by Roy Jenkins
As a result we managed by about 8 o’clock to complete the work, leaving a number of things disagreed, but with substantial accomplishment nonetheless. The rest of the conference was still grinding on, but I decided there was nothing more I could do and therefore rushed down to the Gare du Nord and just caught the 8.30 TEE. A nice journey across northern France on a perfect June evening.
THURSDAY, 2 JUNE. Brussels.
Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia at 11.45, first for a short private talk, then for a formal Commission meeting, and then for lunch at Val Duchesse. Kaunda is a nice, honest and quite interesting man, certainly the best of the African heads of state that I have so far entertained at the Commission, although he harangued us unnecessarily aggressively about Rhodesia.
Dinner with Luns, the NATO Secretary-General, who was in his usual large canine mood. I was struck by how incomparably grander a house the Secretary-General of NATO has than the President of the Commission could possibly afford out of his allegedly so large salary. (The difference of course is that the NATO house is provided and staffed officially.) A male dinner: Haferkamp who arrived late and said practically nothing; Davignon who talked a good deal very sensibly; André de Staercke (famous Belgian ex-diplomat), whom I had not seen since Grimaud, behind St Tropez, in 1966; Pansa Cedronio, the Italian deputy Secretary-General; and Killick, the British Ambassador to NATO. Killick talked a good deal too much in his usual RASC colonel manner and ended up with a spirited defence of South Africa. Stevy Davignon carved him up over this, but at least the fact that he (Killick) did it showed a certain bloody-minded independence.
FRIDAY, 3 JUNE. Brussels, Bonn and East Hendred.
Motored to Bonn to deliver the first in a series of German Marshall Fund Lectures to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Marshall’s Harvard speech. An audience of about two hundred, a lot of ambassadors, a lot of Americans who had come over, Carstens,129 Dohnanyi and a moderately distinguished German gathering. I talked about enlargement and North/South relations. Plane from Düsseldorf to England.
MONDAY, 6 JUNE. East Hendred.
To the Berlins’130 at Headington for a rather grand but highly enjoyable lunch party. Apart from the Berlins and us, the Beaumarchais’, the Asa Briggs’,131 Arnold Goodman132 and Ann Fleming133, Michael and Pam Hartwell,134 Nin Ryan135 and Joe Alsop.
WEDNESDAY, 8 JUNE. Brussels.
Commission all day, but now working quite well and no immense difficulties. The main subject in the morning was Gundelach’s attempt to impose Monetary Compensatory Amounts (MCAs) upon durum wheat (essential for pasta) which provoked a lot of Italian opposition, both Giolitti and Natali speaking with great passion. It was the first time Gundelach had failed to carry the Commission with him when he had been deploying an issue with full force directly within his own field. Following this his extremely ingenious solution for the British pig problem went through, as Asquith would have said ‘on oiled castors’ with merely a little grumble from Vredeling and one or two others, mainly because the Commission could not possibly turn Gundelach down on two agricultural issues running.
Anthony Lewis136 of the New York Times and Crispin and Hayden to an enjoyable lunch, rue de Praetère. After the Commission I saw Davignon for a general round-up, although his preoccupation was his complaints about the laziness of Haferkamp, fully justified but not for the moment at any rate leading to anything very much. Haferkamp is, I fear, without doubt a disappointment and I may have made a mistake in giving him the big external job, although I still do not see a better realistic alternative. Gundelach or Davignon would of course have been individually better, but this would have left the Germans without a major portfolio.
THURSDAY, 9 JUNE. Brussels and Copenhagen.
Philippe Le Mâitre of Le Monde for half an hour to see if I could delicately improve relations with him and therefore Le Monde’s reporting of the Commission, with which we could most certainly do.
To Copenhagen, where we were met on the tarmac by K. B. Andersen, the Foreign Minister, and pouring rain. Drove to the Hôtel d’Angleterre, a nice turn-of-the-century hotel, where I had rather magnificent rooms, though no luggage until after midnight owing to a cock-up, and did a little work there before going to the Prime Minister’s dinner of about fifty. I sat between him (Anker Jorgensen) and K. B. Andersen. Jorgensen neither speaks nor understands English perfectly by any means; he is however an agreeable man with a great deal of sense, pro-Community, and with a strong position in the country; and as one gets to know him better it is not difficult to see why. Speeches, in English, about a quarter of an hour each; fortunately I managed to think up a Hamlet quotation to match his prepared one, but was quite unable to match his Hans Christian Andersen one.
