* * *
fn1 A letter to The Times contrasted the high quality of this extended debate with the usual brief studio discussion chaired by an intrusive interviewer, noting that ‘the exasperated incredulity of Mr Jenkins in the face of Mr Benn’s statistical agility . . . revealed far more subtly than a shorter confrontation could have done the personal rivalry that lay behind their careful cordiality.’15 The writer was the present author.
fn2 Still worse, Wilson told Barbara Castle, he had learned from a reliable source that Heath had been ‘secretly’ to lunch at East Hendred.21 Typically, his spies had misled him. Heath had indeed been to East Hendred, but for dinner (not lunch) on 1 April, when the other guests were Sir William Hayter (former ambassador to the USSR, now Master of New College, Oxford) and his wife, and Evangeline Bruce (wife of the former American ambassador to Britain, David Bruce) – a typical mixed party, not obviously coalition-hatching material.
fn3 Three years later Jenkins elaborated his regret over this incident to John Grigg, who reported the conversation to his wife:
R. himself feels that his only chance to split the Labour Party and bring about a coalition was two days after the EEC referendum. He then had a blinding and ‘particularly squalid’ row with Wilson, demanding that Prentice should not, as W. wished, be dropped from the Cabinet. W. gave way but R. clearly thinks that some other and much better excuse for resignation could have been found at that time, and that if he had been ruthless enough to do it the result would have been a Coalition. He is convinced that a number of leading Tories, including Ian [Gilmour], would have joined him. The whole idea seems to me highly debatable, but it’s fascinating that he regards that as the great opportunity missed.27
fn4 Oddly, however, he wanted to exclude defence, claiming that ‘our national credibility depended on no more cuts in Defence’.37 ‘If we adjusted our Defence so rapidly,’ he argued in May, ‘we would become a third-class power in the eyes of the world.’ This would not help the economic problem, but would actually make it worse, ‘because of its depressing psychological effect on the British people’. Wilson and Callaghan agreed, and defence was spared.38 But it was a strange argument from one who had always urged Britain to reduce its military ambitions in accordance with its economic strength.
fn5 As Westminster and Fleet Street struggled to take it in and rumours abounded that Wilson had resigned to pre-empt some looming scandal, Jenkins started a mischievous explanation of his own: that Wilson had forged his birth certificate and was actually ten years older than he pretended, which would account both for his youthful precocity and his seemingly premature retirement!53
fn6 After the election Bill Rodgers compared Jenkins with Gaitskell, who had led the party successfully despite an equally middle-class lifestyle. Rodgers did not believe that Jenkins’ lifestyle counted against him, but thought his manner did:
There is no doubt that Roy can be brusque and off-putting. He can be difficult to approach and to talk to. Telephone calls can be cold and abrupt. His accent, his use of words, his pronunciation, the way he holds his head, the way he shows interest (or impatience) – all these are obstacles to easy contact. The fact that there is shyness does not come through: it can seem like arrogance and indifference.59
fn7 Crosland had been determined to stand in the deluded hope that he could ‘beat Roy on the first ballot’ by picking up the votes of the 1974 intake. ‘I cannot believe that it will happen,’ Donoughue commented. From the moment Wilson resigned he thought the contest was ‘all sewn up for Callaghan’.61
fn8 Jack Jones was the left-wing leader of the Transport & General Workers’ Union, widely held to wield undue influence over the government.
fn9 She also wondered what she should say to her other Labour favourite. ‘I don’t know what to write to Tony?’ she wrote. ‘Perhaps advise a more elegant way of smoking and look generally less scruffy.’
fn10 Davis regained the seat at the General Election in 1979 and held it (redrawn and renamed Hodge Hill) until 2004. After holding various frontbench spokesmanships under Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock in the 1980s, he became leader of the Labour group on the Council of Europe, before becoming its Secretary-General from 2004 to 2009.
