Jenkins made no apology for enjoying good food, the best wine and large cigars; but he was a demanding customer and his diary is full of critical comments on meals that failed to meet his standards. Quite early on, in May 1977, he had a very good, expensive lunch with Helena Tiné, followed by dinner the same day with Laura Grenfell and Michael and Maxine Jenkins, which was only ‘tolerable’ and almost as costly. ‘Moral,’ he concluded: ‘Unless you go somewhere really cheap it is always better in Brussels to go to restaurants of the grande classe.’52 His comments on the quality of the airline meals and many of the official dinners he was obliged to eat were often withering, though he was sometimes surprised by the quality of the wine: Château Lafite on the fourteenth floor of a modern hotel in Halifax, Nova Scotia, for instance (even if it was not the best year), or ‘ludicrously good wine, Haut-Brion ’62’ in Ghana.53 He could be intimidating to entertain, as Nicko Henderson noted after having Roy and Jennifer to dinner at the Paris Embassy in June 1978:
Roy was satisfied, I think, with the Lynch-Bages 1960. He brought his own cigars with him, so we did not have the usual trouble arising from inadequate hospitality in this respect on my part.54
He always enjoyed guessing the wine and was delighted when he got it right. On his first foray into Brussels society, a private dinner where the wine was ‘outstanding’, he got it ‘nearly but not sufficiently right’. He guessed a Medoc Premier Grand Cru of middle age (1953, possibly 1961) but not a Lafite, when it was in fact Château Lafite ’53. ‘It was a pity to have got so near, but to have failed so completely at the last fence.’55 His expertise was largely confined to claret, however – though he was once very pleased with himself for correctly guessing ‘an extremely good Californian’.56 At a heads of government dinner in Paris in March 1979 ‘both the wines . . . were Burgundies so it was a little difficult for me to judge how good they were’.57 Crispin Tickell used deliberately to serve him Spanish wine, which he confessedly knew nothing about.58 But so long as it was red he was reasonably happy. He had no time for white at all – except champagne. ‘One must remember not to go to Rome for official dinners on Fridays,’ he reminded himself in January 1980, ‘as it always means not particularly good fish and no red wine.’59
Despite his expensive tastes, he was scrupulous about his expenses. He certainly claimed every allowance to which he was entitled, and these were undeniably generous. But he was careful not to exceed them and was annoyed when the German Commissioner Willi Haferkamp was exposed by The Economist for running up excessive bills – partly for being accompanied on foreign visits by an interpreter who was also his mistress – which resulted in a searchlight being thrown on the alleged extravagance of the whole Commission. ‘No doubt my own predilections assisted the caricature,’ Jenkins wrote. ‘But in fact it was largely unjustified.’60 Compared with the representatives of the national governments or other organisations like NATO, he insisted, he and his staff and colleagues lived relatively modestly and largely at their own expense. Whenever he and Tickell stayed in Paris, for instance, they stayed in a grand suite at the Hôtel de Crillon if paid for by the French government, but at the less expensive (though scarcely spartan) Ritz if the Commission was paying.
At weekends he liked to get out of the city on excursions of one sort or another, usually including a good restaurant, and made a practice of taking visitors to sites of historical interest, like the battlefields of Waterloo and Passchendaele or the war memorial at the Menin Gate. Two relatively new friends – made through Jennifer’s Historic Buildings work – who came out to Brussels several times were Henry and Shirley Anglesey. He was the seventh Marquess and a noted military historian, author of a multi-volume history of the British cavalry; she was the daughter of the now largely forgotten novelist Charles Morgan and an active stalwart of all sorts of arts and conservation quangos. In February 1980 Jenkins took them, in filthy weather, to Waterloo, where they managed to find the place where the first Marquess’s leg was buried after he lost it in the battle; the next day he took them to Malines, where they witnessed the installation of the new Archbishop in the presence of an impressive turnout of cardinals. The Angleseys, he noted approvingly, were ‘very good guests, full of enthusiasm and interest’.61 They became good (if eccentric) friends over the next twenty years, and their stately home, Plas Newydd, with its Rex Whistler murals and stunning views over the Menai Strait, was one of his favourite places to stay. They in turn thanked him for a weekend of ‘superb wines and delicious meals . . . gourmandising and good company and talk.’62, fn8
Jenkins had inexhaustible curiosity about places, buildings, countries and people: he loved to compare and contrast, categorise and rank them. So he enjoyed the non-stop travel around the Community and beyond. In addition to the constant meetings in his role as President, he delivered an enormous number of speeches, addresses and semi-academic lectures at universities and ceremonies of all sorts all over the world. His diary is thus an exhaustive record of flights and train journeys, meetings and meals, commenting favourably or unfavourably on the airlines, hotels, hospitality and habits of different countries. He loved to compare the varying diplomatic protocol between the smaller countries of Europe and the large – the grand palaces, blank modern conference centres or nineteenth-century suburban châteaux where European Councils were staged with more or less pomp; the French motards who swept important dignitaries though the Paris traffic at hair-raising speed; the fact that the Prime Minister of Luxembourg could eat quite modestly in an ordinary restaurant without anyone batting an eyelid; the informality of the Dutch or Spanish royals compared with the stuffiness of the British court; or the etiquette of inspecting guards of honour at the Vatican or the Elysée. All this was material for his amused observation. He pretended to mock, but really loved it when he was awarded honours such as the Grand Cross of Charles III, which he was given by the King of Spain for opening the negotiations for Spanish entry into the Community – ‘a splendid decoration with an enormous blue and white sash, though of course one can think of no possible occasion when one could wear it’.64, fn9 He was ‘slightly irritated’ when he subsequently had to decline a grand Italian decoration, ‘owing to the ridiculous British Government rules . . . about not accepting foreign decorations’.66
Above all, as a biographer and keen observer of global politics Jenkins relished the opportunity to meet, talk with and critically assess all the great men and women of his day, from Giscard, Schmidt and Mrs Thatcher to Jimmy Carter, Deng Xiaoping, Pope John Paul II and Indira Gandhi, as well as a lot of lesser lights. He did this with the self-confidence of one who clearly saw himself as their equal, if not superior, judging them for intelligence and penetration – often admiring, sometimes a touch patronising and curtly dismissive of those he considered second-rate. A typical snap judgement was that on Al Haig, supreme NATO commander in Europe 1974–9 and later Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State:
Haig appeared as usual as a nice man, plenty to say, right-wing views but not offensively so. He has been a good SHAPE commander and believes, though I have my doubts, that he may have a great political future, but he is not to my mind a great man.67
Pope John Paul he found disappointing:
He has a wonderful smile and, even without the smile, looks agreeable (forceful as well) and made of very good material . . . While it was a much more agreeable, intimate talk than I had ever had with either of the two previous Popes whom I have met, the sheer human and intellectual impact on me was less than I expected.68
Deng Xiaoping, however, with whom he had ‘one and half hours of extremely fast, taut, intensive conversation’ in Peking in 1979 – through an interpreter, obviously – impressed him:
Compared with when I had last seen him five and a half years ago . . . Deng looked younger . . . and he has gained enormously in authority. He is now an extremely tough, impressive personality by the highest world standards, with a great grasp of the details of international affairs, accompanied of course by an extrem
ely hard line.69
One leader with whom he got on particularly well – with no language barrier – was Garret FitzGerald, Irish Foreign Minister during Jenkins’ first year in Brussels and later Taoiseach. ‘He listens well, is serious, and takes in what is said.’70 This was always an important attribute, in Jenkins’ book. Of his old friend Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore he wrote in 1979: ‘Harry Lee may have political faults, but he is almost unique amongst world leaders in being an extremely good talker and a very good listener as well.’71 Reviewing FitzGerald’s memoirs more than a decade later, Jenkins recalled almost enviously his effortless cosmopolitanism when he spoke in excellent, elegant French at the opening of the new European Parliament building in Strasbourg. ‘There, I thought, spoke the Ireland of Joyce and Synge and the Countess Markiewicz . . . It was he who made me feel provincial.’72 It was not often that Jenkins, the great European and world statesman, admitted to feeling provincial!
