Success secrets from a former PM
Ex Danish politician Helle Thorningschmidt on leading from the heart
Helle Thorning-schmidt is perhaps best known outside Denmark for that selfie with Barack Obama and David Cameron during the memorial service for Nelson Mandela. Today, not one of the three is still in politics, and the former Danish prime minister has a depressing postscript to that moment in 2013.
“I think it will be a while before we see another black president,” she says.
For two decades, the former Danish prime minister has been a glamorous, outspoken and arguably intriguing character on the European political scene. There have been the comparisons between her and Birgitte Nyborg, the left-leaning female prime minister in the Scandi drama Borgen, and additional interest in her private life – she and her husband, Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon and son of the former Labour party leader Lord Kinnock, have endured weekly commutes to see each other while based in separate countries.
Now she’s moved to London, taking the helm as global head of Save The Children. The charity’s offices are a stone’s throw from the Palace of Westminster, so “I can pop over to see Stephen in the evening, have supper and then he can vote”.
Thorning-schmidt is striking in the flesh. Her eyes are as cold and green as glaciers, her hair is blonde and well cut. The day after she was elected PM in 2011, one newspaper described her as “too well dressed for the Social Democrats, too fresh to become head of the country, too cool to win people’s hearts”. How wrong. Nonetheless she would upbraid me for mentioning what she’s wearing (cream jacket and a silk red-and-white patterned blouse). “We should come to a time when in interviews we don’t have to talk about what you’re wearing,” she says. But, I’m not sure I agree. It allows a reader to feel as if they are there, whether the subject is male or female, in politics or pottery. Perhaps “Gucci Helle” still bites, the nickname from a former colleague.
I liked her riposte to journalists back
then – “I always had a wardrobe that matched my ambitions.”
Today, Thorning-schmidt says media commentary is a way of “pigeon-holing” female politicians. “They get criticised if they have children, criticised if they don’t; criticised if they look a certain way, if they dye their hair, for what they wear. Are they too boring? Not boring enough? How we talk about female politicians is still an issue.”
The end came abruptly – as high-flying political careers tend to do. The day she left in 2015 – when her coalition with the Socialist People’s Party collapsed – she describes as “awful”. “Big changes in life are not nice, and the change from being prime minister and leader of my party to unemployment was not pleasant. I lost both roles in one day. All the people I’d worked with, from the police that protected me to the staff in the prime minister’s office, people that had been very closely a part of my life, were suddenly gone.”
Her words bob up and down on her soft Danish lilt, but she’s precise with answers, a reflection of years of practice. “One thing that made it easier,” she says, “is I’ve always been anchored in my own life. I paid my own bills, did my washing, shovelled snow from outside my house. The first thing I did [after leaving office] was get the family’s bikes fixed and start biking round Copenhagen.”
Her party won in the capital – a strongly Social Democrat city – so she would bump into supporters who would embrace her and cry. “The emptiness was paired with a lot of emotion,” she says. “But it was good for me to get through it.” And she continued to get up at 6am. “I didn’t do much lying in. Although I did watch Game Of Thrones.” All 60 episodes? She nods. “I had eight months off. Everyone was talking about it so I watched the whole thing.”
Then in November, negotiations with Save The Children began. “What took me out of that empty feeling [after leaving politics] was the thought, ‘If I can be one little part of changing lives of children across the world, that would be amazing.’” She adds, “I am still shocked about how this world treats children…
Now I am part of an organisation: every day we are changing children’s lives and that’s very compelling.”
After a lifetime in politics what she enjoys most is the
“practical element” of her new role: “Giving that child a vaccination; campaigning so this child should not be married under 15. We are getting closer to making sure all children get access to quality education.”
The charity was founded in 1919 by British women Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton to advocate children’s rights. Thorning-schmidt says the UK should be proud. But does she feel children were let down when a scheme to bring 3,000 unaccompanied refugees to the UK under the Dubs Amendment was wound up after only 350 had been admitted? “I am hoping the discussion will be honoured,” she says, “and that those children who have arrived will be treated well. There is a lot of compassion from the British, Brexit or not.” She adds, if she found herself alone with Theresa May she would certainly buttonhole her. “Of course I would talk to her about these things.”
