Rikard Gaarder Knutsen was still too young to drive a car in Norway, let alone vote when, as he puts it, “the politics caught me”.
His timing was good. Knutsen, State Secretary in the Ministry of Petroleum & Energy since January, joined the youth group in Norway’s Progress Party just a couple of years before the right-wing libertarian party, long shut out of the top levels of power, won enough votes in the 2013 election to join a governing coalition.
