The Separation Rule

I began this on the last train from Kalmar on Midsummer Eve, in a seat facing backwards, with a paper plate of strawberries in front of me wrapped in a napkin that has a crown on it. I am finishing it a week later at my kitchen table on Kungsholmen, with the napkin washed and folded beside me, because nobody has told me whether you are supposed to give them back.

I am writing it down because nobody else will. The Court keeps a record of everything and publishes almost none of it, and if it ever publishes this week it will say that the Joint Session of the Scandinavian Union opened at nine minutes past twelve on Thursday 24 June 2027, which is true, and nothing more, which is how the Court tells the truth. The Government Offices keep a record too. Ours will say that the Government took no decision, which is also true, and is the part of the week of which I am proudest.

My name is Karin Lindholm and I am the Prime Minister of Sweden. I should say at the start that I am not a monarchist. I am not a republican either, not in the way my father was, which was in principle and never on a weekday. He unloaded ships at the port of Gothenburg for thirty-four years, the last twenty of them at the Skandia terminal on Hisingen, where I was born, and he believed that a country which could run a container port could run itself without a King. He also bought the royal calendar every Christmas and hung it in the kitchen, because my mother liked the pictures. When I asked him once, at about fourteen, how those two things went together, he said that the calendar was my mother’s and the republic was his, and that they had never yet had to share a wall.

My mother cooked school dinners in Biskopsgården for twenty-six years. She had one rule, which she applied to fish pie and later to me: there is enough for everyone if nobody takes two. I have tried to govern by it. It is harder than it sounds, because everybody believes that they took one.

I sat on Gothenburg’s city council for twelve years and chaired its port committee for six, which is where I learned most of what I know about government, chiefly that a crane costs more than you were told and arrives later. I went to the Riksdag in 2014, became leader of the Social Democrats in 2023, and became Prime Minister in October 2026, after an election that we did not so much win as lose by less than anybody else. I lead a minority government of the Social Democrats, the Centre and the Greens, with the Left voting for our budgets on conditions that they renegotiate every autumn and remind me of every spring. It is a good government. It is held together with string, like most good things in Sweden.

That week was my first Midsummer as Prime Minister, and the first time in my life that I had been made to think about the monarchy for longer than it takes to open the Riksdag. I had met the Queen on a screen most Tuesdays since October, when she was in New Westminster and I was in Rosenbad, and in a room eleven times. I had never met the King. I had expected, if I am honest, to find him absurd. A man who is King of fourteen countries seemed to me, from Hisingen, to be thirteen kings more than anybody needs.

---

The Tuesday audience was at ten, at the palace, in the small room on the Logården side where the Queen receives her Prime Ministers. It has two chairs, a table with nothing on it, and a window on the water, and I have come to think of it as the only room in Stockholm where nobody wants anything from me. The Queen wants nothing from me. That is the whole arrangement. I tell her what the Government is doing, and she listens, and at the end she asks one question, and it is always the question I had hoped nobody would ask.

She was hoarse that morning. She said that she had a summer cold, and that she had been rehearsing in the Hall of State, which has the acoustics of a cathedral and the heating of a barn.

“Rehearsing what, Ma’am?”

“Forty seconds,” said the Queen. “It is the presidency year. I open the Session on Thursday.” She cleared her throat, which made it worse. “I have opened it three times. I have never yet got through it without whoever is President of Finland mouthing the words with me, to help. They all do it. They mean it kindly.”

I told her about the summer. The Left wanted a housing guarantee written into the autumn budget, and the Centre wanted it written out, and I wanted both of them to stop telling the newspapers before they told me. I told her about the Union Council’s agenda for Thursday afternoon, which was the common market in electricity and was going to be as exciting as it sounds. I told her that the Sámi Parliament had asked again for a meeting on the northern mine, and that I had said yes, and that the Centre had said nothing yet, which with the Centre is the loudest thing they say.

She listened to all of it. She had listened, in March, to the whole of the spring budget, all two hundred and forty pages of it as I summarised them, and she had asked at the end why the line for school dinners had gone down when the number of children had gone up. My mother would have liked her. I have never told her that.

