Yet the souvenirs were not flying off the shelves quite as quickly as had been hoped, and some of the city’s hotel rooms were empty. Two of the three special “wedding trains” laid on to bring spectators from the provinces were cancelled due to the lack of demand. Notes of dissent had begun to creep into the media – not least over the cost of the celebrations, estimated at twenty million kronor (£1.6 million), half of which was to be borne by taxpayers.
Yet such sentiments did little to dampen the mood that evening, as the happy couple presided over a sumptuous gala for six hundred guests in the staterooms of the royal palace. For many the high point was a speech by Daniel. Speaking confidently without notes and switching effortlessly between Swedish and English, he dispelled at a stroke any doubts about his ability to handle such big occasions. “I love you, Victoria, and I am proud that we are here together,” he declared, calling his bride “princess of my heart”. “And I am so happy to be your husband.”
He recalled an early episode from their courtship when the future queen stayed up all night writing before an official trip abroad. “When I got up, I found thirty beautiful letters, addressed to me, one for each day she would be away,” he said. He even managed a joke about his humble origins: drawing on the Grimm brothers, he told the story of a young man who “while perhaps not a frog, was certainly not a prince” who met a princess. “The first kiss did not change that,” he continued, to laughter from the audience. “His transformation was not possible without the support of the wise King and Queen who had ruled the kingdom for many years and were full of wisdom and experience and had good hearts. They knew what was best and guided the young couple with a gentle hand, generously sharing all their valuable experience.”
Daniel then led his bride onto the floor for the first dance, a perfectly executed waltz, while King Carl Gustaf followed with the groom’s mother Eva, and Daniel’s father partnered Queen Silvia.
In the early hours of the following morning, while the party was still in full flow, the couple slipped away to board a private jet belonging to Bertil Hult, one of Sweden’s wealthiest businessmen and a friend of the King. It flew them to Tahiti and then on to one of the islands in French Polynesia, where a yacht was waiting for them.
Swedes, meanwhile, were left to ponder the newest addition to their royal family: they liked what they had seen – or rather, heard. Aftonbladet said the speech had “moved royals to tears and spread goosebumps over Swedes’ arms around the whole country”; it was, the tabloid declared, “the moment he became our darling prince”. An online poll on the website of its rival, Expressen, showed Daniel had become the country’s second-most popular royal – beaten only by his wife.
Westling was something of a surprise as a royal consort, even though the Swedes had already had several years to get used to him. Victoria might have been expected to end up with one of what the Swedes call “brats” – the gilded youth from wealthy families who dress well, drive flashy cars and hang out in the bars, restaurants and clubs of Stockholm’s upmarket Stureplan district.
Indeed, for several years the Crown Princess dated Daniel Collert, a “brat” par excellence, whom she met at school. Good-looking, rich and confident, Collert was an attractive catch. But his life had also been marred by tragedy: first his father died, then his mother, and he was brought up by his stepfather, Göran Collert, a wealthy banker.
When Victoria moved to America in 1998 to recover from the anorexia from which she suffered during her late teenage years, Collert followed her across the Atlantic, but by then their relationship was effectively over and they had become just friends. It was shortly after the Princess’s return to Sweden that Westling came into her life – or rather she walked into his.
By royal standards, it was a curious way to meet your future husband. Victoria had been looking to join a gym and asked around for suggestions. Both Caroline Krueger, a close friend since childhood, and Victoria’s younger sister, Princess Madeleine, recommended Master Training, an exclusive establishment near Stureplan, popular with Stockholm’s smart set. With a restrictive membership policy and annual fee of more than £1,000, it was more like a private club than a fitness centre – in short, a place where even the heir to the throne could work out undisturbed. They also suggested a trainer: a young man named Daniel Westling.