18
‘Le Roi Jean Quinze’
JENKINS FELT ALMOST childishly excited in the summer and autumn of 1976 as he prepared to go to Brussels. Once he had made up his mind, he felt liberated by the prospect of escaping the drudgery and dishonesty of domestic Labour politics; and he anticipated the new challenge of Europe with unrealistic optimism. While still Home Secretary until September, he started reading intensively about the history and institutions of the Community, with briefing papers prepared for him by Michael Jenkins (no relation, chef de cabinet to George Thomson, who was just finishing his term as one of the two existing British Commissioners) and Christopher Audland (deputy Secretary-General of the Commission) – plus a useful list of Dos and Don’ts from the other outgoing British Commissioner, Christopher Soames. He also visited all the Community capitals at least once – except Brussels, which he deliberately avoided till he took up his post in January 1977 – meeting the Prime Ministers and foreign ministers, and lunched in London with Emile Noël, who had been Secretary-General since 1958. Noël was a classic French diplomat of immense wisdom and subtlety who – Jenkins later wrote – ‘knew every strand in the history and practice of the institutions of Europe as a spider knows every filament in its web’ and composed ‘inimitable minutes, where mots justes jostled with subjunctives in every sentence’.1
This highlighted his first challenge, which was to improve his schoolboy French so as to be able to appreciate these subtleties. He worked hard at it, compiling – as he had with his German at Bletchley – long lists of vocabulary to learn, reading simple French authors like Voltaire and Simenon and practising conversation with Leslie Bonham Carter. He achieved a functional level of communication, but was never comfortable in French. He always distrusted those who claimed to be able to understand a language but not to speak it, insisting on the contrary that ‘it is much easier to speak a language simply than to take in the nuances of what someone is saying to you’.2, fn1 Despite his love of Italy he had never learned any Italian – his many holidays there were spent entirely among British friends – and his German remained rudimentary. Fortunately the business of the Community was done almost entirely in French and English, and most of the non-French-speaking leaders and officials spoke good English. Nevertheless his lack of fluency in French remained a handicap.
He also had to appoint his cabinet – his team of personal advisers – and staff. His first intention, characteristically, was to take Hayden Phillips from the Home Office as his chef de cabinet. But Phillips had no experience of Brussels and spoke no better French than Jenkins did. So he was persuaded to interview several Foreign Office high-flyers from whom he eventually chose Crispin Tickell, who had served as private secretary to successive Europe ministers during Britain’s successful entry negotiations in 1970–72. Tickell went on to a distinguished career, culminating as Mrs Thatcher’s ambassador to the United Nations; more unusually he was one of the first to highlight the threat of climate change – an interest that appealed to Jenkins’ obsession with the weather.fn2 Jenkins admired his intellect, and Tickell served him well; but he was an abrasive character whose perceived arrogance made enemies in Brussels – rather as David Dowler had done in Whitehall. He tended to assume that the Commission should function like the British Civil Service, with a clear command structure, which it did not. The more emollient Phillips, who became his deputy, had to spend a lot of his time mending fences and smoothing ruffled feathers, while there was some competition between them for their master’s ear.
For the rest Tickell recruited for him two more Britons – ‘both of them Balliol economists as it happened’5 – a German and a Luxembourgeois, and a British press spokesman. In addition Michael Jenkins stayed on for some months to ease the transition; and David Marquand
gave up his safe seat at Westminster to take on a somewhat undefined role supposedly liaising with the European Parliament. There was some criticism that the personnel of his cabinet was too British. This was not surprising – Jenkins always needed to be surrounded by people with whom he felt comfortable – and previous Presidents had shown no less preference for their own nationality. The more valid criticism in the early days was their inexperience of the ways of the Community, which stirred some resentment among old Brussels hands that the British had joined Europe late but now expected to throw their weight around. Some of this naturally reflected on Jenkins himself, and some wit soon christened him ‘Le Roi Jean Quinze’.