That morning her question was about the mine. She asked whether the meeting with the Sámi Parliament would be in Stockholm or in Kiruna, and I said Stockholm, and she said nothing at all, which is how she tells you that you are wrong. I moved it to Kiruna that afternoon.

At the door she said, in a voice like a gate that wants oiling, “The Marshal wishes to brief you about Thursday. I should warn you that he has a diagram.”

---

He had three.

Admiral Per-Olof Strand, retired, is the Marshal of the Court. He commanded a submarine flotilla in the cold war and the Court for the last eleven years, and he told me once that the two jobs are the same, except that at Court the enemy is always inside the hull. He is a tall, grave, beautifully polished man of about seventy, who addresses everybody in the third person, as the old Court did and as nobody else in Sweden has done since my grandmother’s time. In his office, under a portrait of an admiral who looked exactly like him, he stood until I sat, and then he said, “Does the Prime Minister take coffee?”

I said that the Prime Minister did.

“Black,” said Ebba Lindqvist, from the window. “She takes it black. She told us in October.” The Queen’s Private Secretary was at school with the Queen and has been at her side for forty years. She is small and dry and says “no” to the Queen in front of other people, which nobody else at Court is allowed to do and which, I am told, the Queen relies upon. She sat on the windowsill with a folder on her knee and did not get up for an admiral or a Prime Minister, and I liked her at once.

Strand unrolled the first diagram on his desk and weighted its corners with a stapler, a paperweight shaped like a whale, an inkwell and a small bronze bust of Gustav III.

“The Joint Session,” he said. “The Prime Minister will be familiar with it.”

I was familiar with it in the way that one is familiar with a relative’s wedding: I had been, in my previous life, in the gallery, twice. Once a year, at Midsummer, the five heads of state of the Scandinavian Union meet in Stockholm in the Hall of State, and receive the Union Council’s report, and sign the year’s instruments, and are seen by the north to be there, which is most of what they are for. The Queen hosts it every year, because Stockholm is the Union’s seat. But the Union’s ceremonial presidency goes round the five of them in turn, and in the presidency year the host is also the President, and the President opens the Session. In 2027 it was Sweden’s turn.

“The President opens the Session,” said Strand, “by pronouncing the formula. The formula is fixed. It is three sentences, in the language of the President. It was agreed in 1951 and it has not been altered.” He touched the diagram where a small gold circle sat in the middle of a long table. “The President sits here. The other four heads of state sit here and here, in the alphabetical order of their countries in Swedish, which suits the Danes, who come first in every language of the Union except Finnish, where they come last. Behind them stands the silver throne, which has nobody in it.”

“Why does it have nobody in it?”

“Because it is the Swedish throne, and the Union has five equals. It cannot be moved, because it is the silver throne. So it stands behind them, empty.” He looked at me. “The Prime Minister will appreciate that it is not a comfortable arrangement for a piece of furniture.”

The first row of chairs below the dais, he said, was for the five Prime Ministers of the Union Council. The host’s Prime Minister sat at the end nearest the door, so that she could be sent for. The second row was for the Secretary-General of the Union, the five Speakers of the five parliaments and the guests of the Presidency. Behind that sat the ambassadors, and above, in the galleries, the press and the public.

“And this year,” said Strand, “there is His Majesty.”

He unrolled the second diagram.

---

I have to explain the separation rule, because the week does not make sense without it, and because I had not understood it myself until Strand explained it to me with a whale and a bust of Gustav III.

The Queen is Queen of Sweden. Her husband is King of fourteen realms, among them Great Britain and the United Kingdom of America, and none of them is Sweden. When they married in 2009 the Riksdag passed a Consort Act, which gave him a Swedish style, His Majesty King Ernest, the Queen’s Consort, and a place in Swedish precedence immediately after the Queen and before the Crown Prince, and nothing else whatsoever: no seat, no vote, no papers and no office. The two of them signed an instrument at the same time, which has never been published in full, and which keeps their two lives apart in every way that the state can see. They have separate households, and separate papers, and his officers may not direct her programme, and our officials may not use the marriage to reach any of his fourteen capacities. Whatever they say to each other at breakfast is theirs and creates no channel for anybody. And when the sovereigns attend one another’s ceremonies, each does so under the law of the host realm, and imports no precedence or authority from any other crown.

