Brendan O’Neill Brendan O’Neill

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. Funny that so few of these Women-vs-Covid pieces mention Sophie Wilmes, the prime minister of Belgium, which has the worst death rate (per capita) in the world.

This week Momentum made one of its viral propaganda videos contrasting the wonderful Ardern with the evil Boris. Her leadership on Covid is why NZ has far fewer cases and deaths than the UK, it claims, and of course it’s being lapped up by Twitter lefties who live to bash the Tories.

The naivety in all of this is staggering. Of course Covid hasn’t moved through New Zealand in the same way it has through the UK, because, erm, New Zealand and the UK are unbelievably different countries.

New Zealand is slightly larger than the UK but it has a tiny population: around 4.8m. That’s half the population of London alone.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in