Roy Jenkins
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Initially he blamed Mrs Thatcher’s senior advisers – Carrington, Armstrong and the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Michael Palliser – for not putting enough pressure on her to accept a good deal. But in the end a settlement was achieved only by outflanking her. The Commission spent the next four weeks working up ‘approximately the same deal in somewhat different form’, lasting for three years instead of two, which was then put to the Council of Foreign Ministers in Brussels at the end of May.118 (It was typical of Jenkins’ mixing business with pleasure that he spent the previous weekend staying with the Gilmours in Tuscany, and then had Gilmour, Michael Jenkins and another senior Foreign Office man, David Hannay, to dinner at rue de Praetère the evening before: there was some ground for French suspicion that he was hand-in-glove with the British.) But it was still not easy. The Council sat from 3.30 to 8.30 p.m., adjourned for dinner till 11.15, followed by an all-night session during which Jenkins and the Italian Foreign Minister, Emilio Colombo, saw all the other foreign ministers individually or (in the case of the Benelux countries) together, with several intervals ‘during which’, Jenkins wrote, ‘I had to sustain myself with Irish whiskey, which I do not much like, for the bar for some curious reason had run out of all other supplies’. There was one highly technical sticking point, concerning agricultural payments, which Carrington could not accept, but which the others (including Jenkins’ three most powerful colleagues in the Commission) all insisted on, which brought them very close to another failure. They resumed after a short break at 7.15 a.m. and finally achieved a breakthrough around 10 a.m. when Emile Noël, ‘with a sudden shaft of subtle brilliance’, came up with a formula that both sides accepted. ‘It was a prodigious achievement,’ Jenkins noted with relief, but one ‘made necessary only by a stubborn woman’s foolish whim a month before. The new settlement was only cosmetically different from that which Mrs Thatcher had turned down at Luxembourg.’119 He gave credit to Colombo for what he called ‘the finest piece of sustained chairmanship I have seen in decades of public life’;120 and to Carrington, who had proved ‘a more skilful and sensible negotiator than his head of government. He knew when to settle. She did not.’121
He went back to the Berlaymont, had ‘a few glasses of champagne to celebrate’, followed by a large breakfast at the rue de Praetère at noon, and got back to East Hendred by two o’clock, where he ‘slept fairly contentedly all the afternoon’.122 Meanwhile Carrington and Gilmour went straight to Chequers, where they received a frosty reception. ‘Had we been bailiffs arriving to take possession of the furniture,’ Gilmour wrote, ‘we would probably have been more cordially received.’123 Furiously Mrs Thatcher accused them of selling Britain down the river and vowed to resign rather than accept their deal. But when they got back to London Gilmour ignored her reaction and briefed the press that they had secured a diplomatic triumph, which the press the next day duly hailed as a victory for her hard bargaining. Grudgingly she had to swallow her objections and accept it. It was still only an interim settlement; but it shelved the issue for three years, by which time two new leaders of the Paris–Bonn axis, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, realised that they would get no peace until Mrs Thatcher got what she wanted and concluded a final deal at Fontainebleau in 1984. By that time Jenkins had long gone from European affairs. But he deserved a lot of credit for the interim achievement. He generously acknowledged the role of Colombo and Carrington; but Carrington gave much of it to him. ‘You were splendid on Thursday–Friday,’ he wrote on 2 June. ‘It would not have been possible without you & your advice and experience . . . I feel as if a black cloud has been lifted off the top of my head. And for you it means a tremendous success as you near the end of your term as President.’124
But Jenkins still felt it was an unnecessary row, which not only soured his last year in Brussels but blighted Britain’s relations with Europe for years to come. He had hoped that the return of a Conservative government would bring a more positive British attitude to the Community after the ambivalence of Wilson and Callaghan; instead the row over the budget stoked Mrs Thatcher’s latent suspicion and contempt for Europe and set her on the Euro-bashing path which led her by the end of the decade – and eventually most of the Tory Party – into full-blown Europhobia. More widely, Jenkins thought it ‘a dreadful diversion of energies’, which damaged the whole Community. If only it could have been settled earlier, he reflected in an encomium to Emile Noël on his retirement in 1987, instead of hijacking successive European Councils in fruitless efforts to devise new formulae to bridge a relatively trivial difference, ‘I am convinced that Europe could have escaped slipping so far behind both the U.S. and Japan, from technological, growth and employment points of view, as it did in the early 1980s.’125