Until then, Victoria had been mixing largely with “brats” like Collert: Westling was different, and not just because he worked in a gym rather than as a lawyer or in finance. For a start, he came not from one of the smart parts of Stockholm but instead from Ockelbo, a small town of six thousand or so people in central Sweden – a fact that was immediately clear to everyone as soon as he opened his mouth. His father was not a wealthy banker or industrialist, but worked for the local council, while his mother was employed by the post office. He dressed in jeans and baseball cap rather than smart designer wear, lived in a modest ground-floor flat and drove a little Alfa Romeo.
Yet, almost in spite of herself, Victoria came to fall for him. What had begun as a professional relationship turned into friendship – and then something more. Unbeknownst to all but members of her closest circle, she and Westling became lovers and she even started travelling back with him to Ockelbo. The locals appeared unfazed by their future queen’s relationship with one of their own. And far from rushing to give the story to Sweden’s gossip-hungry evening papers, they took pride in keeping their secret to themselves.
Just as the King’s relationship with Silvia Sommerlath had been rumbled by the press thirty years earlier, so his daughter knew her secret would eventually come out. By May 2002 Johan T. Lindwall, a well-connected royal reporter from Expressen, Sweden’s best-selling evening tabloid, had been tipped off about their relationship and, after warning the palace, wrote a story about it. By coincidence, Victoria was due to hold a news conference on another subject on the same day Lindwall’s story appeared. This would have given her the perfect opportunity to deny the relationship – except she didn’t. Asked about Westling, Victoria said only, “Daniel is a very good friend and is very close to me.”
Confirmation of quite how close they were came that July at Krueger’s twenty-fifth birthday party, held at a restaurant in the Stockholm harbour, hired especially for the occasion. The theme was Hawaiian: Victoria and Westling were there together but, conscious of the journalists camped around the venue, they knew they had to be discreet. Then, sometime after midnight, Victoria led Daniel to the dance floor – and they kissed. Unknown to them, a lucky photographer with a long lens on a boat in the harbour captured their clinch. The next afternoon the photograph was plastered over almost the entire front page of Aftenposten under the headline “The Kiss”.
That day Victoria was due to fly to the Solliden Palace, the Swedish royals’ summer residence on the southern island of Öland, to join her family for celebrations later that week to mark her own twenty-fifth birthday. As she walked onto the plane, her image stared back at her from the front of her fellow passengers’ newspapers. That was nothing, however, compared with the discomfort that awaited her when she had to explain herself to her father.
The King, it seems, was not happy with her choice of Westling as a partner. “He was not what the King had imagined for his daughter,” says Herman Lindqvist, a journalist turned popular historian who has got to know Victoria well after tutoring her on her country’s past. “But when she met him she liked him, very much. She wanted to keep things on a friendship level, but she couldn’t control her feelings.”1
The King wasn’t the only one to have misgivings. Many of the palace officials, used to mixing in their narrow court circles, looked down on this boy from the provinces. So did some of Victoria’s friends. However elite his gym, Westling was still a personal trainer. Stéphanie of Monaco may have married her bodyguard, but this was Sweden, not a tiny principality on the Mediterranean. And Victoria was going to be its next monarch. Comments began to appear in the Swedish press about Westling’s poor English and lack of soph
istication. Unprepared for the media attention, he made things worse by losing his temper with the photographers who began to follow his every move.
Victoria was not going to give him up, however, and Westling began gradually to win acceptance, being seen in public with the royal family and joining them at events – but it was a process that took several years. As he came more and more into the public eye, Westling was working on his image: the jeans were replaced by smart suits and the little Alfa Romeo by a Lexus. He was also becoming more confident in high society; his English improved. One of the country’s leading public-relations companies started to give him advice and set up meetings with politicians and other prominent figures in Swedish society.
With every month that passed it increasingly became a matter not of whether the pair would marry but of when. In May 2008 Victoria and Westling appeared together at the fortieth birthday party of Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, who is Victoria’s second cousin, but they carefully avoided public displays of affection. The next month it was announced that Westling was going to rent a modest two-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom flat in Drottningholm, the royal estate outside Stockholm, paying just over £400 a month. Palace officials insisted that the Crown Princess would continue to live in the Sjöflygel wing of the palace, which was a few hundred metres away from Westling’s new apartment in Pagebyggnaden, a house in the grounds.
