PanThe Telegraph (UK)Don’t read this book ... Reads like a 350-page transcript of a therapy session ... Large sections are dedicated to an uneventful youth in Murupara ...
Don’t get me wrong: it’s good to be reminded that politicians are human beings, and healthy that a modern woman can both have a baby and run New Zealand. But between all the paragraphs on childrearing and pump-sterilising...one gets the impression that there was little else to do ... So much ink is given to relationship talk and cake baking...that it starts to feel as though the author’s self-doubt lies not in her leadership skills, but in a fear that people can’t see how nice she really is ... The author’s virtue may be signalled brightly enough to be seen from the moon—and yet this empathy curiously doesn’t extend to every critic of her Covid policy ... The principle that the world would be a better place if we just empathised with each other is nice in theory, but codswallop in practice ... By reducing all government to thoughts and prayers, she transformed humility into vanity—a softly photographed carnival of her own emotions.