On a practical level, Jenkins also had to find a house in Brussels. The President of the European Commission, he later complained, ‘was the only head of an international organisation in the world who did not have a residence provided’. From the moment of his appointment the British press focused relentlessly on what it saw as his enormous salary – around £50,000 plus expenses: this was in line with European pay levels, but more than twice the British Prime Minister’s salary, with three years’ severance pay and a generous pension on top. But Jenkins claimed that more than half his salary ‘went straight into providing what had to be in effect a small embassy’.6 He did not accept that he was overpaid. ‘The position was obviously more than tolerable, but hardly the Croesus-like existence constantly presented . . . to the British public . . . I do not think that I saved anything during my four Brussels years.’7 He declined to take over the grand mansion occupied by Christopher Soames, but settled for what he called ‘a small art nouveau town house’ – found by Jennifer – in the rue de Praetère to the south of the city near the Bois de la Cambre.8 John Grigg, visiting in 1978, described it to his wife as ‘a solid bourgeois house more or less out of Villette, with a porte-cochere, high ceilings and an atmosphere of rather drab prosperity . . . The drawing room, for instance, has rather a dentist’s waiting-room air.’ Roy and Jennifer, he added, ‘are not particularly good at making their houses attractive . . . But on the whole the house is comfortable and certainly the drink flowed.’9 They undoubtedly did a lot of entertaining there. The dining room could not seat more than ten, but Jenkins wrote that ‘it was a rare week in which we did not entertain thirty or forty people, visiting ministers, ambassadors, other Commissioners, staff and friends’.10 To cater for all this they took over from Soames (another noted gourmand) his ‘skilled but sometimes forbidding cook . . . a Belgian lady of uncertain age, confirmed spinsterhood and untitillating appearance’ named Marie-Jeanne, who was kept very busy over the next four years.11, fn3
Jennifer was not there much of the time. She had given up the Consumers’ Association in 1976, but was now chairman of the Historic Buildings Council, among numerous other appointments. ‘There is no real work for me out there,’ she told The Times. ‘It is not like being an ambassador’s wife.’12 She usually came out to Brussels one or two weekends a month, while Roy normally went home one weekend a month, so he was on his own a good deal of the time; except that he hated being alone and invited a constant stream of staff, colleagues or friends from England to keep him company, so that he very rarely lunched or dined alone. In particular he brought over Laura Grenfell – Leslie Bonham Carter’s twenty-six-year-old daughter from her first marriage – to act primarily as his hostess, though she also acted as his diary secretary and was effectively part of his cabinet, with her own office in the Berlaymont building. Many in Brussels assumed that Laura must be his mistress; she was not, but Jenkins loved her ‘zest and intelligence and buoyancy which make my spirits rise whenever I see her’.13 He was delighted when she married Hayden Phillips, and bereft when Phillips felt he should go back to the Home Office after two years and he and Laura both moved back to London.
His most important task before taking up his post was to appoint his fellow Commissioners: two from each of the four larger countries (France, West Germany, the UK and Italy) and one each from the five smaller (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland and Denmark). But here he came up sharply against the realities of the job. Having never taken a close interest in how the Community actually worked – he liked to joke that he had supported the church of European unity for the past twenty years ‘as a buttress rather than a pillar’14 – he had imagined that he would be something like a Prime Minister of Europe with the power to choose his own colleagues. A report by the former Belgian Prime Minister, Leo Tindemans, had indeed proposed that the President should have more say in appointing his colleagues; but in practice the member governments jealously guarded their own right to appoint whom they wanted – invariably chosen for domestic political reasons and not necessarily the best person for the job. On his summer visits to the various capitals Jenkins had to haggle to try to secure the names he wanted. Some of the outgoing incumbents he was happy to keep on, notably the Frenchman Claude Cheysson and the Dane, Finn Olav Gundelach, and he eventually agreed that his French predecessor, François-Xavier Ortoli, should stay on as part of the price of getting Giscard to reappoint Cheysson. After delicate bargaining he was also happy with the two whom the Italians were determined to appoint. But the Dutch and Irish and, more importantly, the Germans all insisted on nominations who would not have been his choice and did not turn out to be conspicuously successful.
