Jacob Christensen

Somehow, this picture says it all: It’s 13 December and I still haven’t made it to 1 December.

Tonight, I finally had a chance to watch the Danish Women’s National Handball team playing in the 2006 European Championships and what a disappointment that was. The Swedes played the way any Swedish team in any sport play – well-organised and unsurprising – while the Danes… Well, the Danes lost 27-22. And that’s about it.

First reactions in Danish media: TV2 – Danes make fools of themselves in Stockholm, Politiken – Denmark went south against Sweden (As a matter of fact, this wonderful pun works in English but not in Danish).

Okay, it’s back to the grading.

I’m sure that this has the Danish People’s Party ready for action: According to reports (Politiken – Rigsrevisionen: Barfoed brød loven, Berlingske Tidende – Barfoed belastet af kødskandale, Barfoeds ministerfremtid i fare) a review by the Danish National Audit Office to be published on Tuesday will criticise the Minister for Family and Consumer Affairs, Lars Barfoed, for failing to produce an annual review of food controls.

Even if the criticism is directed at all ministers since 2000, Barfoed will be taking the direct hit, if only because the Danish People’s Party would love to claim a Conservative scalp. A bit of fun – unless you are Bendt Bendtsen or Lars Barfoed – in the run-up to Christmas.

I haven’t got time to write a post about this now but the results of the internal inquiry into the practices of the Swedish Liberal Party have been made public today. Sveriges Radio has a story here and a link to the report here (pdf document). Svenska Dagbladet also has a story about the report.

According to SvD’s summary of the report, the Liberal party organisation is criticised for being run in a top-down way where officials and employees are afraid to question decisions made on the leadership level and where tactical manœuvering has been considered more important than communicating the party’s ideology.

I just have to note that it wasn’t until episode 16 (in the second season) of Klovn that Mia finally asked the question I’ve been expecting to hear ever since the first episode:

Just how old are you, Frank?

I’m not sure that there is a lesson to be learned, except perhaps that you shouldn’t have your porn magazines sent to one of your friends because you’re afraid of how your wife would react if she saw them.

Especially if Frank Hvam is the friend in question.

Note to possible Danish readers: I can’t watch Danish TV where I live so I have had to wait for the DVD-releases and spare time to catch up with episodes.

Earlier today, Jessika Wide successfully defended her PhD-thesis on “Women’s representation on the national and local level” here in Umeå. (Press release – in Swedish).

Congratulations, Jessika, and the best of luck. Also congratulations to David Feltenius (Mr. Wide) and Svante Ersson (Jessika’s supervisor).

PS: Jessika’s surname is pronounced something like “veedi”, not “wide”.

And to this message I can only say: Thank you, Akismet, and keep up the good work. You’re needed.

(Yes, I know that there are those who suffer more. But this is a relatively recent and small blog, so 1900 spam comments is in fact a lot.)

Just a short note about the highly amusing Leif Östling affair (for a quote in Swedish of what the man said, follow this link):

Note to journalists: The Fawlty Towers episode being referred to was called “The Germans” or alternatively “The Fire Drill”, not “Don’t Mention the War”.

In case anybody wants to send Mr. Östling a Christmas present, I would suggest Saul Bellow’s fine collection of short stories “Him with His Foot in His Mouth”. The Swedish expression for a deed like Mr. Östling’s is “to step on the piano”. In Danish you “step in the spinach”.

Meanwhile, the Swedish PM has joined the Scania-MAN show and warned against the sale of Swedish-based companies to foreign investors. In an interview with Swedish radio, Mr. Reinfeldt warned against the development of a subsidiary company-economy.

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 Göran 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 Møller – 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 Sølvhøj, 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. (Sølvhøj 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.