The problem was that he inherited no clear agenda. The most successful Presidents of the Commission both before and after him – Walter Hallstein in 1958–67 and Jacques Delors in 1985–94 – came in with broadly agreed mandates to drive forward the Common Agricultural Policy and the single market respectively. The only things on the agenda in 1977 were enlargement, with negotiations already under way to admit Greece, and direct elections to the European Parliament, neither of which was very exciting. Jenkins was going to have to find his own way forward and at first he was barren of positive ideas. Meanwhile his inability even to appoint his own colleagues had brought home to him how limited his powers of initiation were. He had accepted the job in the belief that Giscard and Schmidt wanted a political heavyweight – one who might have been Prime Minister in his own country – to raise the profile of the Community, but it was already becoming clear to him that they were resiling from this view and that Giscard in particular had no wish to see a more activist Commission. Friends like Bill Rodgers and Mark Bonham Carter did their best to reassure him that it would be better once he got there,20 but he was horribly afraid that he was going to be no more than a glorified civil servant after all.
He travelled to Brussels on 4 January 1977 and was formally inaugurated as President two days later on what he called ‘the cliff-face day’.21 For the only time in his life he started keeping a diary to record his moods and impressions as he worked his way into the job. Actually he did not write it every day but dictated it every few weeks, using his detailed engagement diaries to fix the framework of his days. He published an edited – indeed lightly polished – version of it in 1989, when it aroused a good deal of mockery for its relentless cataloguing of lunches and dinners in restaurants and embassies as he flew, drove and trained from capital to capital around the Community, recording his conversations with leaders, foreign ministers, parliamentarians and Popes. In fact there was even more about food and drink in the original than in the published text. But Jenkins was always fascinated by matters of protocol and etiquette and by the different practices of different countries. He was a sharp observer, amused as well as frustrated by the absurdities of diplomatic life; and if there is too little for the serious historian about the high politics of European integration, his portraits of the leaders with whom he had to deal are shrewd and vivid. Above all it is an unrivalled record of his stamina, his resilience and his fluctuating moods – which were always heavily influenced by the weather.
He arrived in Brussels in miserable weather – foggy, cold and raw, just the sort of conditions he most hated – and it stayed miserable for most of his first six months. ‘Creature comforts,’ he noted after chairing his first Commission, ‘were clearly going to be well looked after’:
Large open boxes of Havana cigars round the table, boxes of mineral water, coffee placed beside one almost as soon as one had sat down, and huissiers waiting to answer the touch of a bell and bring anything else one wanted. But this was hardly a recompense for the intimidating prospect which confronted me.22
Immediately he was plunged into a bruising all-night session to resolve the allocation of portfolios. The essential difficulty was still over the two Germans – stiffening Haferkamp’s uncertain desire for the External Affairs job, while denying it to Brunner – but there were plenty of minor headaches in trying to divide up the available responsibilities so as to give everyone something that satisfied their home governments that they were not being snubbed. In the end Tugendhat successfully held out for the Budget portfolio, and the main loser was the Irish Commissioner, Richard Burke, who did not finally accept a ragbag of ill-assorted scraps until five-thirty in the morning. After a press conference and five television interviews Jenkins then adjourned with Tickell, Michael Jenkins and Celia Beale for ‘a large bacon and eggs breakfast’ at a nearby hotel, which he described as ‘by far the best hour I had had in Brussels so far’.23
The next day, Saturday, he slept late to recover from this exertion, then went for a rainy drive with Jennifer and Laura round the ‘sodden suburban battlegrounds’ of Waterloo, twenty miles from Brussels, followed by an ‘excessively heavy, excessively expensive lunch’, more sleep in the afternoon and ‘an extremely good dinner with very good wine’ given by Peter Halsey, his British-born driver, and his wife, who also worked for the Commission.24 On the Sunday Roy and Jennifer lunched with some old friends, Jacques Tiné (now in Brussels as French ambassador to NATO) and his wife Helena, whom they had known since 1955. This was typical of his weekends over the next four years.
