Andrew Campbell, Jacinda Ardern's former chief spin doctor, has published a memoir of the Ardern years that lands 17 days before the election, and its central message is blunt: neither Christopher Luxon nor Chris Hipkins has shown voters the conviction that made Ardern a global figure. Kiri Allan, a former Labour minister who sat at the Cabinet table through those years, says the book rings true.
Writing in the NZ Herald on October 24, 2026, Allan argues that Campbell's In the Room exposes a gap between management and leadership that defines this campaign. Both contenders for the top job, she writes, are competent managers, but competence is the minimum, not the prize.
What Campbell got wrong, and what he learned
Campbell admits he reached his central insight late. For years he advised Ardern as though her job was to manage the status quo, when she was a conviction politician set on changing it. He believes his advice would have been different had he seen that sooner.
Her warmth, he insists, was real, and her communication drove her Government. Speeches he thought were finished came back covered in her red ink. People make hard changes only when they feel the reason for them, he argues; a list of numbers will not move them.
The price of conviction
Campbell is just as clear about what leadership cost her. Winning against the virus burned enormous political capital. Death threats against Ardern more than tripled. He watched casual sexism play out in rooms where people addressed him instead of her, and where business leaders praised Hipkins for finally listening, months after dismissing Ardern across the same table.
Those crises forged her. The mosque attacks, Whakaari and the pandemic arrived one on top of another, and Allan notes they arrived for her alongside a cancer diagnosis she has written about in her own memoir, Go Hard or Go Home. Ardern, who became the country's youngest prime minister in more than 150 years when she took office at 37 in 2017, stepped down in 2023, according to Britannica.
Ardern still out-rates every current leader
More than three years after she left office, Ardern still leads the field. A Freshwater poll for The Post puts her net favourability at +10, ahead of current leaders who are all underwater. In this past week's 1News Verian poll, 20% of voters picked Luxon as preferred Prime Minister and 17% picked Hipkins. Between them, the two men who could lead the next Government cannot win over two voters in five.
Campbell says those are numbers either Chris would kill for.
Why the debates have not filled the gap
This week's final leadership debate showed how much room remains to grow. Both leaders appeared to read their vision statements from an autocue, leaving voters with polished lines and little of the thinking behind them. Seventeen days out, the country is still waiting for a clear picture, in each leader's own voice, of where he wants to take it.
In place of vision, voters have been handed venom from both podiums. Campbell calls this a very negative campaign that makes politics feel small-minded. Luxon called Hipkins the most abysmal Education Minister the country has ever had, and Hipkins hit back. Ardern's 2017 message was simply