Jacob Christensen

Lars Danielsson is a story that just doesn’t want to leave the news agenda here in Sweden and this week brought yet another round in the saga.

Just to sum up: Danielsson was undersecretary to the Swedish Prime Minister from 2002 to 2006 and became the focus of attention after he failed to give a adequate and credible explanation for his whereabouts in the early hours of 26 December 2004 when a number of Thai tourist resorts were hit by the tsunami which followed the massive earthquake under the Indian Ocean. The official Swedish response to the disaster – which killed more than 500 Swedish tourists – was delayed and insecure and this led to severe criticism of leading Swedish ministers and government officials.

If we leave aside this part of the story, Danielsson’s position was complicated by the fact that his actual position was uncertain: Was he a diplomat who had been brought into the government to look after tasks, a permanent secretary or a commissioner would deal with in – say – the Danish or the British government, or was he a politician, despite the fact that he had never run for any political office? In the Swedish system undersecretaries to government ministers are selected politically and considered part of the extended government, but in practice Danielsson was always acted on the internal lines and never made any kind of political statements in public.

In this way “Undersecretary Danielsson” also became part of the tangling of politics and bureaucracy which characterised G�ran Persson’s term as Swedish Prime Minister. If you thought that Lars Danielsson had neglected his duties, should you then use political, administrative or judicial channels to call him to account? I should note that Danielsson resigned from his post shortly before the 2006 election as a consequence of criticism from the 2005 Disaster Commission and the Ombudsman’s Office and in this way accepted political responsibility for his actions.

But the story doesn’t end here. Before taking up the post as undersecretary – I have to note that the Swedish wikipedia gives three very different dates for Danielsson’s appointment as an undersecretary and the Swedish Government’s homepage is useless in this aspect, but he succeeded Per Nuder in the Prime Minister’s Office in 2002 – Danielsson was a career diplomat and he was on leave from the Foreign Office until he left the government. So, what do you do with a slightly tainted official who reports back to service after being a member of the outgoing government?

This answer is: Nothing. You give the man an office, a telephone and a computer but no assignments – and no pay. This immediately raises the question if the new Foreign Minister is on the warpath and trying to freeze Mr. Danielsson out of his job. Even if Carl Bildt denies this, he has been careless enough to make statements that suggest otherwise. Union representatives have now been put on the case and even if Mr. Danielsson is unloved by the Foreign Minister, his old/new colleagues and the general public, it is still a nasty-looking story.

From a Danish perspective, the Danielsson story is interesting because there have been some cases of career diplomats entering government. They are few and not very recent and the reason is that administrative careers, diplomacy and party politics do not blend easily.

In 1945, the incoming Liberal Prime Minister Knud Kristensen lacked a Foreign Minister and decided – maybe after advice from the outgoing Conservative Foreign Minister John Christmas M�ller – to appoint the designated ambassador to Rome, Gustav Rasmussen. Why Knud Kristensen didn’t opt for Per Federspiel instead is a bit of a mystery, but maybe Federspiel at 40 was considered too young.

The cooperation between Rasmussen and Kristensen turned out to be a disaster and things didn’t get better when Rasmussen decided to stay on as Foreign Minister in the Social Democratic government which entered office in 1947. Gustav Rasmussen left office with this government in 1950, was shunted off to Rome and died in 1953.

Twenty years later, Jens Otto Krag repeated Knud Kristensen’s experiment. If we leave aside the appointment of the Director General of Danmarks Radio, Hans S�lvh�j, as Minister for Cultural Affairs in 1964, Krag appointed two diplomats as ministers: Thyge Dahlgaard became Trade Minister in 1966 and Hans Tabor Foreign Minister in 1967.

Krag lived to regret appointing Dahlgaard who in the autumn of 1967 in a fit of foreign political realism criticised calls for an embargo against the junta which had taken power in Greece. Dahlgaard was promtly sacked and both he and Tabor saw their diplomatic careers, if not ruined, then suffering significant set-backs. It seems that the Danish Foreign Office equivalent of sending someone to Coventry, is to make him or her ambassador to Italy or Yugoslavia. (S�lvh�j was a much slicker operator and ended his career as Lord Chamberlain).

So maybe Carl Bildt will make a retreat and appoint Mr. Danielsson as Swedish ambassador to Montenegro.