Article Nine

The heads of state came in through the great doors at the far end of the Hall in the Swedish alphabetical order of their countries, as they have since 1951, with the President last.

So it was the King of Denmark first, and then the President of Finland, and then the President of Iceland, and then the King of Norway, each of them walking the length of the Hall alone between the rows with the whole Union standing on either side, and each going up the two steps of the dais and standing behind a chair. And then the Queen, in dark blue, with the star of the Seraphim and the blue notebook in her left hand, walking slowly, looking straight ahead, as she had walked the same floor at a quarter to twelve when it was empty. She went up the steps and stood behind the chair in the middle, under the silver throne. She looked down the Hall. I do not know whether she was looking for anybody in particular. I know who I would have looked for.

She sat. The heads of state sat. The Union sat, with a noise like a great many coats being put down at once.

Then there was the silence that comes before noon in the Hall of State, which I had sat through twice before from the gallery and never from the floor, and which is a particular silence, because everybody in the room knows exactly what is about to happen and is waiting for it to begin. Next door, through the old walls, the bells of the cathedral began to strike twelve.

At the twelfth stroke, the Queen rose.

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I have thought a great deal since about those next forty seconds, which were supposed to be the formula and were instead nothing at all, and I want to describe them exactly, because nobody else will, and because the Court’s account will say only that the Session opened at nine minutes past twelve.

She stood behind the table with both hands flat on it and the notebook between them. She looked out at the Hall, at the two rows of chairs below her and the ambassadors behind them and the galleries going up on either side, and at the camera in the north gallery, which I saw afterwards had stayed on her face the whole time. She did not open her mouth. She did not try. The laryngologist had said that if she spoke, the laryngologist would know, and I think that the Queen believed her, and I think that the Queen is a woman who does what her doctor tells her when it is inconvenient precisely because it is inconvenient.

Ten seconds. On the dais, at the Queen’s right hand, the President of Finland’s lips were moving, without a sound, through the opening words of the formula, as they would have moved in any other year, from habit and from kindness, to help.

Twenty seconds. Nobody coughed. Nobody moved. The interpreter on her stool beside the dais had put down her novel.

Thirty seconds. The Queen looked down at the notebook under her hands, and at the clock in the gallery, and then very slowly she sat down again in the President’s chair, with perfect composure, as if sitting down had been the next item in the Ceremonial all along. And the silence in the Hall, which had been the silence of people waiting, became the other kind.

I looked for Strand. He was by the side door at the corner of the dais, where the Ceremonial puts the Marshal of the Court, with the blue binder open in his hands. As I watched he turned a page, and then another, and then closed the binder, and held it closed against his chest with both arms, and looked at nothing. I have seen men on the quay at Skandia look like that when a ship has gone past the berth that was waiting for it, and there is nothing in the whole port that anybody can do.

The Secretary-General of the Union, at the far end of the second row, looked at his watch.

And beside me, at the end of the second row, the Speaker of the Riksdag rose to his feet.

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He did it well. He did everything well that week. He rose without haste, and buttoned his morning coat, and took the speech out of his breast pocket and unfolded it, and inclined his head to the dais.

“Madam President,” he said, in the voice he uses in the Riksdag for points of order, a voice that carries without being raised. “With the greatest respect. As Speaker of the Riksdag of the host realm, and conscious of the gravity of the occasion, I ask the leave of the Session to address it briefly on a point of constitutional order.”

The Queen looked at him. She did not write anything. She did not need to.

“The constitution of the host realm,” said the Speaker, reading now, “provides, in its fifth chapter, for the case in which the head of state is prevented from the performance of her duties.”

I was going to stand up. I want that on the record. I did not know what I was going to say, and I had no more right to address the Joint Session than the Speaker had, or than the bandmaster had, but I had my hand on the arm of my chair and I was going to stand up and say something, probably something my father would have said on the quay, and in front of the five heads of state of the north and the camera in the gallery it would have been the end of me.

And then somebody leaned forward behind me, and spoke very quietly into my ear, in English.

“Prime Minister. Forgive me.” It was the King. “Have you read the Rules of the Joint Session? Of 1951?”

I turned my head. His long face was quite close to mine, and perfectly grave, and his pale eyes were looking at me with what I can only call courteous inquiry, as if he had asked whether I had read a novel that he had enjoyed.

