European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  FRIDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER. Brussels and La Roche-en -Ardennes.

  The day of my ninth and last official introductory visit, but as it was to Belgium not much travel was involved. We began with a Laeken luncheon with the King and Queen, also the Tindemans’, the Simonets, various Court officials, etc. The lunch enjoyable, the King as nice as ever, and the Queen, whom I had hardly previously talked to and between whom and Mme Simonet I sat, was also agreeable: rather good-looking in a sad sort of way, quite interesting, even better English than the King, who goes off into French fairly quickly, which she doesn’t.

  Then a fairly serious discussion for almost two hours in Tindemans’s office which was constructive, except getting rather snarled up at the end on the question of (Council) presidency representation at the Summit follow-up official meeting. Simonet was being rather wild, in favour of rushing at this in an ill-considered manner, and was supported by Van der Meulen, but Tindemans in the middle was a great deal more sensible and balanced, and saw possible consequences far more clearly. Eventually Tindemans got his (and our) way on this.185 Finally a reception in the Parliament building given by the Presidents of the two Chambers. Then drove to the Hôtel-Restaurant de l’Air Pur a few miles beyond La Roche-en-Ardennes, for our Commission strategy weekend.

  SATURDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER. La Roche-en-Ardennes.

  Morning session on the institutional aspects of enlargement. First, the question of how we would deal with a member state, old or new, in which democracy was overthrown (this issue is clearly made much more actual by the three applicant members, none of whom only five years ago was under any sort of democratic régime). Then there was a good deal of discussion about the size and shape of the Commission itself, most but not all thinking that seventeen would be far too large.

  Afternoon session on Mediterranean problems, with particular reference to enlargement. Gundelach very good indeed; Natali not at all bad. After them the discussion began to get all over the place. However, we managed to steer well away from illusions about massive industrialization of the Mediterranean or any commitment to deal with its agricultural problems by price support. It is vital not to transpose the price support system, with all the excesses which flow from it in northern agriculture, into the Mediterranean.

  Very enjoyable dinner talk with Brunner, who can be an extremely engaging conversationalist; he has a remarkable range of knowledge about English politicians, both of the present day and the late nineteenth century. He is much better on such subjects than when dealing with energy. Perhaps I ought to find another portfolio for him.

  SUNDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER. La Roche-en-Ardennes and Brussels.

  The morning session was extremely important for me as it would determine whether I could carry the Commission with me on monetary union. Ortoli opened in a slightly worried, defensive mood, because of my having put round my paper on the need for an urgent re-launch of the idea of monetary union; I thought he was more worried than offended, but you can never be quite sure. I then spoke for about twenty minutes, and we had a good discussion which came to a fairly natural end about lunchtime, there being general support, with the exception only I think of Haferkamp, who is by far the most conservative member of the Commission, and of Burke who, for some extraordinary reason, got excited about the difficulty of countries giving up monetary sovereignty, which is an odd view for an Irishman, as of course they have never had it, always being tins on the tail of the Bank of England.186 But apart from those two, and Ortoli moving slowly and reluctantly, but moving, there was strong general support for our launching the wider idea and proclaiming the need for an early leap forward. Davignon and Gundelach and, indeed, Brunner and Vredeling were all I thought particularly good in the discussion. So was Tugendhat, as he had been throughout the two days. At the end we all thought we had had a good weekend, and broke up buoyantly with agreeable drinks outside in strong sunshine.

  TUESDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

  Foreign Affairs Council at 10 o’clock. A good discussion on the Spanish application, with the French bewilderingly having decided to withdraw the reservation they were going to put up. However, they were awkward about Commission representation on INFCEP. Guiringaud was not there, but a rather tawdry-looking champagne merchant called Taittinger, who is Under-Secretary at the Quai, put up French objections unsustained by any possible argument. I spoke, I hoped and thought, rather firmly—and this matter ended up by Taittinger saying he would have to get further instructions, which by the afternoon he got and more or less withdrew.

  At the ministers’ lunch I gave a long exposéof what we had done at La Roche, and they seemed quite interested. Then the French rounded off their bad day by coming under powerful gunfire from Gundelach and Cheysson, both of whom spoke extremely well, over our negotiating position in the International Sugar Conference.187 They were completely isolated.

  WEDNESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

  Jennifer went to Bremen to launch a huge ship. Commission meeting all day, adjourning at 6.15. This gave me time to give a little further thought to our 7 o’clock meeting with Bob Strauss, the US Special Trade Representative. The meeting, however, did not demand much thought for Strauss was still at a high level of generality, agreeable as usual, full of bantering conversation, telling us a bit about what was going on in Washington, how anxious he was to make some progress, to produce something he could sell to the public, but showing no desire to get down to any details, or indeed to be awkward, as we thought at this stage he might be.

  THURSDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

  Commission lunch for Strauss and his party, who had been meeting with Haferkamp, Gundelach and Davignon during the morning. Over lunch there was general conversation followed by a brief exchange of complimentary speeches. Strauss was interesting on a number of points. He had spent most of the night on the telephone to Washington resisting becoming Director of the Budget in succession to Lance, who had just resigned. Who were the important senators? Russell Long (Mississippi) he placed almost at the top of the list. How were the various Cabinet officers doing? Blumenthal not very well, though an able man. Then the draft communiqué was brought in and we worked on this for a short time and got agreement without too much difficulty on the basis of the so-called Swiss formula, with a tacit understanding that we should try and go for tariff cuts of about 40 per cent, minus perhaps 5 per cent, worked out on the basis of this formula–but the understanding not at this stage to be published.

  MONDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER. London.

  Dinner at the Annans, with only the Rothschilds188 there besides us. An extremely agreeable evening; a great bashing around with Victor, a mixture of literary, political, gossipy conversation.

  TUESDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER. London and Brussels.

  At 6.30 I saw Howard,189 the new Australian Minister of External Trade, who was perfectly nice but inexperienced. He had clearly been sent by the egregious Fraser with an extremely rough but foolish negotiating brief. It meant that they were trying to go back on the plan we had laboriously agreed to in June for having a general review of trading matters at official level, but not ministerial talks and not with a view to the conclusion of a bilateral agreement at this stage. As a result of this he had stubbornly refused the evening before to allow talks to take place between officials on the agreed basis. The object of my meeting was to get him to change his mind on this, which I did, but not without the chilliness and roughness which seems, far more than with any other government, to be involved in dealing with the Australians at the present time.

  WEDNESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

  Leo Pliatzky, now Permanent Secretary to the Department of Trade, to lunch rue de Praetère. A little preliminary conversation about trade matters, and then a fascinating conversation about the past with him. He had been a close friend, not so much at Oxford as in post-Oxford days, in the late forties and early fifties, but I had seen him hardly at all since I left the Treasury. He had quite a lot of interesting things to say. He was deeply critical of almost ever
ybody within sight, or indeed out of sight: Douglas Allen,190 who had lost his cutting edge since he went to the non-job of being head of the Civil Service; Denis Healey, who had certainly been a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early days and was not all that good now; Joel Barnett,191 who was ineffective as a Chief Secretary, etc. However, Leo’s mixture of prickly charm and angular honesty meant that this did not create a disobliging atmosphere.

  Clearly Leo himself, though fighting through great vicissitudes of ill-health, motor-car accidents, losing an eye, having lost his wife, God knows what else, had played a decisive part in getting control over public expenditure when he was Second Permanent Secretary in the Treasury charged with this side of things. He had relied not so much on cash limits, though he thought these were important, but even more on a formula which he had evolved with John Hunt,192 by which in Cabinet committees Treasury ministers should not be allowed to be overruled, whatever the majority, without an obligation to go to Cabinet resting upon the minister who wanted to spend, not upon the Treasury; and that if there was no agreement, this immediately unlatched a process by which the exact state of the contingency reserve had to be reviewed and placed before the Cabinet. This he thought made a great difference.

  He was also interesting, though unforgiving even in retrospect, about Tony Crosland, who had at times been a still closer friend of Leo’s than I was. He had known him very well up to some time in the early 1960s. But, like a lot of people, Leo had been deeply offended by Tony on a personal basis, and then subsequently, perhaps partly because of this but I don’t think principally so, thought that Tony had an appalling responsibility for public expenditure accelerating out of control during the early days of the 1974 Labour Government, mainly because he had always provided the most sophisticated arguments in favour of an open hand at the till. It was in his view a real example of trahison des clercs. Leo is still as always very much his own man, rather like a senior Graham Avery, with great intellectual self-confidence, in some ways also not unlike the maligned Douglas Allen, but with substantial differences too.

  THURSDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

  Worked at home on the highly complicated subject of the effect on agriculture of the transfer to the European unit of account, preliminary to an hour-long meeting with Gundelach, in which he explained to me why he did not want to make a move on this for several months. Quite a convincing explanation: the intellectual case was overwhelmingly against him and he had the good sense to admit this and said his reluctance was based purely on a judgement of how the various personalities would react; a good example of how to present a difficult case, and he moved my mind somewhat.

  I had Sigrist,193 the German Permanent Representative, to lunch, partly because I felt a little out of touch with the German scene. Good, rather serious, conversation. First, without great shafts of penetrating light, but highly intelligently, he described why the Germans reacted so much to the terrorist threat and the effect on various German alignments and the position of the different parties at this stage. Then a routine exchange about JET and Article 131, and then at the end my expounding to him some of my ideas on economic and monetary union. I wonder how he will report back.

  FRIDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

  A visit from Bill Rodgers, who gave me an advance copy of the public letter which Callaghan had written to the Labour Party on the eve of its annual conference. On balance quite a good letter, very firm on rejecting any possibility of British withdrawal from the Community and recognizing how damaging the continuing speculation about this was both to the Labour Party and Britain’s position in Europe; presenting some good arguments against this, but also concentrating far too much on wanting a loose Community with an absolute ceiling to any significant powers for the Parliament, and welcoming, as it is right to welcome for other reasons, the prospect of enlargement on the basis that it would make a loose Community more certain–a very silly view indeed, this. Not too unreasonable a slant on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, and quite constructive, though very vague, about energy policy.