Then it was down to the tedious work of trying to master the Brussels bureaucracy. His office was on the thirteenth floor of the Berlaymont building, an ‘architectural monstrosity’25 situated in a particularly nondescript area of the city, well described by The Economist:
An X-shaped glass and steel tower . . . rising from the drab Brussels streets . . . the Berlaymont . . . is as cosy as a space station and about as baffling. Floor after floor of corridors lined with identical offices are filled with toiling but well-paid Eurocrats. The 13th – top – floor covered with enough green carpet for a football pitch and altogether lusher than the rest, contains the 13 commissioners.26
The bureaucracy was not in reality all that large, numbering around 7,800, some 1,400 of them translators and interpreters – roughly one-third of the size of the British Home Office that Jenkins had just left and smaller than a single London borough. But it was peculiarly complex, divided into twenty directorates-general with detailed responsibilities for trade and agriculture, of which Jenkins was entirely ignorant. ‘I was an enthusiast for the grandes lignes of Europe,’ he later confessed, ‘but an amateur within the complexities of its signalling system.’27 In practice he concentrated on the grandes lignes and left the signalling to others. But even that left him a very wide range of duties, as Crispin Tickell testified:
The job . . . is exacting. He has to keep the member governments sweet, he has executive responsibilities in quite large areas, he’s got meetings with the Council of Ministers, meetings with others . . . It’s a curious system, with the European Parliament, the European Court, the Council and the Commission. Playing these relationships with each other is quite complex.
‘Roy Jenkins did it,’ Tickell concluded, ‘and did it very well.’28
The job, at least as Jenkins interpreted it, involved an immense amount of travelling between Brussels, Strasbourg – where he spent two to four days every month – and the other capitals of the Nine, as well as beyond Europe to America, Japan and elsewhere. He was rarely in his office, or even in Brussels, for a whole day, but often flew to Rome or Dublin or London and back the same day. While he attached most importance to forging direct relationships with the heads of government, much of his diplomacy was necessarily at a lower level. Within the Community ‘the key body from the point of view of the day-to-day working of relations between the member states and the Commission’ was the Committee of Permanent Representatives (known as COREPER);29 while there were in Brussels another 100 accredited ambassadors to the Community from the rest of the world, all of whose credentials he received in person.30 Many of these contacts, of course, were lubricated by good lunches and dinners. But at the same time Jenkins was easily bored by people he did not think worth his time – and sometimes showed it. Diplomacy was not really his forte. He had made his reputation in Whitehall as a decisive executive and at Westminster as a forceful debater. In Brussels he found that he had few executive powers and no opportunity, beyond formal speeches, to put his case.
‘The job is more difficult to get hold of and less rewarding than I thought,’ he reflected ruefully at the end of his first year. ‘Also I in many ways am not particularly well suited to doing it, lacking patience, perhaps at times resilience, certainly linguistic ability . . . (this notwithstanding the fact that my French . . . has improved very significantly during the year but is still far from magnificent), and possibly application to administrative detail as well.’ Neithe
r the parliament nor television afforded the sort of platform he had been used to in domestic politics. ‘On the other hand,’ he told himself, ‘I think I am able to run the Commission itself, as opposed to the Berlaymont, reasonably well.’31 Others agreed. While he did not attempt to micro-manage, Tugendhat acknowledged, ‘he was exceptionally skilful in getting his team of fellow commissioners to work together’; and Tickell praised his ‘remarkable powers of sympathetic persuasion’.32 Generally emollient and genial, he was usually able to defuse tensions around the table, though his love of elaborate metaphors sometimes baffled the interpreters. In practice he relied heavily on three of his more experienced colleagues: Ortoli (‘probably the nicest of all my colleagues’); Gundelach, who ‘held the vital Agricultural portfolio’; and the flamboyant Belgian, Etienne (‘Stevy’) Davignon (‘taken in the round . . . the best member of my Commission’), who handled Industry and the Internal Market.33 These three formed his inner circle, at the expense of the others who sometimes resented their exclusion. But this was always Jenkins’ way. In fact he was rather disappointed that they, with homes and wives to go back to, did not mix Commission business with social life quite as freely as he liked to do. They rarely invited him (with or without Jennifer) back to their homes; and he frequently complained that when he took them to dinner at expensive restaurants they never offered to pay or host a return meal.34 So he surrounded himself perhaps too much with the British members of his cabinet and a stream of friends from England. Just as it had been in Whitehall, Tugendhat wrote, ‘Roy’s habitual weakness of surrounding himself and working through a praetorian guard of devoted officials was resented.’35
