Olof Palme

Twice Prime Minister of Sweden, and the most divisive man in its modern politics.

He was born in Stockholm on the thirtieth of January 1927 into a wealthy conservative family, and spent his life arguing against the class he came from. He read at Kenyon College in Ohio on a scholarship and hitchhiked around the United States afterwards, which he said was what turned him to the left: he saw the South.

He was Prime Minister from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982. He made Sweden loud in the world far beyond its size. He marched in Stockholm alongside the North Vietnamese ambassador in 1968 and the Americans withdrew their ambassador for a year. He compared the bombing of Hanoi to Guernica and Treblinka. He called Franco's government murderers and the Czech leadership dictators, and supported the ANC and the PLO when few Western governments would.

At home he was hated by a portion of the country with an intensity that is hard to convey - and voted for by enough of it to govern for eleven years.

He did not think Sweden was a place where a Prime Minister needed protecting. On the evening of the twenty-eighth of February 1986 he and his wife Lisbet went to the cinema on Sveavägen to see a comedy with their son and his girlfriend. He had sent his bodyguards home that afternoon.

Walking back toward the underground station at about twenty past eleven, a man came up behind them and shot him once in the back. He was fifty-nine. Lisbet was hit in the shoulder and lived.

Nobody has ever been convicted. The investigation is the largest in Swedish history and a byword for failure. In 2020 the prosecutor named a man who had died in 2000 and closed the case.

His wife Lisbet and their sons Joakim, Mårten and Mattias.