She’s garnered the attention of many for her influential leadership, but New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has just made an announcement that’s thrilled everyone for a very different reason.
The celebrated political leader has just announced that she and her long term partner Clarke Gayford are engaged!
At a ceremony at Pike River on the West Coast on Friday, what appeared to be diamond ring was spotted on Ardern’s left hand – on her middle finger – and a spokesman for the Prime Minister confirmed that the pair got engaged over Easter weekend.
In January, Ardern was asked by a BBC reporter if she’d ever ask Gayford to marry her and her answer was an emphatic no, because that would be letting Gayford “off the hook”.
She said she wanted to put Gayford through “the pain and torture of having to agonise about that question himself.”
It seems she has not had to wait long for him to do that.
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Jacinda and her long term partner Clarke share a daughter, Neve. (Image: Getty)
Ardern, 38, and Gayford, 41, met at an awards event, the Metro Restaurant Awards, in 2012 and Gayford referred to her that night as “the future Prime Minister of New Zealand,” which had apparently embarrassed her.
The pair met again at a later date when Gayford approached the Labour MP with a constituency issue.
He initially wrote to National MP Nikki Kaye, but when he didn’t hear back from her he contacted Ardern.
They went for coffee, and the rest is history.
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Gayford, a keen fisherman, famously took Ardern fishing for their first date and told the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly that he knew she was “the one” before they’d even returned to shore, because she pulled in a 5.4kg snapper on her first cast, then a John Dory, “and then a whale showed up”.
Last year the PM introduced Gayford to pupils at Paihia School in February by saying, “I’m the best catch he ever got… and he didn’t even have to weigh me to find that out.”
In 2018 she gave birth to their first child together, daughter Neve Te Aroha Ardern Gayford. The couple upsized from their small home in Pt Chevelair to Sandringham.
Congratulations to the gorgeous couple!
This story originally appeared on Now To Love NZ.
Congrats to New Zealand’s inspiring PM! (Image: Getty)
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