POLITICAL NEPOTISM

A political neophyte is made Culture Minister, charged with supporting cultural activities in Denmark. He faffs around for most of the last year, not making friends but lots of enemies. It then emerges at the weekend that he has spent more than kr.180.000 (around £19,000) on dinners and meetings held at an institute where he used to be a Board director, despite being warned by an official that this was not a good idea. The institute also got kr.6m for 2013 in the most recent finance act. And the Minister's husband (he is gay) was given a job there in March.

The Minister has apologised. Despite that, he himself, plus his party leader and the Prime Minister that leads the Government of which he is part, went out of their way to say that he had done nothing wrong. This facade cracked this evening, when Uffe Elbæk resigned. And rightly so.

What is puzzling is that so many otherwise sensible people fail to see how the man on the Copenhagen omnibus will view such matters. What planet are they living on?

Walter Blotscher