His French was not quite good enough to do anything else. According to The Times, soon after he took up the job it was ‘painful but grammatically accurate’.36 Nicko Henderson, with an old friend’s cheerful candour, thought his accent ‘perfectly appalling’.37 Jenkins’ diary frequently records the strain of speaking French for any length of time, so he could not properly socialise or joke in French; nor was he comfortable speaking it formally. His press spokesman, Roger Beetham (seconded from the Foreign Office), found his job difficult, particularly in the early days, ‘not least because of his [Jenkins’] reluctance to speak French’. It was partly that he was simply shy:
His vocabulary was incredible, he read Simenon in the original. But he was very reluctant to use his French, except socially. There were a few occasions when this was almost provocative, trying to represent, as I was, a European President who declined to speak the Brussels language. It wasn’t that he couldn’t; and it did make things difficult.38
In August 1977 he was still trying to read Simenon on his summer holiday, but not getting on very well; at the same time he confessed that he was reading Jean Monnet’s Memoirs in English.39
Frustrated by the ‘oppressive strangeness’ of the job, suddenly cut off both from the Westminster and clubland society in which he had lived and breathed for the past twenty-five years and from Jennifer’s emotional and practical support; already under criticism in Brussels for being too British, painfully conscious of the disappointment of those who had invested such high hopes in him, but unsure of how to set about realising them, Jenkins admitted to feeling lost and lonely in his first six months in Brussels. ‘I missed the actual detail of both Stechford and the House of Commons much more than I had expected . . . and found that I was constantly dreaming, literally dreaming in my sleep, about both.’ Had he known what it was going to be like, he would not have come. ‘Even as late as mid-July I was in depths of, not continuous but occasional, suicidal depression with resignation thoughts hovering round my mind.’40
His gloom was deepened barely a month after his arrival by the sudden death of Tony Crosland, who suffered a massive stroke on 14 February and died five days later. This triggered all sorts of complicated emotions: memories of their youthful intimacy overlaid by more recent rivalry (though Jenkins claimed that they had restored much of their old friendship in the last few months), but also inevitably speculation that he might now have had the Foreign Office after all, if he had stayed in the Cabinet. Ironically, since Britain held the rotating chairmanship of the Community for the first half of 1977, Crosland had chaired the Council of Ministers during January: Jenkins had thought him ‘a pretty effective chairman’.41 He had actually been receiving a visit from Denis Healey when they heard the news of Crosland’s collapse. Two days later the Foreign Office Minister of State David Owen – in Brussels to open fisheries negotiations with the Russians – assured Jenkins that Crosland was already ‘morally and mentally dead’, with no possibility of recovery.42 So it was no more than mildly spooky that he woke early on Saturday morning in Rome ‘having had a vivid dream about Tony being present and saying in an absolutely unmistakable, clear, rather calm voice, “No, I’m perfectly all right, I am going to die but I’m perfectly all right.”’ An hour and a half later he heard that Crosland had died at exactly that moment.fn4 He quickly recorded a tribute, which the BBC was able to use on the eight o’clock news; and then wrote a 650-word piece for the Sunday Times in the car en route to an official lunch with Italian officials, which brought ‘the immense closeness of our earlier relationship flooding back into my mind . . . I found I was much more affected than I had been during the previous week, even though I had already realised that he was dying.’45 For all their recent differences, he wrote, Tony Crosland had remained ‘the most exciting friend of my life’;46 and his death left a big emotional gap. He found the memorial service in Westminster Abbey on 7 March an ‘impressive and harrowing’ occasion.47 Susan Crosland told him that Tony would have felt exactly the same had it happened the other way round.48
