Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her partner Clarke Gayford have become 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.
Watch: The things Jacinda Ardern feels guilty about. Article continues below.
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 had initially written to National MP Nikki Kaye about it, but when he didn’t hear back from her he contacted Ardern. They went for coffee, discovered they shared a passion for the Kiwi band Shapeshifter, and the rest is history.
Jacinda was spotted today at the Pike River mine wearing her engagement ring on her middle finger.
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 a three-bedroomed home in Sandringham, Auckland in preparation for their new addition.
Gayford juggles his career as a TV fishing show host with being a stay-at-home dad as Neve’s main caregiver.