FRIDAY, 10 JUNE. Copenhagen and East Hendred.
A three-mile walk confirmed my view that Copenhagen is both agreeable and handsome. Then a short talk with Jorgensen alone, during which I told him of the plans for the Bonn Summit in the early months of 1978, i.e. during the Danish presidency, but added that I thought it likely that this would in fact have to be postponed because of the imminence of the French elections. I suggested that Jorgensen did not raise the issue of double Community representation, i.e. his possible presence as President of the European Council, as well as mine, for a few months, and he seemed to agree.
Following this there were two large meetings (both in length and size of attendance), the first with the Prime Minister in the chair, and the second under the Foreign Minister. We covered agriculture, with particular reference to MCAs, economic and monetary union, the Snake,137 Tripartite Conference, direct elections and the remote but delicate issue of Greenland’s relations with the Community. The veteran (but not old) Per Haekkerup spoke remarkably well on a whole range of issues.
Then we drove about twenty miles to Fredensborg for the royal lunch with Queen Margrethe. Fredensborg is a large, quite impressive early eighteenth-century palace, with a park on one side, a small town very close to its gates on the other, slightly in this way like a very miniature Versailles. Lunch for about two dozen: the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister -1 drove out with Anker Jørgensen and drove back with K. B. Andersen—plus a few other politicians, also the Prince of Denmark (the Queen’s young French Consort who was in the embassy in London) and Queen Ingrid. They had very decently asked to lunch all the people of my party, including my secretary.
I sat between the two Queens and got on fairly well with both of them. A perfect though remarkably different English from each of them; Queen Margrethe’s more ‘educated’, no doubt the result of Girton, and Queen Ingrid’s more in a traditional upper-class English female mould. Rather curiously there was no politics, not even in the broadest European sense, at lunch, and the conversation was purely social throughout, which was not wholly to the taste of the Danish politicians and a contrast with my visits with Queen Juliana, the King of the Belgians, or the Grand Duke of Luxembourg.
By the end of lunch there had been a remarkable change in the weather. A hazy sun had come out and it had become immensely hot and humid. My crowded press conference at the Community office in Copenhagen was one of the most drenching Turkish baths I had ever been in. Then another talk of nearly an hour and a half with K. B. Andersen. There was one point on which we could not get agreement. We wanted the Danes to hold up their ratification of the Baltic Convention in order that the Community should try and be a party to it. The Germans, who are also a party, are willing to do this, but not the Danes. I found it difficult to know whether my Commission brief was excessively legalistic or not. However, we managed to avoid this degenerating into a nasty argument, and finished up and parted with expressions of goodwill at about 6.30.
This Danish expedition was one of the best of the opening official visits to the capitals; both the two major ministers and several others were well worth talking to; difficulties were not glossed over, and high consideration for the Commission was shown by both the Danish State and the Danish Government.
SUNDAY, 12 JUNE. Ea
st Hendred and London.
To Oxford to lunch in Univ. with Arnold Goodman. Only Arnold and the now very old Goodharts138—the former Master of Univ. They were thoroughly agreeable but a bit out of touch with reality. At one stage Arthur Goodhart asked me if I had ever been to America, which left me slightly breathless. Arnold presided benignly, talking rather well on a number of subjects. One of his advantages is that he is largely audience-insensitive; he talks almost as well whether he has got a sympathetic, comprehending audience or not. Spent another sodden afternoon sitting in front of the East Hendred fire. Drove to Isleworth and dined with the Gilmours,139 plus Anthony Lewis’, Beaumarchais’, Rees-Moggs,140 Robert Blakes141 and Carringtons.142 Enjoyable and interesting dinner.
MONDAY, 13 JUNE. London and Brussels.
