Towards the end of The Northern Silence, there’s a reference to Finland’s sometime Culture Minister Paavo Arhinmäki. He admits, in a quote from an interview he gave me while in office, that he is ‘probably one of the worst Culture Ministers ever.’
The interview took place in January 2013 on a roof terrace in Cannes. It was unusual in every sense. I was used to interviewing musicians, not politicians. Also, I was offered the chance to interview Alexander Stubb at the same time – then Finland’s Minister for European Affairs and Trade (and an entertaining columnist in Finnair’s magazine, Blue Wings). Just a year later, he would become the country’s Prime Minister.
Music Finland arranged the interviews. I couldn’t think of what to do with the results – they weren’t really saleable – so I wrote them up for my now-defunct website, Moose Report.
Given the quote’s inclusion in the book, I thought the context might be worth republishing here. I also remember vividly the circumstances under which I wrote the article – late one night, the following February, in Andy’s Pub in downtown Oslo, emptying a few large glasses of beer as I went. Reading it now, I think that shows…
Arhinmäki & Stubb
Have you ever played football against Alexander? I ask the question of Paavo Arhinmäki, Finland’s Culture Minister, as his government colleague the minister for European Affairs Alexander Stubb stands a few yards away posing for a photograph on the roof of a Cannes hotel.
Now, I’m no David Frost, but I think it’s one of the more astute questions of my interview with Arhinmäki. It’s also the last: I’m about to walk over and begin on Stubb. These two Finns might be members of the same government – they’re also pretty much the same age in political terms – but that’s where the similarities end. Ideologically, physically and linguistically they are poles apart. ‘He hasn’t ever played football,’ says Arhinmäki, glancing upwards at the altitudinous Stubb. ‘He’s a hockey guy.’
Of course he is. He would never play football, would he? Just look at him. He’s far too clean-cut. Stubb is famous in Finland and Europe for sporting achievements far beyond kicking a ball on a flat piece of grass. He’s competed in marathons, triathlons and Ironmans.
As he hops up onto the balcony wall for the photographer, he looks chiselled and immaculate in a pale-blue striped blazer. With that single item of clothing he’s gauged the tone and geography of the occasion and nailed it. Perhaps the most impressive part is that he’s come to the French Riviera straight from the World Economic Forum in Davos. He must have packed that pale-blue blazer before he left Helsinki eight days ago. That’s the sort of foresight a good foreign minister needs. That’s the sort of thing that prevents world wars.
If Stubb is the smooth-talking, media-savvy, soundbite-literate and undeniably impressive international politician, Arhinmäki is your clever mate who’s done extraordinarily well for himself. Talking of soundbites, I’m immediately surprised by the first one Arhinmäki offers me. Try this for size: ‘The culture minister before me Stefan Wallin was probably the best or one of the best and I’m probably one of the worst Culture Ministers ever.’
He refers, of course, to the fact that Wallin was in the enviable position of being able to dole-out huge funding increases to cultural institutions, while Arhinmäki is being forced to do the opposite. His cuts are generating angry column inches in arts-loving Finland, but anywhere else in Europe (with the possible exception of Germany and Norway) they’d be seen as fair game: a few brown Smarties dutifully removed from the top a still rich-and-chocolatey cake.
Even so, if I’d got Maria Miller to admit she was ‘the worst culture minister ever’ I’d have a front-page headline on my hands (despite the fact that the statement is self-evidently true).
It isn’t that Arhinmäki doesn’t know how to deal with a naïve-looking music journalist out of his depth sandwiched between two politicians, it’s actually the opposite. He wants to disarm himself early on in the interview.
That way, when I ask what his favourite arts event of the last year has been, he can immediately draw on his special advisor’s brief – knowing that I have a finger in the pie of a major classical music magazine – and say it was the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance at the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki. Tadaa: a neat, back-door and quasi-international routing of those Finnish commentators who have accused him of wanting to dismantle Finland’s extraordinary operatic/orchestral infrastructure.
That’s a little unfair, given the fact that Arhinmäki immediately goes on to reel off a varied list of events starting with Pulp’s Finnish debut (‘I met Jarvis Cocker’) and finishing with a self-arranged view of a private collection of Lichtensteins and Warhols.
What Arhinmäki also does very well is see-off my rather pathetic attempt to align certain elements of musical performance (ie, ensemble singing and playing) to the ideologies of the left. ‘I have had culture as a hobby all my life, and many of my best friends, they are actors or painters’, he says. ‘But it’s not my role to say what is good art and what isn’t. We don’t know in this day what is going to be important art for a whole nation in 50 years.’
He does lurch to the left as part of that statement, but only to cite and criticise the far-right True Finns party, who would only fund artistic projects rooted in Finland’s Golden Age that are ‘easy to understand’.
In the end, Arhinmäki defends those elements of Finnish cultural life which are so humbling and inspiring to people like me who love the arts but particularly enjoy watching operas and listening to orchestras. He points to the issue of engagement: ‘the main idea in our whole cultural policies [sic] is to try to get as many as possible to enjoy all different kinds of art and culture.’
It’s not Arhinmäki’s list of cultural experiences from the last year that strikes you – impressive as it is – as much his emotional and intellectual reactions to them. ‘Patriarkka [Juha Jokela’s play at Finland’s National Theatre] was a discussion about different generations and their political ideas. When I was watching it, I was the whole time wondering what I’m doing, am I doing everything right and wrong about my family, and things like that. It’s very important that it’s that way, you can feel it.’
And so to Stubb, who smoothly slips in a reference to literary hero Elias Lönnrott (he who compiled the Kalevala) when I ask him whether the epic poem – celebrating its 150th year in English this year – has a hand in shaping the everyday life of modern Finns.
Turns out he thinks it does, but only in general terms and in an international sense (a recurring theme): ‘every country has its Kalevala’. I must have missed England’s 736-page poem that takes in incest, fratricide and the formation of the earth through the cracking of an egg on the knee of a semi-submerged woman.
Stubb has far less tenuous things to say about work-life balance – in fact, he delivers a frank admission that takes me back almost as much as Arhinmäki’s ‘worst minister’ protestation. ‘I’m home at five-o-clock when I’m back in Finland,’ says tamed capitalist Stubb. ‘I think it’s bullshit to do long hours to be honest.’
Is that how the Finnish workplace operates? ‘It’s a generation thing. In the olden days you had a whole bunch of politicians who did long lunches, long dinners, and had a certain lifestyle and basically ignored their families. Nowadays, if you look at my Prime Minister and myself, both of us have young kids, and I have to set some rules. I’m away from home for the better part of 4 months a year, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend [the remaining] evenings in cocktail parties or dinners or something.’
That’s not all. Stubb made his name as an economist before entering centre-right politics, and he’s no idiot when it comes to numbers. He’s stumbled Pythagoras-like upon the truth that you can divide very one of earth’s days into three parts of eight hours each: ‘you work for 8 hours, you play for 8 hours, and you sleep for 8 hours’, he tells me.
It’s the sort of statement – especially when delivered in piercing January sunshine on the shores of the Mediterranean – that gets you thinking; that has you inadvertently mapping out a new blueprint for your own life.
That – as well as the moment he pulls out his yellow Nokia Lumia 920 and begins to enthusiastically take me through its features (an experience I last enjoyed at the hands of a deluded individual in an O2 shop in Streatham) – is what I’m left with after meeting Stubb. I’m not even going to tell you what he said about David Cameron. That was quite revelatory, as it happens…but I’d rather you remembered the 8+8+8 theory.