He travelled a good deal beyond Europe in these years: to America frequently, as always, but also on official visits to Japan in 1977; to Sudan and Egypt (a semi-holiday, accompanied by Jennifer and Laura Grenfell, as well as Hayden Phillips), and Canada in 1978 (plus Greenland, which as a province of Denmark was then part of the EEC); to three West African countries – Senegal, Mali and Ghana – in January 1979 (which confirmed that Africa was not his favourite continent); to China in February; to Japan again (for the Tokyo G7 summit in June); to Egypt again in October; and to India in 1980. All these trips he described in his diary in the political travelogue style he had developed in the 1950s, recounting not only his meetings with the local leaders, but his impressions of the country, various sightseeing adventures (riding an elephant in India, for instance) and innumerable more or less ghastly meals. One of the most spectacular was in Timbuctoo:
We had a rather nasty lunch in a rather nasty hotel. After having consumed bits of three or four courses I assumed that the lunch was over, but there was a sudden stirring at the windows which were thrown open . . . and in came the most enormous roast camel, trussed like a sort of monstrous turkey, though about seventeen times as big, borne in upon a stretcher and laid down with great cheering. Then they performed the old desert trick of taking a whole roast sheep out of the inside of the camel, a whole roast chicken out of the inside of the sheep, a little pigeonneau out of the inside of the chicken, and an egg out of that, and one had to eat a little of everything. The camel seemed to me to have rather a bland taste, not nearly as objectionable as its milk. Then back to Bamoko for a Government dinner with speeches and the presentation to me of another Grand Croix du Legion d’Honneur.73
Most reviewers of his European Diary commented on Jenkins’ stamina. But in fact the constant flying, with high-level meetings to be prepared for and speeches to be made as well as the heavy eating and drinking, was a considerable strain on his health. Behind the urbane manner he was actually very highly strung. He expended a lot of nervous energy before any sort of encounter, after which he would be physically and emotionally drained and would need time to recover. ‘An hour and twenty minutes of detailed conversation with a Head of State,’ he wrote after his first official meeting with Giscard, ‘is quite exhausting’ – even though on this occasion Giscard deigned to speak English (‘and spoke it very well’);74 while even a televised interview with half a dozen European journalists would require ‘about 36 hours of mental and psychological preparation’.75 His morale was always surprisingly fragile and sometimes it cracked. In December 1977, for instance, he recorded that he woke at five in the morning feeling under-prepared for a European Council. ‘I haven’t had such a gloomy panicky morning for a long time.’ Jennifer had to postpone her return to London in order to help him pull himself together.76 In fact it went perfectly well. But as late as July 1979 he still confessed to suffering weekly attacks of gloom lasting twenty-four hours. ‘However it is sustainable if it isn’t more than that out of a week.’77
Between engagements he frequently went back to the rue de Praetère or his hotel for a sleep in the afternoon (this was a detail he omitted from the published diary). And he worried constantly about his health. Practically every time he visited London he fitted in a visit to his Harley Street doctor – an elderly Austrian named Gottfried – to have his blood pressure checked. He knew he ate and drank and smoked too much, but was incapable of giving up. In 1977 he tried to give up cigars for Lent (‘even with the temptation of free Commission cigars’); but he lasted only eight days.78 So that summer at East Hendred he took up running as a way of trying to look after himself. Like everything else, he took it very seriously:
Instead of going for a walk I decided to attempt a jogging session which had been recommended to me as producing five times more exercise per minute than walking. Accordingly jogged round the croquet lawn, with a few pauses, for two miles between 8.40 and 9.00: considerable exhaustion but good liver effect afterwards.79