The long-term solution Jenkins was pushing in his last months in office was to reduce the proportion of the budget spent on agriculture – not primarily by cutting back on agriculture, which was politically almost impossible, but by extending Community activity into new areas (industrial, energy, social and regional policy) from which Britain could expect a more equitable return, in pursuit of his goal of a more fully integrated Community. This, he argued in a Winston Churchill memorial lecture in Luxembourg in November 1980, was the next step forward, the only step ‘commensurate with the vision of our founding fathers’. There was no future either in ‘Europe à la carte’, of which British non-participation in the EMS was a lamentable example, or in drift. ‘Some governments,’ he warned, mentioning no names, ‘will wish simply to patch things up, shrink from tackling the agricultural problem, and leave the imbalance of the budget to be settled by a continuing series of ad hoc arrangements.’ ‘The most difficult and most desirable course’, on the contrary, would involve ‘a substantial reshaping of both our revenue system and our expenditure system’. The size of the budget, he proposed, should be tripled – from 0.8 per cent to 2–2.5 per cent of the Community’s total GNP – by transferring to the Community industrial and social functions at present funded nationally. The Community’s resources should be increased primarily by raising from 1 per cent to perhaps 3 per cent the proportion of each member’s VAT payable to it; there might also be a tax on imported oil (which would benefit Britain as an oil exporter). This, as he had stressed in his Florence lecture in 1979, would still be very little compared with a true political union like the United States, where federal expenditure accounted for 25 per cent of GNP; but it would still be enough to transform the EEC from ‘an agricultural community with political trimmings’ into something much more all-embracing. ‘Here is the means,’ Jenkins proposed, ‘by which we can on the one hand deal with the problems of economic divergence and the future industrial base, and on the other establish that better balance within the budget which is indispensable.’ It could not, he acknowledged, be done overnight. ‘But I strongly believe that we should set ourselves on the budgetary path which would permit the development of a Community of this scale and function.’126
Mrs Thatcher, unsurprisingly, did not buy this vision at his last meeting with her on 3 November.127 But neither did anyone else – then or later. With all the developments that have taken place since Jenkins’ time – extension of the single market, the Social Chapter and numerous other harmonising directives leading to the evolution of the European Economic Community into the European Union in 1992 and the adoption of the single currency in 2000 – the EU budget still comprises no more than 1 per cent of the now twenty-seven members’ total GNP (though the share consumed by agriculture has been gradually reduced). So Jenkins left Brussels at the end of 1980 with a considerable sense of frustration. Even the EMS was not developing as fast as he had hoped after its initially rapid launch. In a valedictory statement to the Luxembourg European Council on 2 December he listed what he saw as his achievements. The EMS was certainly one: ‘a modest but substantial’ success, which had already made the EEC ‘an island of monetary stability’ in an unstable world. The directly elected Parliament was another, though after
a good start in 1979 when it had attracted a number of major European figures, including several past and future prime ministers, who briefly turned it into something like a real parliament, it quickly relapsed into bickering anonymity.fn12 A third was the Lomé II agreement with Third World countries in which Jenkins himself played little part, but which, he congratulated himself, had ‘successfully resisted protectionism’.132
