Norway

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 1 November 2018

At the Brexit-related cabinet last week — as revealed by James Forsyth in these pages — David Lidington made an intervention in support of the Prime Minister’s approach to the negotiations. He was, he said, the only person present who had been an MP at the time of ‘Black Wednesday’, when the pound fell out of the ERM on 16 September 1992. It had been so disastrous and divisive, he went on, that the government must at all costs avoid a repeat over Brexit. Many heads nodded sagely. Mr Lidington, a moderate and public-spirited man, was quite right about the pain caused to his party 26 years ago; but the

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The lady vanishes | 15 March 2018

‘Close your eyes and be absorbed by the storytelling,’ urged Jon Manel (the new head of podcasting at BBC World Service) as we settled into our chairs. We were just about to hear the ‘world première’ of the latest podcast from the BBC World Service, launched dramatically in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in front of a packed, expectant audience, with full surround sound, every raindrop magnified (and there was a lot of it). It was odd to realise quite how far podcasting has already transformed radio. Along with the usual Radio 4 crowd (who were surprisingly enthusiastic about the chance to hear this latest podcast), there were hosts

Saturday

Fraser Nelson

The Norway model: a new approach to immigration and asylum

Germany is this weekend seeing whether or not Angela Merkel will be able to form a government as she deals with the political fallout from her immigration policy. Quite a contrast from Norway, whose Conservative-led coalition recently entered its second term after taking a very different approach to refugees. Last week I met Sylvi Listhaug, who holds a recently-created position: Norway’s Minister for Immigration & Integration. She’s with the Progress Party, the junior partner in coalition. You often read about her being ‘outspoken’ or ‘controversial’ and I was interested to see what kind of radical views she holds. At the end of the interview, I was left wondering if her

Thursday

Nick Hilton

The Spectator Podcast: Merkel’s crack-up

On this week’s episode, we look at the situation in Germany, and whether Angela Merkel can hold things together. We also speak to Norway’s immigration minister, and discuss the dying art of cottaging. After 12 years as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel is this week facing the worst crisis of her premiership. Coalition talks collapsed after the Free Democrats walked away from negotiations with Merkel’s Christian Democrats. So where does this leave Germany? In the magazine this week, William Cook calls the situation ‘uniquely damaging’, whilst James Forsyth outlines the implications for Brexit. James joined the podcast, along with Thomas Kielinger, London correspondent for Die Welt. As William writes: “Suddenly, all

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Tough love | 23 November 2017

When Angela Merkel invited refugees to Germany in 2015, tearing up the rules obliging migrants to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in, the consequences were pretty immediate. Over 160,000 went to Sweden, leading to well-publicised disruption. Next door, things were different. Norway took in just 30,000; this year it has accepted just 2,000 so far. To Sylvi Listhaug, the country’s young immigration minister, this might still be a bit too much. ‘We have a big challenge now to integrate those with permission to stay in Norway to make sure they respect Norwegian values,’ she says. ‘Freedom to speak, to write, to believe or not to believe in

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Speech therapy

Oslo opened in the spring of 2016 at a modest venue in New York. It moved to Broadway and this imported version has arrived at the National on its way to a prebooked run at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It’s bound to be a hit because it’s good fun, it gives a knotty political theme a thorough examination, and it’s aimed squarely at the ignorant. In the early 1990s Norwegian diplomats set up ‘back-channel’ talks between the PLO and Israel. The play follows that process and it treats geopolitics like a flat-share comedy. The bickering partners are hauled in by the lordly Norwegians and forced to hammer out their differences

Thursday

James Delingpole

Norway’s noir

Valkyrien (C4, Sunday) is the hot new Scandi-noir series, which is being billed as Norway’s answer to Breaking Bad. In this case, the anti-hero having his mid-life crisis is a brilliant surgeon called Ravn (Sven Nordin). He has become disenchanted with The System because the fancy hospital where he works won’t let him use the potentially life-saving treatment he has devised on his dying wife. (It might kill her, they say — which Ravn, quite understandably, considers a ridiculous, faux-ethical excuse.) So off he goes to sulk in his Batcave — a disused nuclear bomb shelter, accessible via an underground station — for what will no doubt be a series

Thursday

Allan Mallinson

Northern exposure | 6 July 2017

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’. A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command.

Tuesday

Camilla Swift

Norway never said ‘nei’ to Liam Fox

Being half-Norwegian, I can rarely find anyone in Westminster to discuss the Norwegian papers with. But Monday’s front page of the Norwegian business paper Dagens Naeringsliv has been the talk of the town. Why, because its main headline trumpeted Norway said no’ (in Norwegian, of course). The other lines clarified the story – ‘Brits wanted to collaborate on a new EU deal’, but Norway said no… ‘They didn’t get Norwegian help on Brexit’. What a dream story for those who are still in mourning over June’s referendum. It was quickly picked up by the Guardian, among others.   As the article had it, Liam Fox had been keen to establish a task

Thursday

Caroline Moorehead

Twists and turns of the Italian campaign

When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that he would need just 12 weeks to reach the river Po and liberate Italy from the Germans. It took him nearly a year. Christian Jennings’s new book chronicles the months of heavy fighting, the advances and retreats and the enormous losses on both sides as the Allied forces stalled, and the enemy attacked. It was never going to be easy. Once the Italians signed the armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943, turning their backs on their former Axis partners, the Germans moved quickly to occupy the whole of