“Which means,” said Strand, “that on Thursday His Majesty attends as the Queen’s Consort. He is not, in the Hall of State, the King of Great Britain. He is not the King of anywhere. He is the President’s husband.” He paused. “The Rules of the Union do not mention the President’s husband.”

“So where does he sit?”

It took forty minutes.

He could not sit beside the Queen. In Sweden his place is immediately after her, but on Thursday she would not be sitting as Queen of Sweden, she would be sitting as President of the Union, and immediately after the President is the place of the other four heads of state. If the Queen’s Consort sat beside the President he would be ahead of the President of Finland, the President of Iceland and the Kings of Norway and Denmark, and that would be importing precedence on a scale that Strand could not bring himself to describe, so he drew it instead, with a pencil, and then rubbed it out.

He could not sit at the table among the heads of state, at the end, because he is a head of state, fourteen times over, and to put him at the table would be to say so in the one room in the north where it must not be said.

He could not sit in the first row with the Prime Ministers, because he is not a minister, and because, said Lindqvist from the windowsill, if he sat next to me for two hours the British newspapers would say that I was advising him and the Swedish newspapers would say that he was advising me.

“Which would be worse?” I asked.

“The Swedish ones,” said Lindqvist. “The British ones would only be wrong.”

He could not sit in the gallery, because the British Ambassador had already telephoned twice to ask, very politely, whether it was true that the King might be put in the gallery, and because the press were in the gallery, and the King of fourteen realms sitting among the press would be the only story of the day, which the separation rule exists to prevent.

He could not stand. Nobody stands at the Joint Session except the President, for forty seconds, and the Secretary-General, for the report, which takes an hour.

“He could stay at home,” I said.

There was a silence in which I understood that I had said something that nobody in that room would have said, and that this was, possibly, why I had been invited to it.

“He has come early to hear her,” said Lindqvist. “He has never heard her open it. In her other presidency years he was kept in London. This year he arranged his diary to be here on Tuesday, which he has never done, so that he could sit in the Hall on Thursday and hear her say forty seconds of Swedish. He is not going to stay at home.”

So Strand unrolled the third diagram.

It showed the second row. The Secretary-General’s chair was first, and then the five Speakers in the same Swedish alphabetical order as their heads of state, and then, at the very end, beside our own Speaker and directly behind my chair at the end of the first row, a small square marked in Strand’s beautiful hand: H.M. the Queen’s Consort.

“The guests of the Presidency,” said Strand. “He is the President’s guest. It is the nearest we have.”

“Is he going to mind?”

“His Majesty,” said Strand, “has never minded anything in eighteen years.” He rolled up the diagrams one by one, and returned the stapler and the whale and the inkwell to their places, and Gustav III last. “It is one of the great difficulties of the post.”

There was more, because there is always more. The King might stand when everybody stood. He might not be announced. He might not be introduced as anything but the Queen’s Consort, even by the Finns, who had been reminded in writing. He might carry an umbrella in the inner courtyard, Strand said, if it was his own. The Union has no anthem, only a fanfare without words, chosen so that no language and no crown is favoured, and the bandmaster of the Life Guards had asked whether, in view of His Majesty’s presence, the band should also rehearse God Save the King, which it kept in a folder for state visits, in case.

“In case of what?” I said.

“The bandmaster did not say,” said Strand. “He has been told that there is no case.”

---

The King arrived from London at half past six that evening, and I watched it on television in my office at Rosenbad with my press secretary, because the protocol does not allow a Prime Minister to meet a consort at the airport. A Prime Minister meets heads of state who come on state visits, and he was not coming on a state visit, and he was not, at Arlanda, a head of state. He was a husband coming home for Midsummer. The Marshal of the Court met him, alone, at the foot of the steps.