Enlargement was a fourth achievement about which he was more ambivalent than he could let on. He was always dubious about the imminent admission of Greece (‘in my view the least qualified for membership’), despite his high opinion of its Prime Minister, Konstantin Karamanlis, and not much more positive about Spain and Portugal, with whom negotiations were opened under his presidency, which led to their joining in 1986.133 He had no doubt that they must all be admitted for political reasons, to cement democracy as they emerged from recent dictatorships. ‘To keep them out would involve the Community betraying its purposes . . . But I had no illusions,’ he confessed in 1987, ‘about the additional strain which increases in numbers would put upon the already creaking decision-making process.’ He hoped that the accession of new members would make it more necessary to ‘strengthen the sinews’ of the Community; but he recognised that they could simply make it more unworkable, and he was ‘very cautious’ about further enlargement, which might end up with nothing but an enlarged customs union.134 Above all he agreed with Giscard in 1978 that Turkey was not eligible for membership, quite simply because it was ‘not a European country’.135
‘About the future,’ he confessed, ‘I am apprehensive, although certainly not despairing. I do not think we can stand still . . . Yet as yet there is no consensus emerging between Governments as to how we should move forward.’136 This underlined, after four years’ experience, the limitations of the job he had taken on in 1977. He had hoped to be able to make more of a difference. But the President of the Commission was only the servant of his political masters: he had no independent powers of his own to drive things forward. On first coming into office he had spoken ambitiously of ‘grafting the idea of Europe into the lives of the people’, so that the individual citizens of the nine nations should become aware of the EEC ‘not as an abstraction . . . but as a continuum extending from world influence to job opportunity’.137 Four years later he confessed in his final press conference that he had not succeeded in changing the image of the Commission as a remote and irrelevant bureaucracy. In a valedictory report the Brussels correspondent of The Times voiced the disappointment of those who had expected him to make a bigger impact:
Those who had hailed his arrival in Brussels . . . looked to him for more than the role of a clubbable honest broker. They were hoping for a President who would be prepared to court the wrath of member governments in defence of policies that amounted to more than the lowest common denominator of what was acceptable in national capitals. To the disappointment of many, Mr Jenkins seldom put his head above the parapet.138
Jenkins rejected this criticism. He had learned the hard way, he said, that ‘you have to proceed by persuading governments. It would be nice to think that you could operate by generating a tide of public opinion that would sweep governments aside. But that is an illusion.’139 What success he had was indeed achieved by working directly with, and on, the heads of government. From that point of view his victory over Giscard in establishing his right to be present and play an active role not only at EEC but also at international summits was perhaps his most important legacy to his successors. His tireless travelling and high-level networking undoubtedly raised the profile of Europe on the world stage. Jenkins never pretended to take much interest in running or reforming the Brussels machine – though here again it was the heads of government who in his last year blocked the implementation of the Spierenburg Report, which recommended a number of sensible improvements. But the EEC had had faceless technocrats before – such as his predecessor François Ortoli – good at oiling the bureaucratic wheels, but lacking the ambition or the political weight to do much more. Jenkins was appointed as a politician, and as a politician he probably had as much success as could be expected with no independent base of his own, wholly dependent on whatever personal influence he could bring to bear on Schmidt and Giscard, Callaghan and Mrs Thatcher. He ducked the problem of agricultural spending, which did not excite him. But he did launch, in defiance of the cautious wisdom of the time, one big idea and saw it carried at least partly into effect. That is not a lot to show for four years: but that is the nature of international organisations. It is arguably a waste of a major politician to condemn him to the frustrations of Brussels; and yet it takes a major politician to achieve even as little as Jenkins did. Of his five successors, only Jacques Delors has made more impact.
‘I have lost a little of my superficial European idealism,’ he confessed. ‘But I have lost none of my underlying conviction that a united Europe is essential for itself, for every one of the member states, and for the world.’140 ‘I am glad I came,’ he told his farewell press conference on 5 January 1981, ‘and glad that I did the job. I would not have wished to spend the past four years otherwise.’141 At the end of his life he still looked back on them as ‘on balance a well worthwhile segment of my life’.142 But he had never seen Brussels as more than an interlude. And the next day – just two months after his sixtieth birthday – he returned to Britain to embark on the boldest gamble of his political life.