Rue de Praetère dinner for the Gough Whitlams (former Labour Prime Minister of Australia). A surprisingly agreeable dinner after a slightly sticky start. Whitlam is most engaging and so is the mammoth Mrs Whitlam. The conversation became general halfway through dinner and he began to talk with extraordinary knowledge and interest about the genealogy of European nineteenth-century royal houses. He is a great expert on who exactly was every Hapsburg relation of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. No detailed discussion about current issues, but brief exchanges of view, with Mrs Whitlam mainly, on Fraser143 whom she was against -not surprisingly—and Peacock144, to whom she was much more favourable.
TUESDAY, 14 JUNE. Strasbourg.
Dinner for the bureau of the Socialist Group with an unsatisfactory conversation led by Fellermaier; they are not an inspiring group and most of the conversation was about some incredibly detailed, pointless, trivial matters of relationship between the Commission and the Parliament. The only man who tried to raise the level a bit, and up to a point succeeded, was John Prescott145
WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE. Strasbourg.
Horrible morning as so often this summer. Lunch for a group of Labour stalwarts and possible candidates brought by Jim Cattermole.146 This was a surprisingly successful occasion. They were lively and good, temporarily raised my spirits and, as David Marquand said afterwards, made one realize what a lot of nice people there still are in the Labour Party.
THURSDAY, 16 JUNE. Strasbourg and Brussels.
Jennifer rang to say that Ladbroke Square had been sold within two hours of being put on the market. Mixed feelings, both because it is one thing putting a house on the market and another to realize that (after twenty-three years) it has gone; and also because its going so quickly makes one think we sold it too cheap.147
FRIDAY, 17 JUNE. Brussels and Bernkastel.
A meeting, followed by lunch, with Malcolm Fraser, the Prime Minister of Australia. He is a rather surly fellow who looks a mixture of the self-confident and the suspicious. What in fact he most reminds me of is a fast bowler on an off day, tall, quite strong, but looking as though throughout a hot afternoon he had been taking very long runs to the wicket and bouncing them down short without getting any result; shirt out, trousers slightly coming down. He was anxious to be awkward and I had to respond once or twice. He came out with a ludicrous theory that we had all been beastly to the Japanese and that, as a result of his talks with Fukuda, he thought that Japan, unless allowed much better access to markets than at present—surely a work of supererogation—would go back to its policies of the thirties, i.e. reversal of alliances, no support for the Western world, possibly moving into the Soviet sphere. I, and I think everybody else, had interpreted Fukuda’s remarks—particularly about the thirties—in London in a totally different sense.
We then moved to lunch and I found Fraser slightly more agreeable. It emerged, most extraordinarily, that although I had begun by saying, ‘I don’t think we have ever met,’ and his agreeing, except to say, ‘Maybe we shook hands,’ it then transpired in the course of lunch, fortunately coming to us both almost simultaneously, that I had in fact been to his house in the country in western Victoria in 1965 when I had been there on my visit as Minister of Aviation. I was driven over for a drink before lunch on the Sunday. Fortunately, as the occasion had been equally non-memorable for both of us, there was no great embarrassment about this. We then moved into a fairly rough discussion round the table which ran until 4 o’clock. An awkward, aggressive man, who does not put his best face forward. His attitudes obviously caused considerable embarrassment both to Peacock, his Foreign Minister, a much smoother man, and to his Ambassador (Sir James Plimsoll and not smooth), but perhaps ambassadors always dislike abrasiveness.
Motored to Bernkastel to join Jennifer and the Annans, who had gone that morning. After dinner at the Hotel zum Post we went to a café where impromptu singing broke out, and I wondered how different it had all been forty-three years before when Noël had first been there. He thought not immensely, apart from more people now—it was a German holiday weekend. The Annans have an extraordinary attachment to Germany, rather surprising in Gaby’s case as she was brought up as a small child in grand Jewish circles in Berlin and left sometime in the 1930s. Noël likes the lederhosen aspect, and had indeed been on a walking tour there in 1934.
SATURDAY, 18 JUNE. Bernkastel.
