In the bar of the Emmanuel Centre the sound system is playing “Every Breath You Take” by the Police. This is unfortunate because the person the gathering crowd have come to see – Sanna Marin, who in 2019 became the prime minister of Finland aged just 34 – has had to file this year for a restraining order against a man who had been following and harassing her. Sting’s 1983 smash hit is a great song but also, let’s face it, the internationally recognised anthem of the stalker. I scan the faces of a few lone men nursing beers and flipping through recently purchased copies of Marin’s book: do any of them seem unhealthily interested in Sanna Marin?
Then again, why am I here? Why are several hundred people interested in someone who was the prime minister of a small Nordic country for a few years? I doubt anyone in the audience could name another politician from Finland, or any other Scandinavian country. I asked four people, from different groups, what they thought of the political party Marin led from 2019 to 2023; none of them could say what any of its policies were, what it was doing now, or even what it was called.
I take a seat next to a couple in their sixties who are avid consumers of centrist hagiography; they were at Obama’s recent appearance at the O2, which they found disappointing (they’re not wrong; I’ve watched episodes of Bargain Hunt that were more invigorating). The wife of the couple freely admits she knows nothing whatsoever about Marin. Her husband is the one who’s interested in her, she says; he’s also recently been to a Jacinda Ardern gig. What is it, I wonder aloud, that makes the former prime ministers of New Zealand and Finland so interesting? The husband and I share a long moment of eye contact, he draws a breath to explain, but then the lights go down and Marin arrives on stage.
The book Marin is here to promote is genuinely called Hope in Action: A Memoir about the Courage to Lead from the Former Prime Minister of Finland. In it, she recounts how circumstance – ill health among party leaders, scandal – conspired to place her, almost by accident, in a position to become the world’s youngest leader. She recalls repeatedly asking herself and others, “Do I really have to do this?”
The answer was of course no, but she wanted to do it. In 2019, when Marin – then the transport minister – got the call that her predecessor, Antti Rinne, was stepping down, she was in Brussels. As she tells it in the book, she flew back to Helsinki where she found a “crowd of reporters” waiting at the airport. She popped into the loo, quickly fixed her hair and make-up and told the waiting journalists she would “not shy away from responsibility”, thus beginning her campaign for PM. The Finnish media would not, of course, have known to attend this apparently spontaneous shouldering of civic duty without having been briefed well in advance. The timing was also impeccable: her main rival was forced to rush out of a party meeting in order to declare his own candidacy. This suggests an approach for leadership that was sharp, organised and anything but reluctant.
Then again, a little reluctance would be understandable. Marin transcended Finnish politics as soon as she was elected. Her picture was in the New York Times the following day. The BBC News website, which had not previously taken the slightest interest in Finnish politics, has published 22 different articles with her name in the headline. Her politics, as a traditional Scandinavian social democrat, were unremarkable; what interested the global media was her face.
This is what many of the people in the audience have come to see. One woman, about Marin’s age, tells me that while she knew nothing about Marin’s policies, she was angry about “how they treated her”. She means, of course, the confected scandal that occurred over the summer of 2022, when some videos of Marin and her friends having an entirely standard time were leaked to the press. In 2020, during the height of the Covid crisis, she had worked so hard that she temporarily lost her vision – she took one day off, she told us, until her sight returned. Meanwhile, our own government spent its evenings drunkely vomiting on to the Downing Street carpets. Nevertheless it was Marin who became known as a partying PM, and she is still described in these terms in British newspapers today. The audience bristles at this, but it’s the part they’ve been waiting for. On stage, Marin sighs deeply, but she says she wasn’t angry – just “frustrated, because it took so much time from the actual work”.
Her actual work at the time involved orchestrating her country’s response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Finland has the longest land border with Russia of any country. Marin reminds us that her country has fought – and lost – wars with Russia. The lasting achievement of her government was not only joining Nato (something most Finns had previously been opposed to doing), but also coordinating with Sweden so that the remaining Nordic states applied to join the alliance together. The apparent furore over a video of her having a normal time at a party was surely in Putin’s interest, but she’s not the type to throw accusations around. She concentrates now on being “merciful to myself”. A man behind me says “huh” and nods, rapt.
Perhaps the moral panic over Marin’s dancing was also down to our natural suspicion of beautiful people. Hotness acts as a reality distortion field, a power of which we must be wary. After the Louvre diamond heist, a mugshot circulated online of a purported suspect. It was the wrong man, but the story that he was a glamorous art thief caught on because he was an absolute dreamboat. Full lips, mesmerising eyes, fabulous hair: the security guards probably opened the door for him.
This is why the hot tend to be outliers in politics. Zack Polanski is, let’s face it, no oil painting. Keir Starmer has a face like an anvil. Michael Gove looks like a Soviet cartoon that has somehow found its way into the human world; run, run, or you will sleep in Govlonki’s forest tonight! Say what you like about these people, you can at least be confident that they haven’t used the advantage of physical charm.
Not that this audience minds being charmed; it’s what they’re here for. A middle-aged man turns mottled pink as Marin’s attention is turned upon him, and asks a question so generic it’s actually too boring to repeat. A young woman, upon being handed the microphone, tells Marin: “You’re one of the most inspiring women I’ve ever known, and you’re my role model.” Marin trades platitudes at world-class level: “You are more talented and capable than you give yourself credit for,” she tells the young woman, although she obviously had no idea if this is true. Someone asked her what she plans to do next. Marin says she intends to be unpredictable, but she would be led by the same values. “If I could stop climate change,” she says, “that would be perfect.”
Marin doesn’t rule out a return to politics. She lost the 2023 election (as incumbent Finnish governments usually do) because the Finnish people were more interested in public borrowing, which had risen rapidly under her government, than being led by an Inspiring Solver of International Challenges. The Nordic welfare model, which gave Marin the education and opportunity to run her country, remains the first priority of Finnish voters. Following your dreams is one thing; reducing Finland’s spiralling public debt is another.
As we leave the auditorium, a young woman in front of me turns to her friend: “That pantsuit,” she says. “My dream is to own a Victoria Beckham pantsuit.” They laugh together, happy to have found someone, somewhere in politics, that they actually like.
[Further reading: The BBC’s darkest hour]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear