It was here that Mr Stoltenberg was sitting, a year ago this Sunday, when he first heard that a bomb had blown out the windows at the Labour Party headquarters in central Oslo.
At the time Mr Stoltenberg was working on the speech he was to give the next day at a Labour party’s youth camp on the island Utoya.
It was a speech the speech that would never be delivered. Within hours Anders Breivik himself arrived at the camp where he massacred 67 people in the worst atrocity in Norway since the Second World War.
This Sunday, Mr Stoltenberg was back on the island once more, to speak at a memorial event for 1000 people, including many of the 495 survivors of that attack.
“It will be a way of showing that 22 July had to do with the people that lost their lives, the people who got wounded and all those who lost their loved ones,” he told me. “I think it’s important for a country to collectively be able to express those feelings, and that’s what we’re going to do on Sunday.”
In person, Stoltenberg, 53, is strikingly good-looking (he has held the top spot in ‘Hottest Heads of State’, a light-hearted US blog, for the past two years). He was dressed formally in a smart suit, tie and crisp blue shirt.
Stoltenberg first became Prime Minister in 2000, when he was just 42 years old, and he’s served a total of eight years in office, making him one of Europe’s longest-serving national leaders.
But it is now fairly certain that what he will most be remembered for is the remarkable speech he made on the Sunday after Breivik attacked.
“Our response,” he told a gathering in Oslo Cathedral, “is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity.”
“I believe the message was quite obvious,” he told me when asked how he managed to come up with just the right words at such a tense time.
“It was our democratic, open society that was under attack, so therefore it was quite logical to say that the answer was more of what was attacked.”
Minutes after the first phone call informing him of the blast, Stoltenberg got a second call from his press advisor, Arvid Samland, who was on the 15th floor of the government office tower hit by the bomb.
Samland had been thrown to the floor by the blast, which had embedded more than 20 tiny fragments of glass in his face.
Despite his shock, he managed to ask Stoltenberg if he was hurt, “I was a bit confused,” Stoltenberg said, “I didn’t understand why he asked whether I was hurt, because I had only heard about an explosion down in the centre of Oslo.”
Samland, who was present at the interview, remembered how he briefed the Prime Minister as he descended the stairs to the first floor, witnessing ever greater devastation the lower down he went.
“I told him that there had been a huge explosion,” he said. “I could see right down to the square where the bomb had gone off. I could see that the buildings around the square were all demolished and everything was broken. I told him that there had been an explosion with massive impact.”
Stoltenberg and his advisors immediately moved to a secure safe room, where they were to stay for more than three hours.
“When these kinds of attack happen, there is always a danger of a second attack,” Stoltenberg explained. “But it’s hard to really believe it, so I thought it was a bit exaggerated.”
But after a few hours later, news of the second attack started to come in.
“Suddenly, we got information via people in my staff, via text messages from many people in Utoya, that there was shooting going on.”
Stoltenberg is always reluctant to talk about Breivik or his motives.
“To be honest, I don’t think so much about him as a person and I haven’t followed the trial very closely,” he told me.
“What he did is so cruel, it’s more than enough for me to form my opinion, my assessment of those acts.”
Many in Britain have wondered why the court allowed the killer such leeway to promote his anti-Islamic crusader ideology in the hearings.
But Stoltenberg said that it was crucial that he had the same rights as any other defendant.
“This was an attack on our democratic society, and an important part of that society is the rule of law,” he explained. “We had to show that even in this case we are able to have a normal trial, according to Norwegian law.”
For a time after he made his speech, Stoltenberg became more popular in Norway than even King Haakon. The Labour Party briefly shot up in the polls, while the anti-immigrant Progress Party, of which Breivik was a onetime member, saw support collapse.
This not to say, that tension over immigration has evaporated, as shown by a recent bitter debate over a group of Roma who camped out in Oslo’s city centre.
“Of course there are some challenges related to higher immigration, which has of course stimulated the extreme Right,” said Stoltenberg.
“The main experience, I think, is that we have managed: people moving to Norway has made Norway richer, economically, but also our culture has become more rich in many ways.”
But the political debate around immigration is now largely back to where it was before the attacks. In last month’s polls, Erna Solberg, the leader of the Conservative Party for the first time had more support than he did.
Meanwhile the Progress Party saw a 4.2 percent jump int he polls, giving it more than a fifth of the vote for the first time since Breivik struck.
But Stoltenberg said be believed anti-immigrant groups should be brought out into the open. The rise of extremist anti-Islamist groups like the English Defence League cannot, he said, be combatted by banning their marches.
“One of the lessons learned from 22 July is that we have to take seriously all those people who take part in debates on the Internet, expressing extreme views, and then meet them, discuss with them, bring them into the open. We have not used bans or used the laws to try to forbid parties or political tendencies which we don’t like.”
After the interview, Stolteberg planned to spend the afternoon working on his speech for this Sunday.
He admitted it was going quite slowly.
“We didn’t have much time to prepare the speeches on 22 July and 24 July, so you have to be very efficient,” he said.”Now we have more time, so we’re not so efficient. We’re back the normal, time-consuming method.”
But on Sunday, when he remembered the 77 people who died, and the hundreds more who were injured, the world, now stunned by another shooting at a cinema in Colorado, shared Norway’s grief.
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