The former New Zealand prime minister is now officially Dame Jacinda Ardern.
She received the honour from Prince William at a ceremony at Windsor Castle overnight.
“It’s a huge honour,” Dame Jacinda said in a video posted to social media today by the Prince and Princess of Wales.
“I feel really honoured by the chance to be here with my family and really I see it as an acknowledgment of them,” she said.
“And of every person I worked with, and of everyone that supported me and that includes a very large number of New Zealanders.”
Prince William described Dame Jacinda as “A friend, an extraordinary advocate for the environment and now a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to the State.”
Dame Jacinda was appointed a trustee of the prince’s global environmental prize initiative, Earthshot Prize, in April 2023.
She was made a Dame in the King’s Birthday Honours in June 2023.
At the time, she told media she was “incredibly humbled” but felt the honour properly belonged to all of Aotearoa, after the country rallied in the wake of the 2019 terrorist attacks in Christchurch and the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020.
“I was in two minds about accepting this acknowledgement. So many of the things we went through as a nation over the last five years were about all of us rather than one individual,” Dame Jacinda said.
“But I have heard that said by so many Kiwis who I have encouraged to accept an honour over the years. And so for me this is a way to say thank you - to my family, to my colleagues.”
