Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has married long-time beau Clark Gayford in an intimate ceremony on January 13. The two have been together for a decade now and got engaged five years ago. Their wedding plans got cancelled after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ardern, 43, and Gayford, 47, had scheduled their wedding for early 2022 after getting engaged in May 2019 but had to postpone it due to the pandemic, Reuters has said.
In a post shared on Instagram, Jacinda shared a picture from the wedding with the caption, “Worth the wait”.
The couple’s five-year-old daughter Neve walked down the aisle with her father, wearing a dress made of fabric from her grandmother Laurell Ardern’s wedding dress, the New Zealand Herald reported.
According to the news site Stuff, the pair’s special day was attended by some 50 to 75 guests, including opposition leader Chris Hipkins, Ardern’s successor as prime minister, the New Zealand Herald said.
Ardern became a global icon for women in leadership and her left-leaning politics. The key events during her tenure were the attack on Christchurch Mosque and the pandemic of Covid-19.
She was inspired by Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto. While being Prime Minister, she paid tribute to the late Benazir Bhutto, a former Pakistani prime minister, during her Harvard University Commencement address. Bhutto was the first to give birth in office and Ardern was the second, her daughter was born on Bhutto’s birthday. “The path she carved as a woman feels as relevant today as it was decades ago, and so too is the message she shared here, in this place,” Ardern said about Bhutto’s own 1989 commencement address at Harvard entitled “Democratic nations must unite.”
Arden gave her final speech in January last year, where she told Gayford, a New Zealand television presenter, “Let’s finally get married.”