'Hipster salty sea dog': Jacinda Ardern defends partner 'Clarke with an e' after op-ed attack

Jacinda Ardern and prominent New Zealanders have defended the prime minister’s partner, Clarke Gayford, after a hostile opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald called him a “hipster salty sea dog” and criticised him for having an “e” in his name.

On Monday, the New Zealand Herald published “Why does Clarke Gayford bug me?”, written by the columnist and business journalist Deborah Hill Cone.

The piece, tagged as breaking news, accused Gayford of “piggybacking” on Ardern’s success and said his presence with the PM at a Commonwealth heads of government meeting was “the political equivalent of manspreading”.

“There’s something about our First Bloke that keeps nagging me every time I see his cheerful face,” Hill Cone wrote of Gayford. “Is it the fishing, the posing ... the “first man” thing, the flourish of an “e” in Clarke?

“The picture of Ardern in her korowai at Buckingham Palace was magnificent. The picture of Gayford posing like the Bachelor with the Chogm spouses was cringey.”

Gayford, the host of New Zealand fishing show Fish of the Day, responded in a tweet that compared Hill Cone to a “bottom feeding fish”.

“Welcome back to NZ – lol,” he wrote, attaching a picture of himself holding a large fish. “Here’s some other bottom feeding fish who I’d never met which feature as breaking news this weds 8pm on Prime.”

Gayford first rose to prominence on a New Zealand reality TV show in 1999, and has worked as a television and radio presenter since 2003. He has presented Fish of the Day, which he co-created, since 2015.

On Tuesday, Ardern was asked about Gayford’s social media use during her weekly radio interview on Newstalk ZB, run by New Zealand Media and Entertainment, which also owns the New Zealand Herald.

“Clarke had a public profile long before I came along,” she said. “That means both of us have been in the public eye ... I’m not here to be the ultimate person editing Clarke’s social media.”

Other journalists and editors criticised the Herald for publishing Hill Cone’s piece.

Online magazine The Spinoff also published a parody article poking fun at the “serious allegations” against Gayford.

“Hill Cone further alleges that Gayford’s first name ends with the letter “e”,” wrote The Spinoff’s Danyl Mclauchlan. “If the revelations in Hill Cone’s piece are true, Gayford is far from the amicable figure he seems.”

The majority of callers to Newstalk ZB radio were outraged by the piece, the Herald said in a follow-up article the next day.