SPIN DOCTORS


Spin doctors are much in the news here at the moment. Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt is married to a Brit, Stephen Kinnock, who has tended to work abroad in recent years, most recently in Switzerland. In the summer of 2010, when she was leader of the Opposition, a newspaper alleged that he had not being paying taxes in Denmark. Although working in Switzerland fom Monday to Friday and coming home at weekends, he was technically still resident in Denmark, and so should be paying taxes here as well.

If true, this would have been a major blow to the Social Democrats, who at the time were advocating more taxes in order to stimulate public spending. So the outcome was of crucial importance to both the Opposition and the then Government. As it turns out, Mr. Kinnock had not spent enough days in Denmark to be classed as resident. Reading between the lines, I think it was a close-run thing; but the end result was that he (and his wife) were in the clear.

In recent weeks, some murkier things have emerged. Decisions of this kind are taken by the relevant local tax office; and neither politicians (eg the Tax Minister) nor the senior management of the Revenue are allowed to get involved. Yet it appears a) that the head of the Revenue chaired a number of meetings at which this particular case was discussed, and b) that the Minister's spin doctor tried to leak the whole of the 9-page decision to the press instead of the headline "he has done nothing wrong" which Ms. Thorning-Schmidt originally published. If true, a is at the least bad practice, which could cost the top civil servant his job; while b would be a crime. Investigations, by independent judges and the police, are being set up; but it all points to a coordinated attempt to smear Ms. Thorning-Schmidt in the run-up to a close election.

However, what is really interesting is the political fall-out. The average Dane thinks it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that the then Tax Minister Troels Lund Poulsen would not have been informed about these events by either his top civil servant or his spin doctor. Indeed, they might have been working on his orders, a view reinforced by the fact that Mr. Poulsen has now taken unpaid leave from Parliament. Furthermore, he was a big cheese in the Venstre party, big brother in the former minority coalition Government. So the question then becomes what party chief and ex-Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen knew, since it has emerged that his spin doctor and Mr. Poulsen's at the least exchanged notes. When pressed on this issue yesterday in the form "have you in Venstre ever had any party meetings to discuss Ms. Thorning-Schmidt's tax case", the usually unflappable Mr. Rasmussen looked decidedly evasive, to say the least.

The irony is that the prime Sunday evening television programme this autumn has been the second series of Borgen (the slang word for Christiansborg, the Parliament building), a drama series which charts the ups and downs of a female Prime Minister running a coalition Government, in close collaboration with her spin doctor and lead adviser. Oscar Wilde once said that "life imitates art"; Danish politics appear to be doing just that.

The big winner in all this of course is Ms. Thorning-Schmidt. Her first couple of months in the top job have been underwhelming. But now she can just sit back and watch the Opposition, previously riding high in the polls, wriggle and squirm.

Walter Blotscher