Sweden’s Margot Wallstrom, the EU’s commissioner for Institutional Relations and Communications Strategy is notable mainly for a blog that is, as numerous eurosceptics have discovered, good for hours of brutal fun in a pulling-the-wings-off-a-fly sort of way.
Now, if this account from Expressen can be believed it seems that this squeaky-clean moralizing bore may be joining the numerous ranks of EU Commissioners with a touch of murkiness in their past. The source of her problem lies in Sweden’s system of state funding for political parties. I’m not entirely clear of all the details of this system, but it appears that the more members a party could sign up, the greater the subsidy. It’s now alleged that Sweden’s Social Democrats indulged in a little jiggery-pokery with those numbers back in the 1970s, swelling the ranks with a ‘dead soul’ or two, three or fifty, thereby defrauding the already hard-pressed Swedish taxpayer. It’s now alleged that la Reine Margot may have had a hand in such dealings.
Quizzed on this, Wallstrom’s press spokesman said that Margot had no comment. Margot, most conveniently, was “travelling.”
In an unusual burst of investigative journalism I contacted a reliable -and very smart – source in Sweden. He gave me additional background information about the allegation, including the delightful detail that an apparatchik in the Stockholm Social Democratic Youth League had reportedly enrolled at least one ludicrously overqualified individual into the ranks of those phantom Nordic leftists.
A dog.
The dog’s name was, apparently, Engels.