European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  On the journey the weather for the first time since our arrival began to improve. As we pulled out of Brussels there was a clear sky with some snow on the ground, and we travelled, working hard on the speech the whole way, through a dramatic sunset and then up through the Ardennes with heavy snow and to Luxembourg just after 6.30. I had the speech complete by the time we arrived and went straight to the unsatisfactory Aerogolf Hotel; unsatisfactory because the food was indifferent, the service slow, and the windows would not open, a typical new hotel.

  TUESDAY, 11 JANUARY. Luxembourg.

  An agreeable morning with deep and hard freezing snow and a good light, but the Aerogolf managed to destroy the effect of the light by having tinted windows. At 10.45 I went to the European Parliament building to call on Georges Spénale, the French Socialist deputy for the Tarn2 and President of the Parliament. Then I made a courtesy call on Kutscher,3 the President of the European Court, before the formal ceremony of taking the oath of office at 11.30. During this call he gave me his speech which was a speech of substance with happily a reference to President Madison which I was able to use as a peg to work in the rather good quotations from Chief Justice Marshall with which Anthony Lester4 had provided me.

  The Justices and I all assembled in an ante-room where they put on their impressive purple robes, which are a mixture of those used by the Hague Court and those used by the German Federal Court at Karlsruhe. A few moments later we went into the main building before an audience of about two hundred people. Kutscher, an agreeable and impressive man, made his speech seated from the bench and I then made a response of about eight minutes, and the content, particularly the Lester parts, was clearly welcome to the Justices who responded appropriately.

  We then took the oaths of office. I saw in some newspaper a criticism that I had read mine in English and not in French. As, however, it was presented to me in English, as I would have wished, I had little choice, and I do not think that I could have been unduly faulted on grounds of insularity as Burke chose to read his in Erse, and Vredeling in Dutch. Kutscher then gave us a very good lunch, though I was not greatly able to appreciate it owing to my concentration on the speech for the afternoon to the European Parliament.

  The Parliament met remarkably punctually by European standards and I was on my feet at six minutes past three. The speech lasted exactly thirty-two minutes, only two minutes longer than I had been advised was the optimum. I had put a lot of effort into it and it went reasonably well. At the end there was a good deal of applause, though not I thought overwhelming, but I was told subsequently by Noël that the Parliament was not much given to applause and that I could regard the speech as une grande réussite, which was at least polite. The press was also satisfactory. Later that evening I had a thirty-five-minute television panel interview with six journalists from a variety of European countries and which was sent out by a television network in each of the member countries. I was exhausted by this time, and even the English words were not coming easily to me, let alone the French ones at the end.

  WEDNESDAY,, 12 JANUARY. Luxembourg and Brussels

  We had a fairly formal meeting of the Commission in the Kirchberg (Commission office in Luxembourg) at 9.00 before the sitting of Parliament at 10.00.

  In the Parliament there were questions to the Council of Ministers5 which were answered very well by Crosland6 and then questions to the Commission, one of which was for me. I then listened to Crosland’s speech, which was too long–forty-five minutes–cautious in tone, but extremely interesting in analysis and on the whole well received, though not exactly with positive enthusiasm. Then a lunch in honour of the Commission given by the President of the European Parliament. I was sitting opposite Spénale across a narrow table. He had Crosland on one side of him, Ortoli on the other side, and I had Kutscher on my left-hand side so that we were four Presidents carrés. It was a beautiful day, with a sparkling view to the wide horizons of the surrounding snow-covered countryside. Not much political conversation: it was mostly a mixture of geography and culture, with Ortoli becoming tremendously animated, agreeable and informed about the monuments of south-west France and indeed of Italy. Brief speeches at the end of the lunch.

  Seven o’clock reception for me given by the Socialist Group under the presidency of Fellermaier.7 TEE to Brussels, dining in the Swiss restaurant car which had started from Zurich. Home at 10.45, back out of the snow and glittering sun of Luxembourg into the murk of Brussels.

