She is coming out on Monday with the book “The Blonde’s Considerations”, which is about gender, feminism and #MeToo.
Here she reflects on Jeppe Kofod’s current ministerial post in the light of the wave that was seriously set in motion in Denmark after a speech by TV host Sofie Linde at the Zulu Comedy Galla in August last year.
– Jeppe said sorry and experienced a sanction that at the time was perceived as very harsh.
– Since then, he was elected several times with fine elections – also as a candidate for the European Parliament. The voters have said yes to Jeppe many times.
– If a person has said a heartfelt apology, if there has been openness about the matter, and if there has been a sanction, then I will not be the one to say that one can never come back.
– I think it was right that he became the leading candidate for the European Parliament, and I think it is good that one can defend that he has become a minister in a new government, says Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
She describes in the book her reaction when she was informed in 2008 that the then 34-year-old Jeppe Kofod had had sex with a 15-year-old girl at a DSU meeting in Esbjerg.
– I was furious about that, and I thought it was really clammy and that he was an idiot.
– We held meetings at the top of the party, and it ended up that I deprived him of all his rapporteurships, she writes in the book.
Five months later, he was appointed foreign affairs rapporteur, and in 2013, Helle Thorning-Schmidt invited him to become the leading candidate for the European Parliament.
Last year, the Radicals and the Alternative said they would never have appointed Jeppe Kofod as minister in the current government.
Ritzau has asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about Jeppe Kofod’s comment on Thorning’s statements in the book, but the ministry has not returned.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt mentions in the book, which she has stated several times in interviews over the past year, that she should have taken a stand against the culture of the Social Democrats after the Jeppe Kofod case came to light.
– We should have examined the culture of the party and not least of its youth organization thoroughly instead of treating it as an isolated case. But we did not know better, she writes in the book.
Source: The Nordic Page