To the Prüms at Wehlen at 11.00. He is both a substantial wine grower and a substantial wine merchant: a young man, who is a doctor of something or other, aged about forty, living with his mother. He gave us an extraordinarily good selection of Mosel wines to drink throughout the day, ranging from a 1921, through one of the wartime years, to the great 1949, and a whole variety of more recent ones. It taught me a lot about Mosel. It is remarkably unintoxicating because the alcoholic content, which I had long suspected, turned out on investigation to be not more than about 7 per cent. The Prüms live in an oppressive Wilhelmine house, built about 1902, of dark red, sombre appearance—all our wine tasting was done in a very heavy salon and the lunch, rather good, was in a hermetically sealed dining room. His mother, an opera-loving widow, was present at lunch but at nothing else. Then he drove us up to a hill on top of one of his Wehlen vineyards, where we had yet more tasting.
SUNDAY, 19 JUNE. Bernkastel and Brussels.
Motored to Trier (good cathedral and Marx’s birthplace) which we looked round briefly and agreeably; and then on into northern Luxembourg where we had a picnic just on the edge of the rain. In the evening we had a dinner party rue de Praetère for the Annans, with the Tindemans amongst others. After dinner I arranged with Tindemans that he would be glad to attempt a JET mediatory job. He would endeavour to see both Schmidt and Callaghan during the early part of the following week.
MONDAY, 20 JUNE. Brussels.
Received and had a short talk with Seretse Khama,148 President of Botswana, before taking him in for a pro forma Commission meeting. I had previously suggested that our Wednesday dinner for him ought, if his wife were in Brussels, to be a mixed one, contrary to our normal pattern, but this had been resisted by the Protocol Department on the ground that it had not been done for other African heads of state; and I had not persisted, partly because Ruth Khama is an Englishwoman. On the way down in the lift, however, I said to Seretse that I understood his wife was in Brussels and I was sorry that the dinner was not a mixed one. ‘Oh, don’t worry in the least,’ he replied, ‘she is used to being treated like that in Arab countries.’ The point was sufficiently well made that I insisted that we changed our arrangements immediately, particularly as Jennifer was in Brussels that week.
To the house of the American Ambassador to the Community, Deane Hinton, deep set in rhododendrons, for lunch with General Haig,149 Nixon’s old White House aide and now Supreme Allied Commander. He turned up in full uniform. He was, however, an agreeable and interesting man, maybe, as some people say, rather a politicians’ general, but so for that matter was Eisenhower.
Then in the evening I addressed a dinner for the Advisory Council of the Ford Motor Company—a rather grand body presided over by Henry Ford himself and containing about ten of their world managers but also a lot of notable outside figures, like E
dwin Plowden,150 Karl Schiller151 of Germany, whom I had hardly seen since the Bonn monetary conference of 1968, and Guido Carli152 of Italy. I rather liked Henry Ford, and did not find the whole dinner nearly as much of a chore as I had expected.
WEDNESDAY, 22 JUNE. Brussels.
Our dinner for Sir Seretse and indeed Lady Khama at Val Duchesse, with a more or less adequate complement of about 25 per cent women. I found Ruth Khama thoroughly agreeable, although a curiously uncoordinated mixture of south London secretary and Botswana duchess, rather reminiscent of old Mrs Philips Price,153 who was a still more uncoordinated mixture of Berlin proletarian (Philips Price did indeed literally pick her up in the gutter after she had been clubbed in a 1919 Rosa Luxemburg/Spartacist riot) and Gloucestershire châtelaine. I made a brief speech, Seretse a rather longer one. He is a man of interest and distinction, though seems fairly ill.
THURSDAY, 23 JUNE. Brussels.
Our six-monthly dinner for COREPER to mark the change of presidency, which I had decided against all precedent to give, not at Val Duchesse because we were so fed up with it, but in a restaurant, the Barbizon, in the splendidly named suburb of Jezus-Eik. By some miraculous chance the weather changed and the sun came out for the first time for weeks in Brussels. Speeches from me, Donald Maitland as the retiring President of COREPER, and Van der Meulen,154 the incoming President, the last partly in English, partly in French, partly in Dutch, and embellished by two Latin quotations.