He naturally took a close interest in the choice of the second British Commissioner, who for reasons of political balance had to be a Conservative (thus ruling out the possibility of Thomson staying on). Jenkins first tried to interest Lord Carrington in the job. Carrington professed himself ‘flattered’ and replied that ‘there is nobody with whom I would rather work’. He admitted – ‘rather indiscreetly’ – that he was not happy with the direction in which Mrs Thatcher was leading the Tory Party, but did not feel he could jump ship. ‘Your problem is wholly different but perhaps you will understand.’15 Jenkins then successfully resisted Mrs Thatcher’s attempt to nominate John Davies – her first Shadow Foreign Secretary, whom she was now trying to be rid of – and considered a number of other candidates, including Ian Gilmour, before persuading Callaghan to appoint the thirty-nine-year-old MP for the Cities of London and Westminster, Christopher Tugendhat. His thinking was that he wanted a younger man with his career to make, not another ageing retread.16 Callaghan was delighted to annoy Mrs Thatcher in this way, and Tugendhat fully repaid his appointment by becoming an effective if unflashy Commissioner, as well as a good friend of both Roy and Jennifer.
Having finally assembled his team, Jenkins next faced the nightmarish jigsaw puzzle of trying to allocate portfolios among his twelve colleagues. Each must have his own area of responsibility, but there were not enough real jobs to satisfy individual and national pride. Again it was a shock to discover that he had very limited authority and everything in Brussels had to be horse-traded. He quickly decided that nothing less than Economic and Monetary Affairs would do for Ortoli (given that he wanted Cheysson to retain Overseas Development, on which Giscard also insisted). That meant that one of the two Germans, Wilhelm Haferkamp or Guido Brunner, neither of whom he really rated, must have External Affairs. The coalition government in Bonn wanted Brunner – a prickly career diplomat whom Jenkins thought lightweight; he preferred Haferkamp, a somewhat sybaritic trade unionist, whom he wanted to prise out of the economic brief to make room for Ortoli. In an effort to bang heads together he brought the whole team together, with their wives, for a dismal weekend at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire just before Christmas which still left a good deal of the jigsaw unresolved. By this time his initial exhilaration had evaporated and he approached the moment of departure for Brussels at the turn of the year with gloomy trepidation.
Back in October he had spoken confidently of the fresh impetus he intended to bring to the Community. He had been appointed as a politician, not a civil servant, he told David Dimbleby on Panorama. ‘I want to introduce some political content, to have direct contact with the Governments, with the peoples of
Europe in a way that perhaps non-politicians have not been able to do to the same extent.’ He frankly admitted that he would rather have become Prime Minister, but was now fully persuaded that Brussels was ‘the most difficult job open to me at the present time . . . in fact the most difficult I have ever done, but I regard it as a crucial next stage in my life.’ He was not turning his back on Britain. ‘I think I can help this country just as much by what I am going to do in Brussels as by anything which it would be open for me to do here.’17
In a farewell speech to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in December he repeated his intention to be a more active President than his recent predecessors: his aim would be to try to get the Community moving forward again after the stagnation of the past few years when the momentum had been lost following the 1973 oil shock.18 How he was going to do this, however, he had little idea. In an interview with The Times he set out his goals with his usual combination of seeming certainty and studied vagueness about the ultimate destination:
My wish is to build an effective united Europe. Now I’ve never sought to define exactly what I mean by this, but I’ve got an absolutely clear sense of direction. I’ve never been frightened about the pace being too fast, I have been frightened about the pace being too slow. I do not think it’s terribly useful to lay down blueprints as to whether one will be federal or confederal in the year 2000 and beyond. I want to move towards a more effectively organised Europe, politically and economically, and as far as I am concerned I want to go faster, not slower.19
Roy Jenkins Page 63
