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Hello, I'm Nicola Klase, the Swedish Ambassador to the UK, and I'm a devoted fan of the world's most popular entertainment show, the Eurovision song contest.

But I'm also convinced that it's a lot more than a spectacular television event and that diplomats would do well to pay close attention.

There's someone I've been meaning to discuss this with for a long time, Shell Analeling. He was Sweden's ambassador to

neighbouring Norway in 1995 when the evening of the contest came around. I was as a matter of fact watching the program with my wife. We thought

the Norwegian contribution was quite good and we were expecting Sweden to give some points.

The next country to vote is Sweden. The jury is in Malmo. Good afternoon, Bjorn.

And when they didn't mention Norway and I then understood that we had given zero points to Norway,

my wife said to me that you will have problems.

Major problems actually.

Well I think it was a day after a friend of mine working for this newspaper called me up and said

I wanted to discuss some matters with you and I thought it was a question of

export of fish products so I prepared myself we read about it and so on and it was

quite prepared and then he said forget that he said I want to talk about why Sweden did not vote for Norway. And how can you treat

us like this? The story of Sweden's snub was front-page news in Norway's leading evening

paper. The ambassador's apology on behalf of his country

was printed in outside letters, and the story continued on the inside pages.

It took some time before it calmed down, I must say. I've been to more difficult

posts than that and I was in Greece during the Junta time and so on and I never

had those problems like I had in no way with its contest.

That was like remarkable.

...