* * *
fn1 At the Other Club in February 1978 Jenkins was the recipient of Willie Whitelaw telling him ‘how absolutely ghastly life was with that awful woman’ and asking his advice on whether he should resign from the Shadow Cabinet. Jenkins advised him not to resign, but to ‘distance yourself’.2
fn2 They bought this flat in 1977 for £55,000 and sold it shortly before Roy’s death for £1.25 million – an almost twenty-three-fold increase over twenty-five years.
fn3 Less diplomatically Wilson had let slip in an interview that his wife intended to vote for Mrs Thatcher. A few days after the election Jenkins met them both at an Open University degree ceremony in London where ‘Mary, amazingly, more or less confirmed the story . . . She said that she had to deny it, “which meant that I couldn’t vote for her” [Mrs Thatcher] – the clear implication being that she would otherwise have done so.’19
fn4 He had made at least one previous foray onto this territory since coming to Brussels: a lecture at the Royal Institution in November 1977, which was reprinted in Encounter in February 1978 under the broad title ‘What’s Wrong and What Could be Set Right: Reflections after 29 Years in Parliament’.24 But this attracted little attention.
fn5 Birmingham, Northfield, a previously safe Labour seat which had fallen to the Tories in May, was said to have put out feelers, ‘although I don’t think that would attract me, even if a Labour seat did at all’.32
fn6 An example of those he would have classified as ‘dotty’ came from a Mrs Brown, telling him not to come back to Britain: ‘We had enough of you when you were here before, with your policy of turning this country into a BLACK STATE, after which you marched your arse off to Brussels . . . You are a useless money and glory-grabbing dolt . . . In fact you are hated by many people in this country.’43
fn7 Comme Chez Soi was ‘spectacularly good and spectacularly expensive’. Dinner for four in December 1977 cost £160.50 But that did not stop Jenkins going there remarkably frequently.
fn8 Henry Anglesey’s eccentricity manifested itself in meticulously hand-decorated postcards, which he used to send, sometimes six or seven at a time, to Roy and Jennifer, full of the most florid and archaic compliments.63
fn9 In Twelve Cities he wrote that he did sometimes wear it to Buckingham Palace banquets, ‘partly as a tease and partly as a bit of peacockery’.65
fn10 He had already noted Mrs Thatcher’s lack of interest in wine at the Tokyo G7 in June, when he was seated opposite her at dinner. ‘I decided during dinner that my new friend Mrs Thatcher . . . doesn�
�t know very much about wine because she refused the Lafite and also asked Giscard whether the Dom Perignon was French champagne. Furthermore when Giscard responded to this . . . by asking whether they had a good wine cellar at Downing Street, she said “Alas, no”, whereas the wine cellar in effect is Government hospitality, which is extremely good and far better than anything you ever get from the French Government.’94
fn11 Three months later Granada Television staged a dramatised enactment of the Dublin summit, with journalists playing the leaders, which Jenkins thought ‘remarkably good’. Sarah Hogg took the part of Mrs Thatcher ‘in a way worthy of Sarah Bernhardt’, and Schmidt and Giscard were equally convincing. ‘Stephen Milligan played me, accurately in substance, but I thought without style.’105
fn12 He had been ‘secretly dreading direct elections,’ Jenkins told David Butler, ‘and had feared that they would be a terrible fiasco and that the new Parliament would be a dreadful anti-climax’. But initially he felt he had been wrong. ‘There was far more life, and one’s speeches got a better response. To make a speech to an audience including Brandt, Berlinguer, Craxi, Chirac, Debré, Tindemans and Madame Veil . . . was a quite different experience from speaking to the rather lack-lustre figures in the old Parliament.’128 But Barbara Castle – who as a lifelong anti-Marketeer had rather surprisingly got herself elected to the new parliament – gave a rather different impression in her memoirs, recalling Jenkins replying to a prim and tedious debate in which members read their speeches onto the record before going off to dinner. ‘When Roy rose to reply about 10 pm, there were about five MEPs left in the chamber, including me. Roy was furious and stumbled angrily through his detailed reply.’ Years later she teased him: ‘“You know, Roy, you hated the European Parliament.” He replied, with one of those slow smiles of his, “Barbara, you cannot expect me to abandon the beliefs of a lifetime.”’129