The engagement was finally announced on 24th February 2009, with the wedding set for June the following year. Victoria’s parents appeared to be reconciled to the prospect of having Westling as their son-in-law – not least, perhaps, because of the family’s overarching need, like all dynasties, to have an heir. Their daughter, after all, was already into her thirties; breaking up with Westling and starting up with someone else anew could take time.
There was one more problem: although Westling seemed ostensibly fit and strong, he also suffered – unknown to the Swedish people – from a serious kidney complaint. That May, the Swedish royal court announced that he had been admitted to hospital and undergone a kidney transplant, with an organ donated by his father. The court claimed the need for a transplant had been known for a long time and the reason for the surgery was “a congenital but not inherited disease causing impaired renal function”.
If Westling seemed an unusual choice of partner, he was positively conventional beside the woman that Crown Prince Haakon, Victoria’s Norwegian counterpart, had married nine years earlier. Tall, blonde and statuesque, Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby certainly looked like a princess; her background, however, was anything but the usual one for a future royal spouse – not least because she was a single mother.
Traditionally, Europe’s royal houses have preferred the women who marry into their family to come “without a history”. Mette-Marit had not just a history but living proof of it in the form of her son, Marius Borg Høiby, who had not only been born out of wedlock but had been fathered by a man, Morten Borg, with a conviction for possessing cocaine. Far from trying to gloss over her past, the royal couple confronted it head on. When Mette-Marit walked down the aisle of Oslo Cathedral on 25th August 2001, stunning in an ecru-coloured wedding gown of soft, thick crêpe with a twenty-foot veil, she was accompanied not just by three flower girls, but also by Marius, aged four, dressed in coat and tails.
In his wedding address, Gunnar Stålsett, the bishop of Oslo, praised the bride for setting an example in the way she had cared for her son. “You are beginning a new chapter, with the pages still unwritten,” he said. “You do this with dignity. Today you are better equipped to understand others, young and old, who are in pain. Jesus says, ‘He who is forgiven little, loves little.’”
So how had the heir to the Norwegian throne found himself such an unusual bride? The couple first met in July 1996 at the Quart Festival, a rock-music event in Kristiansand in southern Norway. Haakon had been staying with Morten Andreassen, one of the festival’s organizers, whom he knew from his time in the navy. Andreassen, in turn, introduced him to Mette-Marit. The couple apparently clicked almost immediately, and they were soon seen dancing and laughing together. It has also been claimed they began a short but passionate summer romance.
The claim, if true, was extraordinary, for Mette-Marit was, at the time, pregnant with Marius, who was born the following January. Not that she was letting pregnancy slow her down. That autumn she appeared as a “flirt queen” on Lysthuset, a TV programme in which more than a hundred singles competed for a date with her.
Their backgrounds could have not have been more different. While Haakon was groomed from birth to be king, his bride grew up in more modest conditions in Kristiansand. Mette-Marit was born on 19th August 1973, the youngest of four children, to Sven O. Høiby, a journalist turned advertising copywriter, and his wife, Marit Tjessem. In 1984 her parents divorced. The three older children had already left home, but Mette-Marit was just eleven. She stayed with her mother in the family home, visiting her father every other weekend and on holidays. Although her parents’ split was amicable, Mette-Marit took it badly.
Life went on, however. Mette-Marit grew into a pretty blonde teenager interested in music, boys and sport. Bored with life in Norway, she set off in 1990 for Australia for a year on a school exchange. She had hoped to be sent to Sydney, Melbourne or another big city, but ended up in Wangaratta, a dusty town of just 20,000 people in the state of Victoria. She nevertheless adapted quickly to Australian life, making friends and quickly losing her Norwegian accent.