“I’ve read the Treaty,” I said.

“Yes,” said the King. “Everybody has read the Treaty.”

He put the small grey book into my hand. It was open. It was warm from his pocket. The pages had been cut, raggedly, with a knife, and on the right-hand page there was a single straight pencil line in the margin beside one paragraph, very light and very neat, and beside the line, in the margin, in pencil, in a small upright hand, one Swedish word, underlined: skriftligen. In writing.

The Speaker, above me, was reading on, about heirs under age and the want of any other member of the royal house.

I read the paragraph.

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Article 9. The Rules of the Joint Session of the Scandinavian Union, adopted by the Union Council in 1951 under the twelfth article of the Treaty of Kalmar, are printed in four small editions, each with the Swedish text facing one of the other four languages of the Union, and the copy in my hand was the Swedish and Finnish one, and I read the Swedish, and then I read it again, because I did not believe it the first time.

En statschef som är förhindrad att närvara vid sessionen, eller att fullgöra någon del av presidentskapet, får företrädas vid sessionen, eller för den delen, av en person som statschefen skriftligen har utsett.

A head of state who is prevented from attending the Session, or from performing any part of the office of its President, may be represented at the Session, or for that part, by a person whom the head of state has designated in writing.

That was all. One sentence. Written, I learned afterwards, at about two in the morning on the night before the first Session in 1951, by the Union’s first Secretary-General and a Finnish lawyer, for a Finnish President with a temperature of thirty-nine, and never used, because in the morning the Finnish President got up.

I sat with it on my knee for perhaps five seconds. I have never in my life understood a thing so completely and so fast, not even the price of a crane.

It was not a Swedish question. That was the whole of it. We had spent two days, the Court and the Government Offices and the Ministry of Justice and the Speaker of the Riksdag and I, treating it as a question about the Swedish Crown: whether the Queen was prevented, whether the Crown Prince could act, whether the Speaker could be regent. And it had never been a question about the Swedish Crown at all. On Thursday the Queen was not sitting in the Hall of State as Queen of Sweden. She was sitting there as President of the Union, which is an office of the Union, held under the Union’s Treaty and conducted under the Union’s Rules, which Sweden as host applies. The Speaker’s regency was a Swedish remedy for a Swedish office, and it would have made him regent of the Swedish Crown in order to perform an act of something else. And the Union’s Rules did exactly what the Speaker had told me on Wednesday night that the constitution could not do. They divided the office into parts. A head of state could be prevented from one part of it and not from the rest.

She was prevented, it turned out, exactly enough.

I had spent the whole of Wednesday evening insisting to the Speaker that the Queen was not prevented, and he had spent it insisting that she was, and we had both been right, for the length of one sentence, and wrong about which book it was in.

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I could not take it to her. The Prime Minister of the host country may not walk up onto the dais of the Joint Session while the Speaker of her own Parliament is on his feet addressing it, and if there is a rule that says so it is because nobody has ever needed to write it down. So I did the only thing I could think of. I leaned forward and to the side, and touched the arm of the President of Iceland’s interpreter on her stool beside the dais, and gave her the book, and pointed to the line in the margin, and then pointed up at the table.

She looked at it. She looked at me. She understood at once, because interpreters always do, and she half rose from the stool and passed the book up to the President of Iceland, open at the page, and the President of Iceland read it, and raised her eyebrows almost into her hair, and passed it, still open, to the Queen beside her. On the Queen’s other side the President of Finland leaned across to read it over her shoulder, and put her hand over her mouth.

It was, the interpreter told me at dinner, the only thing she interpreted all day, and the most important thing she had ever interpreted in her life, and it had not required a single word.

The Speaker was still reading. He had reached the part about the Government of the host realm, which had, for reasons it had declined to explain, declined.

The Queen read the paragraph. She read it once. Then she looked down the length of the Hall, past the Speaker on his feet and me in my chair, to the end of the second row, where her husband was sitting with his hands folded on his knee, looking at her. And she laughed. She did not make a sound, because she had been told not to, but I saw it, and everybody in the first two rows saw it: the Queen of Sweden laughed through her nose in the President’s chair of the Joint Session, the way her son had shown me on the bench in the courtyard, the only way she laughs at Court.

Then she unclipped the pencil from her notebook, and wrote, and signed what she had written, and tore out the page.

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She gave the page to the Secretary-General, who had come up the steps of the dais without anybody sending for him, because that is what Secretaries-General are for. He read it. He was a grey, careful Dane in his sixties who had been the Union’s servant for thirty years and had opened nothing in all that time, because a servant cannot open his master’s session. But a servant can read his master’s instructions aloud, and he turned to the Hall, and read it.

“Under the ninth article of the Rules of the Joint Session, being unable to pronounce the formula, I designate the Queen’s Consort to pronounce it for me. Christina R.”

The Speaker stopped reading his speech.

“Madam President,” he said. “I must object. Under the law of the host realm the Queen’s Consort is, with the greatest respect, a person who may import no precedence and no authority of any kind.” He drew breath to go on.

“He imports nothing,” said the President of Finland.

She said it quite loudly, in Swedish, from her chair at the table, and her voice went down the Hall and came back, and she was beaming. “He is designated. Under our Rules. In your country. He is the President’s designate for forty seconds and nothing else in the world.” She spread her hands. “Let him read.”

“Let him read,” said the President of Iceland.

The two Kings at the ends of the table said nothing, which is their privilege, and I am not going to say what their faces did, which is mine.

The Secretary-General had the Union’s own copy of the Rules by then, brought up from the secretariat’s library at a run by somebody I never identified, and he found the ninth article and read it aloud to the Hall, all of it, in his careful Danish Swedish. “‘A person designated by the head of state in writing,’” he said. He looked up. “The Rules do not say which person, Mr Speaker. In 1951 I do not think they imagined that they needed to.”

The Speaker of the Riksdag stood quite still for a moment with his speech in his hand. Then he bowed to the dais, and folded the speech lengthways, and put it back in his breast pocket, where it stuck out four centimetres, white against the black, and he sat down. He had no ground, and he knew it. He knows the constitution of Sweden better than any man alive, and the Rules of the Joint Session were not the constitution of Sweden, and he had not read them either.

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The King stood up.

He did it slowly, because he was eighty, and with care, and then he stood for a moment at the end of the second row and looked at Strand, by the side door, and Strand looked back at him with an expression of the most complete professional anguish I have ever seen on a human face, because there was no page in the Ceremonial that told him where the President’s designate was to stand.

So the King decided for him. He walked up the side of the Hall, under the gallery, to the corner of the dais, and up its two steps, and he went to the President’s chair and stood beside it, not behind it and not in front of it, a pace to the left and a pace back, where he walks behind her in processions in Sweden as a courtesy, and where, I think, he has been standing in one way or another for eighteen years. He did not take the book. He did not need the book. He put his hands behind his back, and looked down the Hall of State, and spoke.

“Vi, Skandinaviska unionens fem statschefer, är församlade i Stockholm enligt Kalmarfördraget. I enighetens namn förklarar jag unionens gemensamma session för år tjugohundratjugosju öppnad, för Danmark, för Finland, för Island, för Norge och för Sverige. Må vi rådslå i frid och skiljas i enighet.”

We, the five heads of state of the Scandinavian Union, are assembled at Stockholm under the Treaty of Kalmar. In the name of concord I declare the Union’s Joint Session for the year two thousand and twenty-seven open, for Denmark, for Finland, for Iceland, for Norway and for Sweden. May we take counsel in peace and part in concord.

He said it slowly, as if every word were a separate object that he was setting down on the table in front of her, and in the accent that she has been correcting every night since 2009: very clear, very careful, with the long vowels of a man who learned his first languages as a boy and his last one on the telephone. It took about forty seconds. They were the first words he had ever spoken at a public occasion in Sweden, in eighteen years of attending them, and strictly it was still not a Swedish occasion. It was, I think, better Swedish than mine. It was certainly better than the Speaker’s. He got every word of it right except the last syllable of the year, where the sju came out not as the strange soft sound that we make at the back of the throat and that no foreigner has ever made in the history of the world, but as something nearer shoe, like every Englishman who has ever tried.

Then he bowed, once, to the President, and once to the table, and went back down the steps and along under the gallery to the end of the second row, and sat down beside the Speaker, and folded his hands on his knee.

Strand opened the binder, found his page, and nodded to the gallery, and the Life Guards sounded the Union’s fanfare, twenty seconds of trumpets and drums without a single word in any language, as the Rules require, after the formula.