Back in Brussels in September he forced himself to carry on his exercise regime, meticulously recorded. He would leave home at 8.15, walk for twenty-one minutes through the Bois de la Cambre to the lake, where he would jog for seven and a half minutes, walk for two to two and a half and jog for another six and a half, ‘before collapsing in the car and being driven back to the Rue de Praetère with the newspapers for bath, breakfast [and] newspaper reading’. After this, he was ‘rather late in the office, but these times suit my pattern and I think it is well worth it in terms of effectiveness when one gets there’.80 After a while he started being driven to the Bois as well as back: but he kept up his routine, with some variations, most of the time he was in Brussels, except when it snowed or he had hurt his ankle or felt otherwise unwell, or when an assassination scare led the police to urge him to vary it. His friends were satirical about his ‘new addiction’ (as Nicko Henderson called it). ‘Every morning he seeks redemption from overeating and overdrinking by jogging for two miles in the Bois,’ John Grigg reported to his wife. ‘I only hope the exertion won’t be too much for him.’81
By the end of 1978 his blood pressure was down; but then he started suffering from debilitating colon pain, and by early 1980 his blood pressure was high again and he was getting headaches. Gottfried had retired, forcing him to find a new doctor named Bott (recommended by Solly Zuckerman) whom he did not like: he was ‘too bouncing, too English’ and wore an Old Harrovian tie (‘always a bad sign’).82 So he went back to Gottfried, now semi-retired in Wimbledon – ‘creeping back to him in a period of worry, rather like somebody going back to their wife’.83 Gottfried confirmed that his blood pressure was up, ‘not dangerously so but higher than it ought to be, I think 170 over 110’, and put him on a heavy dose of pills.84 The next month Jennifer persuaded him to go on a diet. For a few weeks he ate light lunches, with white wine or Vittel, and sometimes no dinner, which seemed to do the trick. But by July the colon pain was back, he was sleeping badly and getting depressed again as the end of his time in Brussels loomed. In August, with much trepidation, he saw a specialist who found nothing seriously wrong. ‘Really rather an anticlimax,’ Jenkins reflected characteristically. ‘One of those visits which are very satisfactory at the time, but a little less so subsequently. At first you are suffused with the relief of a negative diagnosis, but after a bit realise that you have not been cured.’85 The truth is that Jenkins was bit of a hypochondriac, and his pains were probably largely psychosomatic. In October Dr Bott – to whom he had to return when Gottfried finally retired to Switzerland – found his blood pressure improved again; but he never seriously reformed his eating and drinking habits.
Jenkins used up so much nervous energy in his ceaseless round of travel, work and equally strenuous relaxation that he needed his summer holidays to recover; though by most people’s standards he worked pretty hard on holiday too. With his compulsion to account for every minute of his days he drew up charts meticulously recording how many hours he had spent on different activities – work, exercise and reading – and what books he had read.
He usually worked in one form or another for four or five hours a day, divided between a certain amount of unavoidable Commission work, English reading, French reading, writing (articles, reviews and letters) and dictating and correcting his diary, which he took very seriously. He also ran, walked or (depending on whom he was staying with) swam a certain number of miles or lengths every day, and played tennis and/or croquet. The rest of the day would be taken up with lunching and sightseeing. Most years his holiday reading comprised around a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction. In 1978, for instance – staying with the Beaumarchaises at their country house in the Pyrenees – he got through six contemporary novels (Barbara Pym, Kingsley Amis, Edna O’Brien, J.I.M. Stewart, Angela Huth and – in French – Simenon); two newly published memoirs (Lord Drogheda and Robert Mark), which he was reviewing; three biographies (Arthur Schlesinger’s Robert Kennedy, Robert Gittings’ Young Thomas Hardy and Charles Douglas-Home’s Evelyn Baring); and (in typescript) a book on Birmingham by Joan Zuckerman for which he had undertaken to write a preface.86 He recorded a similar list every year for the rest of his life. In 1980 (in Italy with the Bonham Carters) he read several books about Franklin Roosevelt, but also the latest novels by Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym and Angus Wilson, Graham Greene’s autobiography, three Lytton Strachey essays and one or two other things.87 Year on year it amounts to a formidable catalogue. What other recent politician, with the possible exception of Harold Macmillan in more leisured times, could claim to have read half as much?
Roy Jenkins Page 69