  THURSDAY, 13 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Lunch at the adjacent Charlemagne (Council of Ministers) building with the members of COREPER (the ambassadors or permanent representatives of the member countries). I made a few introductory remarks. The discussion was a good tutorial for me which lasted until well after 3 o’clock.

  By that afternoon, back at the office, I was applying myself determinedly to the allocations of director-generalships. These have to be balanced almost as carefully as Commission portfolios.

  FRIDAY, 14 JANUARY. Brussels.

  A series of meetings with Commissioners during the morning, culminating with Ortoli from 12.00. A very typical Ortoli interview. I went to see him rather than vice versa, because I had been told that his room had much the best furniture in the building, and for redoing mine I wanted to see it. He was pleased with this, so we started well. I then asked him his general views about economic and monetary policy and he replied characteristically, requiring a little time to get going and then speaking with great lucidity and analytical precision, but the analysis leading to no remedies. There is a certain French intellectual view that once you have analysed a problem you have done as much as anyone can expect you to do about it.

  Commission meeting for two and a half hours in the afternoon. We disposed of a good deal of business, including some reports from Haferkamp on the external scene and on the prospects for Vice-President Mondale’s8 visit. Then we dealt with Gundelach’s fish, on which he made a very good presentation, and there was no great difficulty in getting it through as he wished.

  Then Cheysson to see me to describe the meeting which he had had with Giscard9 that morning at the Elysée. Giscard, he said, had not been in a very good mood, not surprisingly in view of his press conference (difficult because of the Daoud10 affair) looming up for Monday. Nonetheless Cheysson said he had two pieces of rather good news from him, though they cannot have been very good for I forget what they were.

  They were outweighed by his piece of bad news, which was that the French Government would oppose Commission representation at the Carter-convened Summit, whenever that took place. He said that Giscard himself was rather in favour of such representation, but that Barre11 was firmly against, not on personal but on institutional grounds, and that Giscard, being now in a weak position and also, he added, rather a weak man, whereas Barre was a stronger man, would probably give way to him, though whether Giscard would hold this position would depend upon how strongly the other members of the Community made contrary representations.

  Cheyssons and Tinés12 and Roger Beetham and Laura to dine, rue de Praetère.

  SATURDAY, 15 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Three hours of solid paper work until 1 o’clock. We had intended to lunch in the country, but the weather was so awful that there seemed no point in driving through the sodden suburban battlegrounds of Brussels. So we went to Bernard, a fish restaurant above a serious fish shop near the Porte de Namur. A cinema in the afternoon, for the first time for several years.

  MONDAY, 17 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Jennifer and I had Garret Fitzgerald,13 the Irish Foreign Minister, to dinner. The main object was to repair relations which might have been breached by the trouble in the Irish press about Burke’s portfolio, though Fitzgerald is no great partisan of Burke’s, and also to discuss the Irish director-generalship. No problem about relations.

  TUESDAY, 18 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Suddenly a fine, cold winter’s day. My first meeting of the Council of Ministers at 10.15. A rather good discussion o
n the accession of Portugal. Then back to the Berlaymont for a meeting of eight Commissioners in preparation for Mondale’s visit. Fairly satisfactory, brisk going over of the brief. Then to the Château de Val Duchesse14 for a luncheon given by the Council for the signature of the agreement with the Mashrek countries, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Sat in the Council for Gundelach’s excellent opening of the Fish discussion. Crosland a pretty effective chairman. David Owen,15 though going on about one obscure point of very doubtful validity, also made a good impression around the table.

  WEDNESDAY, 19 JANUARY. Brussels.

  A Commission meeting which was due to start at 10.00 and which I was able to get started, by an effort, by 10.10. A totally punctual start is a Brussels impossibility. We spent the morning on a variety of business, by far the most important aspects of which were dominated by Gundelach. He reported on the Fish Council and then went on to outline in a masterly half-hour exposé his thoughts about the agricultural price-fixing, and indeed about medium-term agricultural questions. Then we went into restricted session on the wretched subject of the disposition of director-generalships, and I circulated my proposals. We lunched together, unusually, in the Commission dining room, and had some fairly relaxed conversation there until we reassembled at 3.40 and came down to the real hard knots about directorates-general. However, we had untied quite a lot of them by about 6.30. One of our rue de Praetère dinner parties mainly for Commissioners plus wives, with the Haferkamps and the Giolittis.

