights on the big screen is flawed. It’s that the rest of us, munching our popcorn judgmentally in the audience, are too.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist