European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  The only issue on which we got near to a snarl-up was direct elections, on which he fairly quickly gets emotional; starts thumping away about his difficulties and how he has done as much as he possibly can and how he is much more interested in British elections, etc. But on other issues, even the CAP, certainly 131, certainly regional policy, even EMU, certainly Community loans, he was reasonably forthcoming and helpful.

  MONDAY, 28 NOVEMBER. London.

  Michael Palliser to lunch at Brooks’s. While not on as good a form as he was when dealing so self-confidently and reliably with the problems of my transition to Europe in the summer of 1976, he was more buoyant than when I had last seen him in July. He said that he was undoubtedly getting on better than at the beginning with David Owen; he thought that Owen’s relations with the office still had room for improvement but had picked up somewhat. He complained about his unnecessary rudeness and, probably in response to a suggestion of mine, gave enthusiastic endorsement of the view that David ought now to lengthen his pace a little, as his whole prospect was different from that during his first six months when he might soon have been out of the Foreign Office and even the House of Commons. He said that, while meetings with David were often very difficult, he rarely, in his (Palliser’s) view, failed to come out with a sensible policy decision at the end of them.

  In the afternoon I went to see Harold Macmillan to fulfil an undertaking I had made to the Liberals to try to get him to use what influence he had in favour of a proportional list (for European elections). He did not seem to have aged a great deal, was friendly and relaxed, a little difficult to get to focus upon the point, as it were playing himself in with a lot of high generalizations which, for once, were not particularly well directed. However, when we got on to the point he was quite good. He was not enthusiastic for proportional representation, though not strongly against it either, open-minded so far as the effect on Britain was concerned. He was therefore quite disposed to go along with it for Europe and maybe to lobby a little in its favour. He put his finger rather well on the weakness of the regional list system, which was that it gave excessive power to the party machines. ‘I am not sure’, he said, ‘that under such a system I would have been elected for Stockton in the thirties.’

  THURSDAY, 1 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  Gundelach at 10.45. I tried to persuade him to go for a 1 per cent rather than a 2 per cent Common Agricultural price increase, but did not feel I was making much progress, not because there is a great gulf between us, but because his judgement is that 2 per cent might stick and 1 per cent certainly won’t. He may easily be right and, in any case, the general thrust of our policies march alongside each other fairly closely. In spite of some attempts to stir up suspicion against him, I think he is a nice, effective, overworked, somewhat ‘flying by the seat of his pants’ man, whom I enjoy talking with and whom I think is reasonably straightforward.

  At 6.30 to the little prime ministerial hôtel particulier for a meeting with Tindemans. After half an hour he arrived rather flustered and was as usual not only late but extremely nice and agreeable. However, his mind did not appear to have focused very sharply upon the European Council, and he was very open to every possible piece of advice.

  FRIDAY, 2 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  At 12 o’clock Mrs Thatcher arrived on a visit. I received her at the top of the lift shaft, Tugendhat having met her at the front door, which it is protocol for me to do only for heads of state or government, of which grave issue Mitterrand’s visit made me aware. (I have in fact made exceptions for Mondale and Hallstein.)

  She brought with her Douglas Hurd, John Davies and a PPS called Stanley. We began in a small meeting in my room with these plus Crispin and Tugendhat. She was anxious to be pleasant and the conversation ran into no great snags over the next hour. I spent a good part of it explaining how the different Councils work and what was the difference in atmosphere and form between a Council of Ministers, a ‘Schloss Gymnich’-type meeting, and the European Council. She seemed interested in all this, no doubt hoping that, in the last at any rate, she would be a fairly early participant. At the end we got on to economic and monetary union for about ten minutes, in which John Davies, nice and well-informed man though he is, showed a certain capacity to get the wrong end of a point. She, if anything, seemed more pro monetary union than he did.

  Then seven or eight other Commissioners joined us for lunch. The conversation was partly bilateral with me, which was quite easy, and then general. She was in no way tiresome, but left me with not the faintest sense of having been in the presence of anyone approaching a high quality of statesmanship, or even of someone who was likely to grow into this; she just seemed slightly below the level of events.

  She then had meetings with other Commissioners before her press conference. Douglas Hurd was apparently rather worried about this press conference, and he proved to be right, as it seems she handled this fairly badly, both from her point of view and from ours; she sounded confused as to whether she had been visiting NATO or the Commission, and kept on making what were essentially strategic and defence points. But insofar as she let anything emerge it was that while she intended to be more pro-European than Callaghan, she couldn’t think of any particular ways in which she was going to be so, and indeed chose–or allowed herself to be driven into–subjects of discussion on which she is just as uncooperative as the present British Government.

  MONDAY, 5 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  The European Council began with the King’s lunch at the Palais de Bruxelles. The King as usual was immensely friendly and expressed almost as much pleasure at having received a leather-bound copy of Nine Men of Power as if I had given him a new kingdom. It was a beautiful day with a sparkling sun over the Pare de Bruxelles. The food and drink were obviously specially chosen as a prelude to a hard-working afternoon, the main course a cold marbre de boeuf, which Guiringaud with typical French respect for ‘nos amis Belges’ disparagingly described as bad pâté.

  It was also over surprisingly quickly, but, in spite of this, we managed to start the meeting nearly half an hour late. Tindemans, after a brief statement of his own, asked me to introduce the papers on the current economic situation and economic and monetary union. I spoke for just over half an hour, which was longer than I had intended but it seemed to hold people’s attention: not only the small ones, but Callaghan and Giscard, who was notably friendly and attentive throughout this Council. Only Schmidt looked as though he was asleep, which he mostly does when anyone other than himself or Giscard is speaking. Then we had a tour de table. Tindemans, Jørgensen (notably and rather surprisingly), Andreotti, den Uyl and Lynch all spoke enthusiastically.

  Giscard was a shade cooler in substance, though not bad in manner and saying very precisely that he accepted the Commission’s paper. Schmidt then spoke rather reluctantly and not very well and not on any subjects of any great relevance. However, he made no frontal attack or attempt to dismiss our proposals, though it could not possibly be said that he directly endorsed them, despite the fact that he had come up to me at lunch and said that he thought his ministers had been being too negative and that he would try and correct this. Callaghan was more enthusiastic, although a shade less so in the semi-public of the meeting than he had been to me in private after my introduction when, graciously and surprisingly, he had come round the table and said that he thought it was the best opening he had ever heard at a European Council.

  However, we got enough of what we wanted for the moment on EMU, and also, by the skin of our teeth, we got our Community loans facility through. This was well supported by nearly all those I have mentioned previously, except for den Uyl. Giscard, however, was the disappointment. We knew that Barre was in favour and hoped that Giscard would speak in the same sense. However, what he did was to say that he himself was unconvinced but that some of his own Government seemed to take a different view and therefore he wasn’t going to oppose it. But this didn’t in any way amount to applying effective leverage to Schmid
t who had expressed himself still more sceptically. However, at the end Schmidt said he was not going to stand out and, rather ungraciously it would seem from most people (though he thought he was being gracious), said, all right, if we wanted it we could have it, provided that other things, like the Regional Fund, were settled on a reasonably satisfactory basis; he was not going to be raped twice.

  Dinner at the Palais d’Egmont. The Belgians foolishly applied exactly the same seating arrangements as at lunch, which meant that everybody had the same neighbours, except that the King having been removed, Schmidt and Giscard were next to each other. I had Andreotti and Michael O’Kennedy,216 the Irish Foreign Minister, and we had all had enough of each other. So certainly had Giscard of Andreotti and, it appeared as the meal went on, even of Schmidt, so that towards the end he began some general conversation round the table, surprisingly immediately getting on to my books, announcing to everybody that he had read them all and talking for about ten minutes rather funnily, or at least wittily, about the Dilke book, showing a surprising knowledge, indeed almost an obsession with every detail of that strange story. His command of the subject was only impaired by the fact that throughout he referred to ‘Dilkie’, talking the whole time in French. Indeed he talked French and hardly any English throughout almost the whole of this European Council, and Schmidt also talked more German than I had known him do before.

  TUESDAY, 6 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  European Council at 10 o’clock. In the early part of this we got a rather farcical, but nonetheless quite satisfactory and surprisingly easy solution to the Article 131 dispute. Then we went on to the Regional Fund. This was less satisfactory and was indeed the worst aspect of this European Council.

  We looked at one stage as though we might get a settlement at 620 million units of account. Probably I then made a considerable tactical error. I thought this was a bit on the low side, and by arguing for more got involved in a considerable dispute with Schmidt about the basis on which we calculated inflation. He thought we were doing it in regard to the high-inflation countries, which we were not: we were doing a weighted average. But in the course of this argument it emerged that I was calculating it, as I thought was eminently reasonable, from the beginning of 1974, which was when the last programme came into operation, but he totally refused to do this and would only accept a recalculation from the beginning of 1977.

  So this issue having suddenly exploded, not in a particularly ill-tempered way, but having taken a surprising turn, he went back to a much harder position in which it looked as though we might get only a very small amount indeed out of him. As his agreement to the Community loans facility was dependent on a satisfactory (for him) solution to the Regional Fund, we were in considerable difficulty and really had no alternative but to accept, and indeed accept somewhat gratefully, Giscard’s proposal of 1850 million European units of account over a three-year period, split on a basis which started with 580 million for 1978. The Italians and the Irish were surprisingly unrigorous in fighting for a higher figure, as indeed were the British, but this was partly–to an extent I had not fully realized, but ought to have done–because the recipient countries were gaining enormously from the transfer to the European unit of account, which followed from the settlement of the Article 131 dispute, and very substantially put up their receipts in their own currencies.

  We then bounded through a number of other items more or less satisfactorily, and the whole thing ended about 1.15, after which I did a large press conference with Tindemans, who had been a successful chairman. The Council had not been inspiring, but there had been quite a good atmosphere, some considerable success in settling practical disputes, and a fair if not tremendously enthusiastic wind behind our monetary union proposals. I think that my tactic of not having a great row with Ortoli and not presenting the European Council with too hard a choice at this stage has been correct, although much criticized.

  WEDNESDAY, 7 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  Commission, followed by a Socialist lunch at the Pare-Savoy, which is almost my least favourite of the grand Brussels restaurants and an extraordinarily lavish place to be chosen by the Federation of European Socialist Parties. They had disinterred old Sicco Mansholt217 to preside and had about five or six others, Fellermaier, Prescott, etc. The object was to launch a considerable attack on the Socialist Commissioners, but particularly upon me, for not being more political in the worst sense of the word, i.e. that we didn’t run the Commission on a more party-political basis, that we didn’t have more purely party votes, that we didn’t devote ourselves enough to doing down the dirty Christian Democrats, Liberals, etc.

  It was really all pretty good nonsense, particularly coming from Mansholt whom I like personally but who is a tremendous old attitudinizer. I forbore from asking him what particular Socialist policies he had introduced during his many years in the Commission, except for building up the worst excesses of the CAP during his period as Agricultural Commissioner. But, this apart, I replied with some vigour–provoked the more by the fact that Cheysson had made a ridiculous intervention slavishly agreeing with them. (When have you ever split from Ortoli on an issue touching French national interests, I asked him.) Vredeling, Vouël and Giolitti, however, were a great deal more helpful and reasonable. Having denounced the nonsense of what our assembled hosts had been proposing, I left in something of a hurry but with some satisfaction, feeling that the lunch hadn’t done any harm, apart from being digestively too elaborate.

  THURSDAY, 8 DECEMBER. Brussels, Bonn and Brussels.

  A special Commission meeting from 9.45 to 1.30 to deal both with Mediterranean agriculture and the general CAP price proposals for 1978. It was a remarkably productive morning in which we got through the whole of the substantial Mediterranean agriculture proposals and settled the main price issues. There was a curiously evenly balanced division on this and had I organized against Gundelach I could undoubtedly have got a 1 per cent as opposed to a 2 per cent increase through. However, this might have been counterproductive. There would be no point in sending him into the Agricultural Council with a figure which he regarded as unrealistic.

  To Bonn by car for my dinner with and speech to the German Institute for Foreign Affairs. As with nearly everything in Bonn it was in the familiar Königshof Hotel. Agreeable company, with Birrenbach218 on one side and Weizsächer,219 whom I always greatly like talking to, on the other. An audience of 350, which filled the ballroom, and a talk by me for very nearly an hour on EMU as seen after the European Council, with an attempted reply, particularly in the crucial German context, to the post-Florence criticism; and then a half-hour of quite tough but useful questioning. One or two, Ehmke notably, were sceptical, but the general atmosphere not at all so. Back to Brussels by midnight.

  FRIDAY, 9 DECEMBER. Antwerp and Brussels.

  Antwerp at noon for my official visit to the docks and the city. A short ceremony at the Stadthuis and the presentation of two rather nice Rubens reproduction etchings, a short speech before getting on to a motor launch where we had an elaborate lunch during a long tour of the docks until 3.45. Bonham Carters arrived to stay for the weekend.

  SATURDAY, 10 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  Left at 12 o’clock for Bruges. We missed the turning off the motorway for some reason and found ourselves half-way between Bruges and Ostend and therefore went on and drove round Ostend which I had not been to since I was aged six. A rather striking Gare Maritime and, even in the pouring rain, quite an attractive petit port and seaside town. Back to Bruges for lunch and the normal walking tour of Bruges, the canal banks, the Memling house, etc. A dinner party that evening with Tinés and others. It went on much too late mainly owing to Jacques Tiné seeming so pleased at getting away from his NATO diplomatic colleagues that he stayed until 1.30.

  MONDAY, 12 DECEMBER. Brussels.

  Lunch for Constâncio and the other members of the Portuguese negotiating team, mainly a return for their welcome to us in Lisbon and also an expression of our appreciation of
the quality of Constâncio, his frankness, competence, and the work his team had done. He gave us a realistic appraisal of the Portuguese position following Soares’s defeat. He also made it pretty clear that they were going to settle with the IMF.

  Denis Howell220 for a drink for an hour and was glad to have Birmingham and political gossip with him. He was splendidly critical of nearly everybody in the British Cabinet and I found him friendly and enjoyable, not at that stage knowing how truculent he had been in the Environment Council that day.

  Dinner at the Château de Val Duchesse for the first time this autumn, which may be why the autumn has been relatively agreeable. This was with the Agriculture-Ministers–never having been to an Agricultural Council I thought that this was rather a good way of seeing them. I sat between Méhaignerie, the French minister, and Dalsager, the Dane, with Humblet, the Belgian President, opposite, with Gundelach on one side of him and Gibbons, a caricature of an Irish face, but very nice, on his other side. Light-hearted speeches (by agricultural standards at any rate) afterwards.

  TUESDAY, 13 DECEMBER. Brussels and Strasbourg.

  7.19 TEE to Strasbourg. Agreeable journey apart from a yodelling and dancing waiter who leapt about and shouted in what he thought was a highly dramatic way as we breakfasted without a hint of dawn through the Forêt de Soignes. Three hours’ solid work before Strasbourg–much better than going by air if it is possible. Lunch for Colombo, President of the Parliament. Then by far the best question time I have had. The grouping of questions at last began to work, so that I had a whole hour to myself. I got through only three or four questions, with endless supplementaries, but at least I was able to develop a certain swing and pattern.

  Then the last of my political dinners for the group which calls itself ‘Communist and Allies’, the ‘Allies’ being mainly a curious Trotskyite Dane, who was looked at rather askance by the others for he was dressed like an amateur revolutionary, and two Italians, the irrepressible Spinelli221 and a woman journalist from Milan, who was on one side of me. Ansart,222 the principal Frenchman there, was on the other. They were all very anxious to be pleasant. I had a good talk with Ansart about French Socialist/Communist history in the twenties and thirties, the Congress of Tours, etc.; he was surprised I knew anything about it.