One winter’s afternoon in Oslo, two middle-aged men bumped into each other on a busy street corner, just across the road from a Burger King. One was Ansgar Gabrielsen, Pentecostal Christian, father of four and then Norway’s trade and industry minister. The other was Alf Bjarne Johnsen, senior political correspondent for Norway’s biggest selling daily newspaper, Verdens Gang, (”The Way of the World”). It was February 21 2002 and, improbable as it may sound, the history of the modern company boardroom was about to be rewritten.

When Johnsen told me about this meeting recently, he took me back to the same intersection - of Grensen and Akersgata, Oslo’s Fleet Street - and pointed down the hill towards Norway’s stolid parliament building, the Stortinget. “I was walking up from there,” he said, and the minister was coming the other way. “He said, ‘I want to see you in my office in a couple of hours. I think I have some big news for you.’ I said, ‘What is it?’” The minister wouldn’t say. The reporter had known Gabrielsen since 1993, when the genial Conservative party politician from Norway’s rural south was first elected to parliament, but he had never seen him behave so mysteriously: “I smelt something big.”