  THURSDAY, 20 JANUARY. Brussels.

  A special Commission meeting for an informal tour d’horizon in the Château Ste Anne. I said we would start on internal Community matters as we had discussed these less than external ones in the Commission, and got Ortoli to open; strong on logical analysis as usual but not much suggestion of a way forward. We then went round the room with nine speakers before lunch. So far as intellectual content was concerned, Ortoli was probably the best, Davignon the second, and Tugendhat the third best.

  We then had an enormously long speech from Natali about direct elections and enlargement. Cheysson then spoke quite well and much shorter, and Haferkamp (surprisingly) very well and for a still briefer time. I summed up, saying that enlargement could be a disaster unless we quickly worked out a programme for handling it in the Commission.

  FRIDAY, 21 JANUARY. Brussels.

  An official visit from President Mobutu of Zaïre. Cheysson and I went down to meet him at the front door and conducted him up in due state to my room, where we had a twenty-minute talk before going to join what was nominally the full Commission but was in fact five members plus a number of Directors-General brought in to fill up the table. The talk with him went only moderately well. He handled himself quite impressively, but not friendlily. He spoke no English and his Belgian French was not very easy to dance in step with because he was completely unforgiving of all mistakes and hesitations made by others, particularly no doubt white others. We then went to the Commission room, where I made a six- or seven-minute speech of welcome to him. Mobutu then responded for about fifteen minutes, and talked well. He made more sense than he had done in my room, where he had launched a pretty lunatic idea, calling for the immediate mounting of a European expeditionary force to deal with Rhodesia, under British command he implied, but possibly supported by a few francs-tireurs which he would be glad to supply. An hour’s discussion with him and I then went off to the Château de Val Duchesse to greet him on his arrival for the official luncheon.

  This was a peculiarly disagreeable occasion. I really disliked sitting next to him more than to almost anyone else I have recently encountered. Fortunately on the other side of me I had the thoroughly agreeable Ambassador from Trinidad and Tobago, but on the other side of Mobutu there was a silent and austere-looking Fleming (a Vice-President of the European Investment Bank). Mobutu gave practically nothing at lunch. I tried almost every subject under the sun. I must have opened about twenty with him -and got nowhere of any interest on any of them, and began to feel, which is not always the case, that my French was more and more inadequate.

  Perhaps his ill-humour was partly due to the fact that in helping myself to the fish course I had managed to get a large unfilleted sole to come apart on the plate with a splash of sauce over one of his holy hands. As he apparently regards himself as a near God-like figure and appears on television in Zaïre coming out of the clouds, no doubt this was almost sacrilege. However, the impression I had towards the end of lunch was that he was a man of a certain effectiveness, considerable disagreeableness, with no general interests at all, certainly not in anything historical, geographical, not really much in what was going on in Europe or the rest of the world, not even interested in his own life, since most of the early parts of it were not glorious enough for him to wish to recall them.

  At the end of lunch I made a two-minute speech and then, to the great dismay of Cheysson, Mobutu did what apparently he is quite inclined to do, which was not to respond to it himself but to get his Foreign Minister16 to do so. I did not mind this alleged slight nearly as much as others appeared to—what I minded was having an extremely boring hour and a half at the table with Mobutu–after which I conducted him downstairs fairly chillily, delivered him to his press conference and escaped as quickly as I could.

  Back at the Berlaymont I saw the New Zealand Ambassador (Ian Stewart), a nice, very pro-European Community man who was about to leave reluctantly and go back to live in New Zealand for the first time in ten years. I never expected to be so pro-’white Commonwealth’.

