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NEW BOOK: Thorbjørn Jagland has already announced an upcoming volume in his memoirs, where the first part went on sale today. Photo: Tore Kristiansen, VG / Cappelen Damm
Thorbjørn Jagland is fighting old political battles again, twenty years of overtime and all alone. But now the lights are out and the vast majority have dropped out of the elections.
With “You Will Own It”, Jagland enters the increasingly long and heavy tradition in which retired politicians, especially from the Labor Party, feel compelled to give their own book version of our recent history.
Now he no longer wants to walk like a cat around hot porridge, he announces himself.
The only problem is that Jagland has waited so long that the porridge has hardened and cooled a long time ago.
This shows no less the attempt of the last day of the media to heat up the old and well-known conflicts between Jagland and Stoltenberg. He himself writes that he feels an obligation to tell his story. But the result has been a strangely referential book, written in rather flat and unappealing language.
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The story Thorbjørn Jagland tells does not seem like a linguistic experience of its own, so to speak. He has been in the innermost circles of power for a quarter of a century, but in reality he has nothing new to say about political legends such as Haakon Lie, Trygve Bratteli or Reiulf Steen. It is beyond strange.
Thorbjørn Jagland sometimes appears more as a witness than as a participant in the inner life of the party.
If anything, this book confirms that the Labor Party has a well-established custom that women and men party leaders do not talk to each other as much. Subcommunication as a management principle, in other words.
In many ways, Jagland’s own life and work is symbolic of the post-war Norwegian period. The child of simple circumstances in Lier, with roots among homeowners and forestry workers, is, as it were, a product of the State Loan Fund and the Housing Bank. Two of the social democratic tools that made it possible for the sons and daughters of the working class to take the seven-mile step toward the new welfare state.
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On the part of Thorbjørn Jagland, it was the Labor Party that emerged the most, and chronologically explains the path from the first local positions in the AUF until in 1996 he was leader of the party and prime minister. While it lasts.
All politically interested people are aware of the 36.9 demand for support and what happened after the 1997 elections. With this measure, Jagland made sure to pave the way first for a bourgeois government and then for the Stoltenberg government 1, and therefore for the adapted market. new public management policy ”of which he is so skeptical.
As mentioned, Thorbjørn Jagland is not a great stylist, and he repeatedly probes the facts: not only does he write that he formed a government in 1997, the prime minister himself must remember that it was in 1996. And to remind us of the year: 1998 was converts in 1988 not just once but twice. Whereas Thorbjørn Berntsen changes his name only once: to Håkon.
Jagland also misses two key quotes: it is not called “Expectations of growing dissatisfaction”, it is called “dissatisfaction of rising expectations”. In the same way that it is the intention that sanctifies the means, not the other way around, as Jagland writes. Here, both the author and editor of sleeping posts should prepare for the next announced volume.
“Today Norway is an oligarchic society,” our former prime minister writes somewhere. I look forward to the elaboration of that statement.
In any case, the temperature must be raised several points from this first rather warm volume.
Reviewed by: Sindre Hovdenakk