Kinnock had been based in the UK and also in Switzerland, before being elected as an MP in 2015. He and Thorning-schmidt snatched time where they could – no date nights – and their daughters grew up in Denmark shuttling back and
12-year-olds should run the WORLD. They have a real SENSE of what is right and what is WRONG
forth. Now she can have breakfast with Stephen “for a start”, and spends time in his Wales constituency. So is distance the secret to a happy marriage? She laughs, “People ask that a lot. I won’t say Stephen and I have found the magic formula – we’ve had our problems. We’ve been together for almost 25 years and married more than 20, so it’s a long time. But we just really like each other. We find a lot to talk about.”
What’s grounding, she says, is Stephen’s humour. “He doesn’t take himself too seriously. That’s part of what has kept us together all these years.” I’m interested to know how they divided up their careers; in political families like Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper each has to be careful of stepping on the other’s toes. Was theirs an agreement in advance?
“We didn’t have a system,” she says. “If something came up, we said yes. People would ask, ‘So how’s that going to work?’ And our answers were never very good. But you manage because you want to.”
I read an interview in which she claimed, “I’m the prime minister that lives the most normal life. I wash my own clothes and my children’s clothes.” She added she’d never miss a parents’ evening – how?
She looks embarrassed. “Actually, I regretted saying that because it puts pressure on those who think, ‘I have missed a parent’s meeting’. And I have missed one since –
I said it a long time ago.” The only way to survive juggling a career with children is by not being a perfectionist, she says. “We can have it all. Being part of a professional life is the path to economic independence – enormously important – while raising our children. But you can’t if you try to be perfect at everything.”
Danish women are lucky. The state subsidises childcare. “It means women work and have a family and feel they are doing well in both areas.”
In Denmark, she says, “It’s accepted, if you are the leader of the opposition or even the prime minister, to leave sometimes at 4pm for ‘family time’. You pick up your children, have a nice afternoon, then work late. You’re still working hard, but the rhythm is different. And no one feels guilty because childcare is so good.” Both her children – Johanna, 20, and Camilla, 17 – were put into daycare from the age of one.
Thorning-schmidt describes her own childhood as “from the wrong side of the tracks” – jokingly adding she can “swear with the best of them”. Her parents divorced when she was 10, an acrimonious event that “definitely” informed her world view. “But everyone made up in the end and we became one big family.”
It was her parents who encouraged her to act if she felt something was wrong. “If I came home from school complaining something was not right, they’d say, ‘Have you tried to change it?’ That was powerful.” Indeed, by 12 she had started an anti-bullying campaign. It was the ’70s, she says, and picking on the “weakest” in the playground was common. “There was a lot of bullying, often of the one from a poor family.”
I’m impressed by her precocity. “Actually, 12-year-olds should run the world,” she says. “They have a real sense of what is right and wrong, a sense of fairness and a developed way of thinking about fairness.” After school she studied political science at University of Copenhagen and then a post graduate at the College of Europe in Bruges, where she met Kinnock. He’s younger and she jokes that she set the trend for Emmanuel Macron, “although I’m not 25 years older. Only three. But that is a lot as well.”
Thorning-schmidt’s key advice is this: “Say yes, jump in, do it.” She reflects on the first time she spoke publicly, with a churning stomach and fast-beating heart. “But if you are courageous once, you will have a tendency to be more courageous the next time. Courageousness creates more courageousness.”
She emphasises the importance of separating hard work from perfectionism. While she has worked hard “all my life”, she insists on being satisfied with “good enough”. “Guys get by thinking, ‘This is fine’; girls have a tendency to perfect.”she pauses, before adding a final piece of advice: “Be cool. Be nice. You can create good vibes by being nice.”
If you are COURAGEOUS once, you will have a TENDENCY to be more courageous the next time