The most important task was to work out ways of co-operating on such strictly practical and urgent matters as providing food and clothes in Norway, and of ``solving the problems of war in our own country...of activating the war in our own country...''.(20) The tone of Furubotn's reply showed that he thought the proposal from Stockholm, with its emphasis on speculations about developments after the war, smacked too much of its origins in exile. He was sceptical about it. How could two parties be joined into one if they could not co-operate on an equal footing in wartime?

Furubotn's scepticism was not unfounded. Take for instance the so-called Gothenburg conference in March 1945, a conclave of leading representatives of the Labour Party and the Federation of Trade Unions, convened in secret from London, Stockholm and Oslo. Although Furubotn was probably unaware of the meeting, its resolutions shed an interesting light on the likelihood of building up mutual confidence between the two parties. The delegates resolved to adopt an uncompromising stance in relation to the Communists. Despite the strength of the Communists at that time, they were to be denied representation in illegal union committees.(21) Labour Party members in Stockholm risked exclusion from party circles if they had anything to do with Communists.(22) Such decisions speak eloquently of the tensions among the exiles; on the home front, the so-called Vestfold case was even more dramatic.(23) Two leading Labour Party members of the underground in the county of Vestfold in Norway were supposed to have urged the kidnapping of prominent Communists. One of them wrote that Labour Party people had seen it as their duty to keep the trade union system free from ``Communist intrigue''.(24)

When the union organisation in Vestfold took the matter up in 1945, nobody denied that the documents concerning the case were genuine (25) but the two Labour members were not willing to shoulder responsibility alone. They had acted, they said, on instructions from the trade union committee in Oslo, which was under Labour Party leadership. The responsibility was not theirs, but belonged higher up.(25) The Labour Party newspaper Arbeiderbladet, on the other hand, dismissed the documents as private letters which had nothing to do with the Stockholm secretariat of the Federation of Trade Unions.(26) In view of the strict discipline displayed by the Labour Party during the war, there is little reason to believe that the two men in Vestfold were acting on their own. That the disclosure of these events in 1945 was embarrassing for the Labour Party is another matter. People liked to think that party-political hostilities had been suspended during the war. It was understandable that the Labour Party could not admit to this kind of underground activity. It would certainly undermine the credibility of the party's official co-operative line.

In fact the Vestfold case was probably only the tip of the iceberg. In 1945, it was for instance only the top-level political initiates who knew that it was the Labour Party and not the non-socialists who had been most active in preventing Communist participation in the Home Front leadership (HL).(27) Until the 1970s, it was a widespread and ``official'' Norwegian myth that HL had been above party politics. Anyone who wondered why the NKP was not represented in HL, as communists had been represented in similar joint bodies in other Western countries, was usually met with the argument that the NKP was the only Norwegian party which had maintained its party-political profile during the war, and HL was not a body for political parties and party politics.

It seems strange today that this view should have been so widely accepted in Norway for so long, especially considering that the Labour Party had maintained its party organisation while participating in HL. With the access we have today to documents which were not available just after the war, we now know that the above-mentioned official reason was a cover-up of the fact that the Labour Party used HL in its struggle against the Communists.(28)