The Session was open. It was nine minutes past twelve.

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The Secretary-General began on the Union Council’s report, which takes about an hour and is about the common market in electricity, and which I have never been so glad to hear in my life.

About five minutes into it a page from the blue notebook came down from the dais, by way of the President of Iceland, and her interpreter, and me. It was folded once. It had nothing written on the outside, and I did not unfold it, and I passed it back over my shoulder to the end of the second row, and the King took it and unfolded it, and I saw it, because I am not as well brought up as he is.

It said sju. Just that, in pencil, with the sj underlined twice, and an arrow pointing at the back of an outline of a throat, drawn quite well.

The King looked at it for a long moment. Then he took out his own pencil and wrote underneath it, Ja, and folded it again, and handed it forward to me, and I passed it to the interpreter, and the interpreter passed it up to the President of Iceland, who passed it to the President of the Union, who read it, and put it in her cardigan pocket, except that she was not wearing a cardigan, so she put it inside the notebook.

I have never in my life been a postman between a husband and a wife before, and I did it twice in five minutes, in front of the whole north.

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I want to say plainly what happened, because it is the point of this account and because I am a politician and we are not good at saying things plainly.

He read the Rules more closely than I did. I did not read them at all.

I had read the Treaty, on the train, between Hallsberg and Skövde. The Ministry of Justice had read the constitution. The Marshal of the Court had read the Ceremonial, which he had been told contained the Rules, and which did contain every rule in them that concerns ceremony, and left out the ninth article because nobody in 1952 thought that it ever would. The Speaker had read his thesis. Nobody in Sweden had read the Rules of the Joint Session since about 1951, because they belonged to the Union and not to us, and because the copy in the palace library had its pages uncut from the ninth page onwards, which tells you exactly how far everybody had got.

And the King had not been asking the question that the rest of us were asking. We were all asking whether the Queen could open the Session. He was asking in which capacity she was opening it, which is the only question he has asked about anything for fifty-five years. He has fourteen Crowns, and every one of them is separate, and no realm’s ministers may advise him on another’s, and no Crown may borrow another’s authority, and the whole of his reign has been spent knowing, in every room he walks into, exactly which of him is there. He walked into the Hall of State knowing exactly which of him was there, which was none of them. And so he knew, before any of us, that the President of the Union was not the Queen of Sweden either, and he went to the library and asked for the President’s rules.

The last thing is the one I keep coming back to. Because he was nobody in Sweden, he was the only person in the Hall whose designation could import nothing at all. If the Queen had designated me, the Government would have opened the Union’s Session, and the Moderates would have had a debate about it in September and been right. If she had designated the Speaker, she would have made the Riksdag its President, which is exactly what he wanted. If she had designated the Marshal, the Court would have opened it, and the Marshal would have died. The King was the one man in the Hall of State with no office, no vote, no seat, no papers and no standing in Sweden of any kind, and that was precisely what qualified him. He was the only person in the room who was nobody, and so he was the only one who could be her voice without being anything else.

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After the Session closed, which it does when the President rises, and which the Queen did at twenty past two with some emphasis, I found him in the anteroom by the window where I had seen the two Kings laughing in the morning. He was alone, for a moment, with the grey book in his hand.

“I hadn’t read them,” I said. “The Rules.”

“Nobody had,” said the King. “The pages weren’t cut.”

“When did you find it?”

“Wednesday, at about eleven.” He turned the little book over in his hands. “And then I read the rest, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Because I never rely on one article until I’ve read all the others,” said the King. “In case one of them takes it away again. There are forty-seven. I finished the last one at about five to twelve, in my chair, just before the doors opened.” He considered it. “It concerns the circumstances in which the Secretary-General may leave the Hall during the reading of the report. It is very strict.”

“Why didn’t you tell anybody? On Wednesday?”

He looked at me with great gentleness, as one might look at a child who has asked why the sea is wet.

“Because it wasn’t my place to, Prime Minister. I’m the Queen’s Consort. I may not advise the President of the Union on the conduct of her Session, and I may not tell her officers what to do, and I may certainly not tell her Prime Minister.” He tucked the book back into the inside pocket of his morning coat, where it had been since breakfast. “It was only my place to have read it. In case somebody asked.”

“Nobody asked.”

“No,” said the King. “So in the end, I’m afraid, I asked you.”