  I saw an agitated Tugendhat at 4.30, who was greatly upset, and with some reason, to discover that, without consultation with him, Gundelach had apparently announced that export sales of Community butter, with restitution, i.e. with huge budgetary costs and the likelihood of extremely adverse public reaction, in Britain at any rate, were likely to be 150,000 tons for the year, not 105,000 tons as had previously been thought. Gundelach was in Paris so there was nothing to do except await his explanations.

  MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER. Brussels.

  Màrio Soares, Prime Minister of Portugal, from 11.00 until 12.00. Soares on this occasion more realistic, more self-confident, more impressive than when I had seen him in March. A quite good conversation (in French) with him. He seemed reasonably satisfied with the way the application was being handled and gave a mixed picture of the Portuguese economy.

  I pointed out to him the difficulty raised by the Callaghan letter, in which Callaghan got very close to saying that one of the great advantages of enlargement was that it would inevitably mean a looser, less effective, less supranational Community; and that Soares ought to be aware of this because if he aligned himself with this it would inevitably cause an ideological split amongst those who wanted his accession to the Community. He reacted immediately, saying it certainly was not his view at all; the last thing he wanted was to dilute the Community by coming in. He convinced me that he was not just talking for the book by coining the good aphorism that he was not going to take the trouble of resigning from EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) in order to join what was no more than a glorified EFTA. What he wanted to join was a real political Community with a momentum towards economic and political union.

  Crispin back from Washington with the news that the next Summit is not to be until after the Danish presidency is out of the way, and therefore under the German presidency. Thus the big countries will rather skilfully obviate the problem of what they would do with a small country holding the presidency. He also reported on Strauss’s feeling following his visit to us, which apparently amounted to his thinking that we had slightly taken the pants off him and that he had given us more than we had given him; but this may be a ploy.

  WEDNESDAY, 5 OCTOBER. Brussels.

  Commission meeting, disrupted but agreeably so by the visit of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard. Out to the airport to meet them at 10.15. It was a surprisingly cold morning, and I stood rather chillily on the tarmac although they arrived on time, she dressed in her typical comfortable Dutch way, he, stripped of his uniforms by Vredeling (although I do not suppose he would have come in one in any event), dressed in one of his rather flash pepper and salt suits. However, he is an intelligent and, I find, likeable man in spite of the Lockheed affair.194 Drove in with both of them to the Berlaymont, it having been made clear by the Dutch authorities that the Prince did not wish, which was the previous plan, to drive with Vredeling and therefore he sat in the front of the car, and the Queen and I sat in the back.

  Both of them were very anxious to be agreeable, which I think comes naturally to them. At the Berlaymont they were greeted with flowers for her and a good cheering crowd, mainly of Dutch. They then came up to my room where they expressed great interest in the view, the pictures, everything; the only hiccup being when Umberto, my anglophone Italian huissier, brought the coffee in and she, who hadn’t spoken a word of this language to anyone else, suddenly addressed him in Dutch, and asked for some hot water with the coffee. ‘Warm wasser,’ she said, or some such words. Poor Umberto was absolutely flummoxed. She presumably assumed that all people in subordinate positions in Belgium were Dutch-speaking. However, when I told her that he was an anglophone Italian she apologized profusely.

  In the Commission meeting various members gave exposés, including notably Ortoli, who was not on the list but spoke with great passion and enthusiasm, and much impressed the Queen. She was slow to get going and ask questions and Prince Bernhar
d performed a very useful role in being ready with one or two quite shrewd ones. Then lunch, lasting until nearly 3.30, with nearly all the members of the Commission and turning towards the end into a rather good general discussion: the Queen, idealistic, perhaps a little naïve, but genuinely interested and enquiring; Prince Bernhard quick and intelligent and very agreeable to talk to on a personal plane; and at the end, when I thanked him warmly and privately for having come and said how much he had contributed to the visit, I found him rather moved.

  For this successful visit we paid the mild price of not being able to start proper Commission business until 3.30, which meant a wearing five-hour meeting until 8.30. Ortoli was overcome by his oratorical triumph in the morning and indeed another good and striking performance at lunch. On the way back up in the lift, he told me, ‘Elle est une dame très distinguée,’ which is not exactly the obvious phrase to use about Queen Juliana. Then when I saw him for an hour the next day and said how splendidly he had spoken the day before and how much he had impressed the Queen, he said sadly, ‘Ah, yes, but that was yesterday. I am on much less good form today.’

  FRIDAY, 7 OCTOBER. Brussels.

  A meeting with four or five Commissioners about the enlargement paper we had promised to the Council. Contrary to my hopes and expectations after La Roche, the draft before us was almost useless, with all the edge of the two previous papers taken away. I recalled across forty years a remark of G. D. H. Cole, who, when somebody had said that a book was very bad, replied that it was not quite as bad as it seemed at first sight; if you only read every other sentence, the text made reasonable sense. This was the case here. However, what the sense was depended whether you started with an even or odd sentence. I announced that Kergorlay195 was to rewrite the whole thing, so that it could at least have the coherence of single authorship, as near as possible to the La Roche form, and try to get it through a special Commission on Tuesday, although I alas would be in Japan.