Prevented

The Speaker asked for a meeting at four, and came to Rosenbad at six, and brought the constitution with him.

It was a paper copy, the Riksdag’s own, bound in green, with yellow tabs at the regency chapter and a great many pencilled notes in the margins in a small, upright, contented hand. He set it on the table in my office and opened it at the first tab, and then he took from his leather folder a single sheet of paper and laid it beside the constitution, square to the edge of the table, and turned it so that I could read it. It was a Government decision. It had been typed. It lacked only a date and my signature.

“For the Prime Minister’s convenience,” said the Speaker. “I know how busy she is.”

I am going to set out his argument fairly, because it was a good argument and he had been preparing it, in one form or another, for about thirty years.

The Instrument of Government says that if the Queen is prevented by illness, or by travel abroad, or by some other cause, from performing her duties, the next member of the royal house in the order of succession who is not prevented performs them instead, as temporary regent. The next member of the royal house is the Crown Prince. The Crown Prince is fourteen, and nobody under eighteen may serve as head of state or as regent, as the Crown Prince had told us himself. There is nobody else in the royal house, because the Queen is an only child and has an only child. And for that case the constitution has a last resort, which is that the Speaker of the Riksdag serves as temporary regent, by decision of the Government.

“The Queen is prevented by illness,” said the Speaker, “from performing a duty. The Crown Prince is under age. There is nobody else. The constitution therefore provides, and has always provided, that the Speaker should act. I ask for no more than the constitution gives me.” He touched the typed sheet. “And for no longer than is necessary. I have suggested that the regency run from one minute before noon tomorrow to one minute after. Long enough to pronounce the formula. I would not wish to keep it a moment longer than the dignity of the office requires.”

“Two minutes,” I said.

“Two minutes.”

“You’ve typed a decision making yourself head of state for two minutes.”

“Temporary regent,” said the Speaker gently. “It is a very different thing. The Prime Minister will find the distinction in my thesis.”

---

I had the two lawyers from the Ministry of Justice with me, and Tove, and the head of my own office, who had been in government for twenty years and had never seen anything like it and kept saying so. The lawyers had read the regency chapter twice since lunch, and the Speaker’s annotations once, upside down, while he was talking.

The elder said that the Speaker was right in principle and wrong in practice. The younger said that he was wrong in principle and right in practice. I said that I would like, just once in my life, a lawyer who was wrong in both, so that I knew where I stood.

“A Queen who can write,” I said to the Speaker, “is not prevented.”

“With great respect, Prime Minister, a Queen who cannot speak cannot pronounce the formula.”

“Then she’s prevented from pronouncing it. She isn’t prevented from being Queen. She’s been Queen all day. She approved the Union Council’s report this morning, in writing. She sent the Prime Minister of Norway a note about the herring at the dinner. She told the Marshal a joke, with a full stop. If she’s prevented, she’s the busiest prevented woman in Sweden.”

“The constitution,” said the Speaker, “does not divide the office into parts. It does not say that a Queen may be prevented from some of her duties and not from others. One is prevented, or one is not.”

I remember that sentence very clearly. I remember thinking that it was the strongest thing he had said, and that I had no answer to it. I want it on the record that I had no answer to it, because by noon the next day somebody else had, and it was not me.

“And it is the Government that decides,” I said, “whether she is prevented.”

“It is the Government that decides when the Speaker acts,” said the Speaker, “which is not quite the same.”

“It’s close enough for tonight.”

He bowed. He did not pick up his typed decision. He left it on my table, square to the edge, and I understood that he expected to be asked for it later and wished to save me the trouble of sending for it.

---

I had sent word to the palace at four, and at half past seven Ebba Lindqvist came across the bridges in a Court car with the Queen’s reply, which I had not asked for, but which the Queen, it appeared, had wished to give.

Lindqvist stood in my office in her raincoat and took a single page from the blue notebook out of her pocket and unfolded it, and read it aloud, to me and the Speaker, who had returned at seven to see whether anything had changed, and the two lawyers, and the head of my office, and Tove, in exactly the voice in which she had read Joke to the Marshal of the Court that morning.