Monday

Ed West

Brexiteers need to act now, or become the most hated people in history

The British constitution is built on compromise and moderation; it’s one of the main reasons why this country enjoyed a period of relative domination in the 19th century while our neighbours tore themselves apart. Referendums do not encourage compromise, which makes them such bitter devices, and why the last few weeks have been so painful. But now that the British people have made their choice – and I have no idea if it was the right one – we have the opportunity to make a compromise that will cause the least amount of pain. I’m talking about the Norway option, which an increasing number of Conservative MPs are coming around to. This

Wednesday

Jan Morris

The blank on the map

‘Is Geoff Dyer someone on your radar?’ inquired the courtly literary editor, inviting me to review this book. What a question! Envy is the writer’s sin, as everyone knows, and to a nonagenarian writer of my kind the very conception of Geoff Dyer, aged 57 and perhaps the most brilliantly original practitioner of his generation, figures green and large on any screen. Has he not won countless awards around the world? Has his work not been published, his publicists say, in more than 20 languages? More than 20? More than 20! And White Sands, an elegant parade of his talents, tells me why. It is not quite like any other

Robin Oakley

On the money | 22 June 2016

Forced to depart Ascot earlier than usual to fulfil a cruise lecture booking on the fjords, I hadn’t reckoned with June in Norway. It turned out to require anoraks and sweaters rather than shorts and suntan oil, although Mrs Oakley and I were better prepared than one lady passenger: having travelled without a scarf, she confessed that it was indeed her deftly folded nightie she had wrapped around her neck for warmth. At least a bit of book-signing went without a hitch, better than the time a young lady asked me to write ‘To Bubbles with love and kisses’ and then, when asked to pay for the signed volume, demurred,

Monday

Nick Cohen

Brexit could leave Britain with the worst of both worlds – like Norway

This is a translation of an article I wrote for the Norwegian daily VG Never since the German attack on Norway in 1940 destroyed Neville Chamberlain’s premiership and brought Winston Churchill to power, has your country been so discussed in Britain. Supporters of Britain staying in the EU warn of Norway’s ‘fax democracy’. The ‘leave’ campaign denounce Norwegian politicians who tell us about the dangers of following the Norwegian example, as liars bought with EU gold. There has been propaganda from both sides, of course, but the sheer lack of substance behind the ‘leave’ campaign is stunning.  The right-wing politicians, who dominate the anti-European cause, want the British to take

Thursday

Sara Wheeler

Northern lights | 2 June 2016

‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’ My sentiments entirely. The extract from Unprotected Females in Norway reprinted in this book recounts Lowe’s travels with her mother round the Dovrefjeld in the centre of the long country. Tramping through the valleys wearing mosquito veils, ‘solid plaid skirts’ and hobnail shoes, the pair reckoned that the only essentials were a driving whip and a fishing rod. Lowe (who published anonymously) is a spirited companion on the verdant plains and the snowy peaks, and her pleasure in the long boreal gloaming leaps infectiously from the page. She and Mother

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The power of song

You might not think that the Eurovision Song Contest (screened live from Stockholm tonight) could have any connection with how we might choose to vote in the coming referendum. Surely it’s just a string of naff pop songs stuck together with fake glitter and a lot of false jollity? The songs are uniformly terrible, the show so overproduced it’s impossible not to mock its grandiosity, the idea that it conjures up the meaning of Europe laughably misplaced. But in a programme for the World Service that caught my attention because it sounded so counterintuitive, Nicola Clase, head of mission at the Swedish embassy in London, tried to persuade us otherwise.

Wednesday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 23 March 2016

Apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’ve never known what my human rights are supposed to be. Presumably they include the right to go about my daily business without being attacked, insulted or otherwise abused. But there are many grey areas. Are sudden loud noises or disgusting smells violations of my human rights? And what about the deafening mirthless laughter that I have to endure in British pubs? Perhaps my human rights are changing with age. Am I, at 76, entitled to expect an offer of a seat on a crowded Tube train? Is it my right that somebody should help me with my

Friday

Camilla Swift

Are Anders Breivik’s human rights really being contravened, or is it simply attention seeking?

Anders Behring Breivik – the Norwegian extremist who killed 77 people in 2011 – has for the last few days been involved in a human rights trial in his prison in the south of Norway. Many would argue that, for a person in jail, he has a fairly cushy life – particularly given his crime. He is allowed to play video games, read newspapers and have access to a computer, and also has access to three cells, as well as an outside area. He has also been allowed to take university courses at the country’s main university, the University of Oslo, and took part in the prison’s Christmas gingerbread-baking competition.

Thursday

James Delingpole

Greedy greenies

‘We have a problem. Yes. At the wind farm.’ Any conspiracy thriller with lines like that has definitely got my vote. Possibly most of you are unaware of this, because it’s not something I talk about often, but I happen to be not too fond of the things I call bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes — nor of the charlatans, crooks, liars and parasites who make their living out of them. Indeed, whenever I try to think of an industry that’s worse than wind farms I keep coming unstuck. At least landmines serve a useful purpose for force protection; at least Albanian prostitutes make a few men very happy. Wind, on the

Thursday

Daniel Swift

Wonderful waffle

It is hard to explain the contents of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast series My Struggle because not much happens. Or rather: a lot of things almost happen. In these strange and unquantifiable books, which feel like a spiritual autobiography but read like trashy fiction, Knausgaard recounts his ambiguous relationships with his brother and parents and wives; he describes terrible-sounding meals which he cooks (he eats a lot of pasta with dubious sauces) and the rambling, incomplete conversations he has with acquaintances. He discusses books he has read and books he would like to write. He goes out, meets girls, gets drunk, feels sorry for himself, and then goes back to