Jacinda Ardern’s tattered legacy

Jacinda Ardern has announced she will be stepping down as the prime minister of New Zealand, saying it would be ‘doing a disservice’ to continue in the position she has held here over the past five years. Ardern said she will leave office on February 7. The 42-year-old premier will not seek re-election.

‘I know when I have enough left in the tank to do it justice,’ she said during a hastily arranged press conference during what ought to have been an unremarkable start-of-the-year political retreat with colleagues in the city of Napier.

Napier, the setting of the country’s worst-ever earthquake nearly a century ago, now becomes the scene of another monumental heaving of the Earth’s crust — if not for rank-and-file Kiwis, who in significant numbers have been tiring of the Ardern touch, then certainly for her beloved Labour party as it lurches through the remainder of its annual caucus getaway.