Why Boris bashers like Jacinda Ardern

I’m starting to wonder if the people who unfavourably compare Britain’s Covid experience with New Zealand’s are being wilfully stupid. There’s no other explanation. No reasonable person would compare the impact of a novel virus on these two nations without mentioning that we are starkly different countries.

You see it all the time now. Praise is heaped on the sainted Jacinda Ardern for doing what Boris Johnson has failed to do: protect her people from sickness and death. New Zealand has had just 21 deaths related to Covid; Britain has had 30,000. Which proves, apparently, that women are better leaders than men when it comes to dealing with crisis and calamity.

‘Women are better leaders – the pandemic proves it’, says CNN, with a pic of Ardern, naturally. ‘The secret weapon in the fight against coronavirus [is] women’, declares a writer for the Guardian. Ardern is a ‘world leader in combating the virus’, the Guardian says.