“Everybody else gets met by their wife,” said Tove Berglund, with her feet on my coffee table. Tove is from Malmö and has the Malmö view of Stockholm, which is that it is a large village with a palace in it. She has been my press secretary for four years, and in four years I have never seen her surprised by anything, though I have often seen her pretend to be, for a journalist, beautifully. “Why doesn’t she meet him?”

“Because of the rule. They never fly together, and if she met him at the airport it would be a ceremony, and if it was a ceremony he would have to be somebody.”

“He is somebody.”

“Not here.”

The aircraft was a small grey one from his royal squadron, which had a crest on it that the Swedish television director had been asked not to show and showed for some time. He came down the steps himself, slowly and quite steadily, in a grey suit, carrying his own coat over his arm, a long thin man of eighty with very white hair and the stoop of somebody who has spent sixty years bending to hear shorter people. Behind him came two men in dark suits and a third carrying a suitcase, which I learned later is the valet’s privilege and which he will not give up to anybody.

Strand bowed. The King shook his hand and said something, and Strand smiled, which I had not seen him do in three hours that afternoon. Then the King turned away from the cars and walked across the apron to the ground crew, four of them in yellow jackets, who had not expected it, and shook their hands one at a time, and spoke to each of them. The commentator on SVT said that he was speaking to them in Swedish, and that he was known in Sweden, affectionately, as “the Queen’s Englishman”, which the commentator said nobody had ever told him.

“He was King of Great Britain,” said Tove. “Not of England.”

“I know.”

“Then why do we call him the Queen’s Englishman?”

“Because we’re Swedish,” I said, “and we don’t like to make a fuss.”

There was a boy at the fence with a flag, the blue and yellow one and not a British one, and the King saw him from the apron and lifted his hand, and the boy waved the flag so hard that it came off the stick. Then the King got into the car, and the cars went away towards the city, and the director, who had been told not to, gave us one last long look at the crest.

Tove took her feet off the table and wrote her statement for the morning, which was two lines long and said that His Majesty King Ernest, the Queen’s Consort, had arrived in Stockholm to spend Midsummer with the Queen and the Crown Prince. She showed it to me. I said it was very good. She said that it was the easiest statement she would write all week, and she was right, though not for the reason either of us thought.

---

I went home at nine, which in Rosenbad counts as a half day, and ate a herring sandwich standing up in my kitchen, and read the Union Council’s papers on the common market in electricity until I understood why nobody else reads them. My mother telephoned at ten to tell me that she had seen the King on the television, and that he looked thin, and that the Queen should feed him, and that she, my mother, had always thought he had a kind face. I said that he did. She asked whether I was eating. I said that I was. She said that I was not, and that she could hear it, and rang off.

At eleven o’clock my telephone rang again, and it was Ebba Lindqvist.

I had never had a call from the Court at eleven at night. Nobody at Court telephones anybody after six, unless somebody has died, and I sat down on the kitchen floor, I do not know why, with my back against the dishwasher, and said, “What has happened?”

“Nothing has happened,” said Lindqvist, in a perfectly level voice, the voice that I would hear a great deal of in the next three days. “Nobody is ill, in the sense the Prime Minister means. I am sorry to have alarmed her.”

“Then what?”

“The Queen,” said Lindqvist, “has lost her voice.”

I said, because it was eleven o’clock and I was on the floor, “Lost it where?”

There was a pause on the line, and in it I heard, very faintly, somewhere behind Lindqvist in a room in the palace, the sound of a pencil writing quickly on paper, and then a page being torn out of a notebook.

“The Queen,” said Lindqvist, “has written that she can do everything in writing. She has asked me to tell the Prime Minister so. I have told her. I will be at the palace at seven. So, I imagine, will the Marshal.”

“Is she right?” I said. “Can she?”

“I don’t know,” said Lindqvist. “Nobody has ever had to ask.”