Fitting back into life in southern Norway proved more difficult. One day she turned up to school with her head shaved; her school friends thought it was cool; her mother, predictably enough, was horrified. She also fell in love with a boy two years older than her who played in a party-loving local band. This meant alcohol and hashish, which she appeared to have tried for the first time.
Despite the hedonism, Mette-Marit passed her school-leaving exam in 1994. Shortly before, she had split with her musician boyfriend and taken up instead with John Ognby, a disc jockey from Lillestrøm in eastern Norway who was fifteen years her senior. Soon afterwards she moved in with him and was plunged into a life of wild parties, although this time the drugs, including ecstasy, LSD and other hallucinogens, were stronger than in her Kristiansand days.
Mette-Marit began to realize she had to move on. Her exam results had not been that good, and she decided to take them again at Bjørknes, a private grammar school in Oslo, where she moved in with a girlfriend, who lived in the Grünerløkka part of town. Ognby did not take separation easily: after allegedly making a number of threatening telephone calls – for which she denounced him to the police – he turned up in Oslo and threatened her with a knife on the street. He was held for forty-eight hours before he was released. Their intention, he said, had been to marry in Las Vegas; Mette-Marit had already bought the rings.
It was shortly afterwards, while she was working as a waitress at various cafés, that Mette-Marit met Borg and became pregnant by him. She wanted to keep the baby and was strengthened in her resolve by her mother, who had since remarried. Borg, too, promised to be there for the baby, who was born on 13th January 1997 in Oslo’s Aker hospital.
At the 1999 Quart Festival, Haakon met Mette-Marit again. The arrival of Marius had barely brought any stability to her life. After living alone for a few months, in the summer of 1997 she moved in with a new man – another disc jockey, this time ten years her senior – but split from him the following spring and in early 1998 moved back to Kristiansand with another boyfriend. This relationship, too, ended after a few months. After spending a year at an engineering school in Grimstad in southern Norway, she decided to give up and go back to Oslo and study social anthropology. The problem was that she had nowhere in the capital to live.
Fortuitously enough, Haakon did. Since his return from California, where he had been studying at Berkeley, he had been living in a large bachelor pad at Ullevålsveien 7 in Oslo. He had fallen head over heels in love with the woman he had first m
et three years earlier, and, concerned at her plight, invited her to come and live there with him. For the rest of that year Marius spent most of the time with his grandparents in Kristiansand.
Initially, it seems, Haakon and Mette-Marit shared a flat – but not a bed. Soon the relationship flourished. Even so, Haakon was reluctant to tell his father, and Mette-Marit used to leave by the back door. Norway is one of Europe’s most liberal countries – but the Crown Prince knew what the press would nevertheless make of their relationship.
When Haakon finally summoned the courage to tell his father, Harald was understanding: his own relationship with Queen Sonja, a commoner, had been controversial during the 1960s. The question was: when should they tell the public? Birgitte Klækken, a journalist with the southern Norwegian newspaper Fædrelandsvennen, decided the question for them. For some time, she had been investigating rumours about the romance. On 29th December 1999 she broke the story.2
With their relationship now in the open, the couple embarked on a rapid damage-limitation exercise. They realized they had no chance of hiding Mette-Marit’s past, but there was also the matter of various embarrassing private photographs and videotapes. One by one, Mette-Marit’s friends handed them over, but there was concern there was still something out there.
The media, meanwhile, were investigating Mette-Marit’s past. In April 2000 came the revelation that Borg had a past conviction for possessing cocaine. Crisis sessions in the palace followed: the following month, Haakon went on the offensive and gave an interview to NRK, the state television channel, in which he confirmed his relationship. “I have a girlfriend and her name is Mette-Marit,” he declared. “The reason I have decided to go public now is that if I had been passive, my girlfriend, her son, her family, her friends and acquaintances could all have been dragged into this unnecessarily.” In the interview the Crown Prince admitted his girlfriend had been a frequent visitor in the early Nineties to huge dances where drugs were often used, but insisted that was now a closed chapter.
The Great Survivors Page 27
