Chris Hipkins’ new coalition partner
Saturday, 28 October 2023
“My partner, Toni”…
Two weeks on from the night of the election, those three little words still make Chris Hipkins squirm. Not in a particularly bad way.
It’s because, well, the internet. It just went berserk.
In an exclusive interview with The Post, the Labour Party leader and outgoing prime minister reveals why he went public about his new relationship with Toni Grace.
“Someone that most of you won't know, and that is my partner, Toni,” Hipkins said that night. ”Being prime minister is not the only special thing that has happened for me this year. And I want to thank you for being with me every step of the way over the last few months as we have gone through this campaign.“
Woah. Of course he didn’t spell out her name and why would he? But seconds later the question “Who is Tony/i?” was trending on social media, not only here in New Zealand, but across the wide blue yonder.
“NZ PM has a secret Love“, ”Love Scandal Rocks New Zealand Elections” screamed the headlines. “Is Chippy gay?” someone asked, before qualifying it with a “not that there’s anything wrong with that.“
”Bi Chippy was the funniest thing to come out of this whole election,“ said another.
Two days later there was an explanation of sorts: “We’ve known each other for a long time, we met some time ago and our lives sort of went in different directions,” Hipkins said.
“There was a period where we didn’t have any contact with each other and then we got back in touch this year.”
He said he had talked with Grace before he revealed the relationship to the world.
“It’s not an easy job in which to have a new relationship and I did make the decision to not be public about that until after the election. I think anyone who starts a new relationship doesn’t necessarily want it to be on the front page of the paper right at the beginning.”
Indeed.
But while Hipkins, and Grace, can still laugh about the election night bombshell, there were also some pretty nasty and malicious rumours that kicked off that night and continue to be spread.
The outgoing PM has been here before, and not that long ago. In January after being confirmed as Jacinda Ardern’s replacement Hipkins moved swiftly to stop speculation about his relationship status and to ask for privacy for his family.
'I am aware of the Wellington rumour mill … and I know how things go round in Wellington, so I will put something on the record that will be my final comment on the matter,” he said.
'A year ago, my wife and I made the decision that we would live separately, that we would do everything we can to raise our children together.
'We remain incredibly close. She's still my best friend. But we have made that decision in the best interest of our family.”
He and his former wife Jade spent six years together before they were married in 2020.
Earlier this month he told the Woman’s Weekly the marriage broke down during Covid. He was health minister at that time, working long hours, and in turn waking at night worrying about every new issue the pandemic threw up.
So who is Toni? Toni Lucia Grace has worked as international relations manager at Palmerston North City Council and with Sister Cities New Zealand. She is involved with the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs and is currently working with MBIE on sustainability issues.
She has several masters degrees, one in Political Science from Victoria University of Wellington, where she won the Alan Robinson Memorial Prize—Best student, Honours in Political Science or International Relations in 2010, and a Masters of Sustainable Development Goals from Massey.
Grace’s 2013 masters thesis was titled The Human Capital of Scandinavia?: Citizenship Dilemmas in the Cross-Border Øresund Region, an important hub for economic activity in Scandinavia and the setting for the Swedish/Danish television crime series Broen, or The Bridge.
Sitting down with The Post yesterday to put the various rumours to bed, the pair agreed that, yes, hindsight is a beautiful thing.
“Naming Toni was kind of an impromptu decision,” Hipkins explains. Reading over his speech the final time in the van on the way to the venue, he realised he had thanked supporters and volunteers, but not his family. Or Grace.
“And it would have felt weird mentioning my family and not mentioning [her]. So that was how that came about. It literally was just a decision that we took on the night, which is why the form of words probably could [probably] have been more clearly scripted.
“I knew that it would generate a little bit of interest. We'd sort of talked a little bit about it earlier on about when we would tell people about our relationship.
“When you're the Prime Minister, you don't necessarily want to announce right at the beginning of something that it's happening, and then we got into the election campaign, and we also didn't want that to become a distraction. So we decided that we would kind of hold it, but then by election night, it was kind of like, well, it seemed the right time.“
The couple first met 13 years ago, when Grace, originally from Upper Hutt, was at Victoria University and interned in the MP for Remutaka’s office.
“I thought I'll pick my local MP to get a bit of a bit of work experience,” says Grace. “It was a fun year… we got along really well. We were good friends after that. But then, you know, our lives, kind of went in different directions.”
It wasn’t until earlier this year that they got back in touch. It was coffee for her and Coke Zero for him.
“And it was kind of like although there had been about 10 years since we'd last seen each other, it felt like it was just yesterday,” Hipkins says.
“You know, you meet up with someone and you just start talking to them, and it's like, you never really stopped.”
Says Grace: “It’s just been really nice to reconnect again and be part of each other's lives.
“Coming back after all this time I wasn't quite sure what it would be like, would it be super awkward, would you be somebody with a big ego or whatever now that you're PM or you know, some jaded politician, but it was just same old Chris… ”
Both have two kids, aged between 5 and teenage, both want to leave them out of any conversation about their relationship.
The couple also enjoy word puzzles, such as crosswords and online scrabble. That was another rumour, that their online word building was distracting the PM from the campaign.
Not so, they say. There was little down time, meaning sometimes the games would drag on for days. If it was a distraction it was “an intended one”, a way to switch the brain off and relax for a while, Hipkins claims.
Grace, who travelled with the PM occasionally, agrees: “I’ve had various people ask what was it like, you know, dating on the campaign trail… it sounds like it will be very glamorous, but most days, it was just being there at the end of a long day with a hoodie and a take away.
“[Scrabble] was just kind of a nice way to unwind, in what is otherwise a really high pressure kind of job.”
There was never any strategy to keep Grace out of the public eye. There were some weeks where they didn’t see each other, but there were also events they attended together. One was the Warriors v Knights game. Hiding in plain sight.
“Maybe I was passed off as one of the, you know, the staff or the entourage, but nobody really asked questions,” she says. “But then we just kind of didn't want to proactively make a big fuss about it… I said to Chris a few times, the last thing I want is for a whole lot of valuable air time to be taken up with kind of gossip about who's the PMs new girlfriend.”
Hipkins continues as caretaker PM until the final election results are announced next Friday.
He plans a break over Christmas during which he expects the party to “refresh and re-energize” for the year ahead.
* Julie Jacobson is a former Labour Party press secretary.
* Correction: This story was published two weeks after the election, not three. Story amended October 28, 11.43am.