“‘No.’”

There was a pause.

“Is that all?” said the Speaker.

Lindqvist looked at the page.

“It is underlined,” she said. “Twice.”

She turned the page round so that we could see. It was one word, in capitals, in pencil, pressed so hard into the paper that it had come through on the other side, and the two lines under it went almost to the edges.

“There is a second page,” said Lindqvist, and took it out of her other pocket. “‘Tell Anders I am not prevented. I am resting.’”

The Speaker received this with great dignity. He said that he quite understood the Queen’s feelings, and that he would not dream of pressing the point against them, and that he hoped the Prime Minister understood that he had raised it only from a sense of constitutional duty. Then he went back across the bridge to the Riksdag and pressed it, in a speech of eleven minutes at a lectern in the Riksdag’s press room, before about thirty journalists who had been told that the Speaker would make a statement on the constitution and had come expecting to be bored.

They were not bored. He was very good. He said that the constitution provided for the case in which the head of state was prevented, and that it was not for him to say whether she was, but that it was a grave matter for a parliamentary democracy when the Government declined to apply its own constitution for reasons it would not explain. He said the word “constitution” nineteen times. Tove counted. He did not say the word “laryngitis” once.

“He’s good,” said Tove, watching it on her telephone.

“I know.”

“He’s been practising that for thirty years.”

“I know, Tove.”

---

That was when the evening came apart, in the way that evenings do in a minority government, which is all at once and from three directions.

The Moderates’ leader went on the eight o’clock news and said that the Government had left the Union without a voice, and that the Prime Minister should explain why she preferred a constitutional crisis to a constitutional remedy. It was a good line. I wished I had thought of it. I have since stolen it for a speech about railway investment, and nobody noticed.

At half past eight the leader of the Left Party telephoned me. She is a woman from Luleå whom I like very much, and whose votes I need for the autumn budget, and she said that her party had been asked by the newspapers for a comment, and that she was minded to say that if a Union of five heads of state could not open its own session because one of them had a sore throat, the north might ask itself whether it needed heads of state at all.

“Not this week,” I said.

“It’s a perfectly reasonable question.”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable question in September. If you ask it this week it will look as if the Left Party is kicking a woman with laryngitis, and you’ll lose more votes in Norrbotten than you’ve got.”

She considered this. She is a practical woman. “September, then.”

“In September you can say what you like,” I said. “In September I’ll be too busy with your housing guarantee to hear it.”

She laughed, and rang off, and I sat for a moment with the telephone in my hand and understood a thing about myself that I had not known at breakfast. My own party has had a republic in its programme for longer than my grandfather was alive. I had never given it a thought, because nobody had ever asked us to do anything about it, and because my father kept the republic and the royal calendar on different walls. And here I was at a quarter to nine on Midsummer week, defending the monarchy against the Moderates on one telephone and against the Left on the other, and against the Speaker of the Riksdag in person, and I could not for the life of me have told you how it had happened.

The Republican Association put out a statement at nine. Its chairman, Maja Sundin, wished the Queen a speedy recovery, and noted that two of the Union’s five heads of state could at least be relied upon to speak.

“That’s good too,” said Tove.

“Everybody’s good tonight except us.”

“We’re very good,” said Tove. “We’re just saying nothing. It’s harder.”

---

I should explain Tove’s statements, because they were the only thing in the whole week that went exactly to plan.

Tove’s rule is that in a story that is moving, the press must be told something every two hours, or they will find something to tell themselves. It does not matter what it is. It must be true, and it must be new, and it must not mean anything. On Wednesday she kept to the rule with a discipline that I have seen in nobody else except my mother at a school dinner, and I give them here in order, because I think that taken together they are a small work of art.

At ten in the morning: The Queen has a summer cold and is resting her voice on medical advice.

At noon: The Queen continues to carry out her duties in writing.

At two: The Joint Session of the Scandinavian Union will take place tomorrow as planned.

At four: There is no constitutional question.