To general surprise, Callaghan filled the vacancy at the Foreign Office with the minimum disruption by promoting David Owen, making him – at thirty-eight – the youngest Foreign Secretary since Anthony Eden in 1935. Jenkins professed himself ‘greatly pleased’ by the appointment;49 but it can only have rubbed salt into his sense of what might have been. Nicko Henderson was impressed that Roy showed ‘not the slightest resentment at Owen’s great good fortune’.50 But Jenkins confessed to his diary that there was ‘undoubtedly a slight problem of adjustment’ on meeting Owen in his new role. ‘When somebody has been a loyal, young, junior supporter for a long time, it is a little difficult to get used to his suddenly being Foreign Secretary.’ Not unnaturally, he added with a characteristic mixture of perspective and egotism, Owen was ‘very pleased with himself . . . because he had after all just had a most remarkable political breakthrough – certainly one of the greatest ones since I became Chancellor in ’67, and probably a still greater one than that.’51 Henderson ‘was not quite sure that Owen reciprocated such loyalty in equal measure’, noting ‘his determination to do nothing that might displease Callaghan to whom, after all, he owes his promotion’.52 Very quickly Jenkins found that talking to Owen, even socially at East Hendred, ‘does now remind me slightly of talking to Tony in the last four or five years. There is a certain reticence on both sides . . . I hate being slightly in the position of a demandeur with David.’53 Owen realised that it was awkward for Jenkins, but inevitably their relationship had changed. ‘Slowly,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘our friendship ebbed away.’54 For some time already there had been signs of the ambitious Owen growing impatient with Jenkins’ leadership; but his sudden elevation from subordinate to equal, or even superior, was going to make working together in the future very difficult.fn5
Meanwhile Jenkins’ first major test was to establish his right, as President of the Commission, to attend G7 summits. These originally informal get-togethers of the heads of government of the seven leading Western economies had been inaugurated by Giscard d’Estaing in 1975 and continued by President Ford in 1976.fn6 The next was to be held in London in May 1977. Since they were specifically economic, not political or military in purpose, the five smaller members of the EEC (‘the little five’) thought the Community should be represented by the Pr
esident of the Commission. But Giscard firmly resisted this, partly from a wish to keep the meetings small but also, it increasingly appeared, from a determination to stop the Commission getting above itself. The summits, he argued with perfect French logic, were meetings of sovereign states; the EEC was not a sovereign state, therefore it could not be represented. Under pressure from the ‘little five’ to fight his corner, Jenkins thus found very early in his presidency that ‘my credibility as an effective new President was therefore somewhat at stake’.56 Seeking support from Helmut Schmidt on 18 March, he told the German Chancellor that ‘French arguments for excluding the Commission were palpably poor.’ Crispin Tickell’s minute recorded the exchange that followed:
Herr Schmidt said somewhat defensively but with emotion that he did not want a row with his friend Valéry Giscard d’Estaing whatever the Dutch, the Belgians and others might want . . . Mr Jenkins said that if he were excluded from the Summit he would legitimately ask himself why he was doing the job he was. He had been chosen as a politician and not as a bureaucrat.57
Here was the problem that Jenkins faced throughout his time in Brussels – mutatis mutandis the same problem that successive British governments have faced down the years, whether with Kohl and Mitterrand or Merkel and Sarkozy – the unshakable axis of the French and Germans to fix things in the Community between themselves without giving their other partners much of a look-in. Jenkins had enormous regard for Helmut Schmidt, whom he considered the most constructive Western statesman of his generation. Compared with Giscard, he thought Schmidt by far ‘the more considerable figure of the two . . . Schmidt had wider vision, better balance, and greater depth of personality and character . . . He talked far more engagingly and eclectically than did any other European leader of the late Seventies’ – even if his talk did not always lead to action.58 Giscard he found (like most others who had to deal with him, not least Mrs Thatcher) impeccably polite but cold, supercilious and arrogant, with an extraordinary sense of the precedence due to him as a head of state. Yet to his frustration, Schmidt – still convinced thirty years after the war that West Germany must not attempt to punch its true weight – would rarely take up any position in opposition to Giscard, whom he always called ‘his only real friend’.59
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