  SATURDAY, 22 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Woke feeling more buoyant than at any time since arrival. Two hours’ French before breakfast, two hours on Commission papers after breakfast, before leaving with Jennifer at 11.45 to drive ourselves to Namur, my first substantial drive in Belgium. Drove up most of the way to the Citadel, a fine dominating complex with a lot of fortifications by Vauban above the junction of the Sambre and the Meuse. There we walked for three miles before descending to the town for lunch. Afterwards a quick walk round the centre ville, which has a few attractive things in it, but the whole badly spoiled by redevelopment. The general atmosphere was slightly reminiscent of Aylesbury, or Gloucester without the cathedral.

  SUNDAY, 23 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Bill Rodgers17 arrived to spend twenty-four hours. Took him to lunch at Groenendaal, which was good in a heavy Flemish way, immensely slow, with very serious eating going on all around us. At 4 o’clock we were almost the first people to leave. Bill was enjoyable, not obsessed by English politics, but giving me a good insight into what was going on, as usual perhaps a little more optimistic than circumstances warranted, but not ludicrously so. He was not enchanted by the Cabinet, but enjoying the Ministry of Transport. It was a satisfactory talk, no chasm created by the separation of our paths. We had the Tugendhats to dinner with him, plus Laura (Grenfell). Both the Tugendhats very nice; he in my view is turning out to be an excellent Commissioner.

  MONDAY, 24 JANUARY. Brussels.

  An audience with the King of the Belgians at 10 o’clock. It was in the Palais de Bruxelles in the city, which he uses entirely for business purposes, living all the time at Laeken, five miles away. The Palais de Bruxelles is almost on the scale of Buckingham Palace, built I suppose at about the same time (1840). Grand rooms, rather sparsely furnished, no ornaments or signs of life about it. I was conducted in to him and found an agreeable-looking, shy, young middle-aged man, whose whole manner was quite unlike that of any member of the British Royal Family, less ‘royal’ I suppose is the simplest description. Talking to him was remarkably like talking to David Astor;18 one had the same feeling of intelligent involvement, sense of worry and concern with ‘the world on his shoulders’, interest in a wide range of subjects and anxious in a slightly unchannelled way to do something about them.

  We had fifty minutes’ conversation, mostly in English though he occasionally lapsed into French. He asked a great deal about the work of the Commission, the new Comm
issioners, how I saw the future of Europe, and did it out of apparent deep interest. He has a strong commitment to the idea of Europe and cannot understand why governments are so foolish as not to move it forward further. At the end he said he would very much like to come to the Berlaymont, and ‘assist’ (in the French sense) at a meeting of the Commission. I said that we would be delighted to arrange this, thinking that if we could arrange a special meeting for Mobutu we could certainly do one for the King of the Belgians, and asked him to lunch afterwards. He expressed pleasure at all this and saw me off very graciously, conducting me out to my car, which again is very different from Buckingham Palace protocol.

  In the afternoon we had a visit from Vice-President Mondale, which wasn’t bad going on the fifth day in office of the new administration. I received him at the front door at 3 o’clock. We then had an hour’s discussion with five people on each side. The conversation covered an obvious range of subjects and was not particularly deep, but was friendly with a fair mutuality of approach, particularly about a timetable for various meetings, the Summit, the resumption of the North/South dialogue19 etc., and was generally thought by those on our side–perhaps to a greater extent than by me–to have been very satisfactory and worthwhile. I thought we only skimmed the surface of issues, but that was clearly all that he wanted to do at that stage and indeed all that he was briefed to do. But within the limits which he wanted to explore he was well-informed and spoke fluently and confidently without any significant reference to notes.

  He made it clear, to our pleasure, that he was strongly in favour of Community representation at the Summit, and also at the end delivered to me an invitation to go to Washington on an official visit to the President at some reasonably early date. He presented me with an embossed and personally signed copy of Carter’s inaugural address, the oratorical quality of which, such as it was, seemed to me to be somewhat diluted by ending up ‘Thank you very much’, which is not exactly how I think the Gettysburg Address concluded.