At six, after the Speaker’s typed decision: There is no constitutional question that the Government recognises.

At eight, after his speech: The Government has full confidence in the Queen’s handwriting.

At ten she put out nothing at all. She said that we had now said everything that was not anything, and that the only thing left was silence, and that in the circumstances silence would be taken as a mark of respect.

It was. The eight o’clock statement was the one the newspapers printed. Two of them put it on the front page the next morning, in large type, under a photograph of the palace with one window lit, and I have it framed in my office now, and I like it better than the photograph of me being received by the Queen on the day I became Prime Minister, which is in the corridor and in which I look as if I have been asked to hold something hot.

---

At ten o’clock that night Lindqvist rang me from the palace.

“Nothing has happened,” she said, before I could ask, which I thought was kind. “I thought the Prime Minister would like to know that the King telephoned the Queen at ten.”

“From where?”

“From the library. On the house telephone. It was nine o’clock in London.” She paused. “He read her the Commons. An hour of it. The fisheries bill again, the committee stage.”

“And she couldn’t answer.”

“She listened,” said Lindqvist. “She sat in her chair with the telephone against her ear and her notebook on her knee, and every time he got something wrong she wrote the correction down. And when he had finished she tore the pages out and gave them to a footman, and the footman took them down to the library.” Her voice was still level, but it was a different kind of level. “There were eleven pages. He has them on the table in front of him. I expect he’s going through them now.”

I said that I had not known that the Queen corrected his Swedish even when she could not speak.

“She has corrected every mistake he has made in Swedish for eighteen years,” said Lindqvist. “I don’t think a sore throat was going to stop her.”

I asked what he was doing in the library, apart from that.

“Reading,” said Lindqvist. “He has been reading since breakfast. He has asked for coffee four times and a sandwich once. Pearce has been in to see him twice and been sent away twice. He is reading something small and grey, with a paper knife beside it.” She hesitated, which I had not heard her do before. “I haven’t asked him what it is. It isn’t my place. He isn’t the Queen.”

“No,” I said. “He’s only the Queen’s Consort.”

“Yes,” said Lindqvist. “Good night, Prime Minister. The Marshal will be in the Hall of State at seven. I think he intends to move the chairs.”

---

I stayed at Rosenbad until two in the morning, for no good reason. There was nothing more that anybody could do. The Speaker’s decision lay on my table, square to the edge, unsigned. The lawyers had gone home to disagree in their sleep. Tove had gone to the press room to sit with the journalists who were still there, because she says that a journalist who is left alone at midnight with nothing to do will write something, and that it is the duty of a press secretary to be the something.

My brother Lasse sent me a message at half past eleven. Still coming Friday? Mats has made the maypole taller. It’s taller than me now. Bring the good herring, not the Stockholm herring. I wrote back that I was coming, and that there was no such thing as Stockholm herring, and that he knew it. He sent me a photograph of the maypole lying on his lawn, which was indeed taller than him, though not by much, because he is not very tall.

At two I put on my coat, and turned out the lamp, and before I went down I stood at the window for a moment, as I do sometimes at the end of a long day, because the view from my office at Rosenbad is the best view in Stockholm and I am the only person who is paid to look at it.

It was not dark. In Stockholm at Midsummer it is never quite dark, only blue, and the water of the Strömmen was pale under the bridges, and the Riksdag on its island was grey, and beyond it the palace stood up along the edge of the old town, long and square and very dark against the pale sky, with every window shut and black except one.

It was a window in the north front, high up. Lindqvist had told me, earlier that evening, which of them was the library. The lamp in it was yellow, and in the yellow, very small and far away across two stretches of water, I could see somebody sitting at a table with his head bent over something on it, quite still, and then turning a page.

I watched him turn two more. Then I went home to Kungsholmen, in the back of the car, with my protection officer reading the football results in the front, and wondered, all the way along Hantverkargatan, how a docker’s daughter from Hisingen had spent the whole of a Wednesday night defending the Crown of Sweden against its own Parliament.

I did not wonder what he was reading. I want that on the record too.