European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  Then with Nicko by train from Coventry to Euston for my meeting with Callaghan from 6.00 to 7.20. On European monetary advance he was obviously rather ‘miffed’ (indeed I think this was, rather surprisingly, the word he actually used) that he hadn’t been more closely consulted, although in fact (unless he took the view that Schmidt and Giscard should never meet on their own without him) he had nothing to be ‘miffed’ about, because he had already been sent (whether he had read it I was not sure) a version of the so-called Schulmann/Clappier paper,1 which was more than I had seen at that stage, or indeed the Italians or the Little Five. However, the significant thing was that he felt ‘miffed’ and announced that he was declining the invitation to come before lunch to Bremen on the following Thursday in order to have a tripartite meeting. He claimed that it was very difficult because of a Cabinet meeting, but not with much conviction. As usual, on these recent occasions, he was agreeable, sensible, affable.

  At the end of our discussion Callaghan kept me back alone for a short time, and then asked what I wanted done about my re-nomination as President.2 He didn’t want there to be any suggestion, as there had been last time with the French, that they were hanging back so far as Ortoli’s renomination was concerned. Would I like him to propose it at Bremen? I said I hardly thought this was necessary, and it was not exactly the same position as with the French in 1974, because he was not occupying the presidency (of the Council). However, it ended by his saying that he would do anything I wished, and adding: ‘Would you be all right if Mrs Thatcher were to be there after October?’ In all electoral conversations I have had with him, most of them conducted tangentially in this way, he has never given the impression of overconfidence, which is very sensible on his part.

  TUESDAY, 4 JULY. London and Luxembourg.

  Took off from Northolt for Luxembourg just after 8 o’clock, entirely alone apart from the two pilots in the little plane, and a pretty disagreeable journey it was with the whole of Western Europe covered in endless layers of dirty cloud of almost limitless cubic capacity.

  To the Parliament at 10.15, only a little late for the beginning of the Genscher speech, and sat in until 1.00, when I made a brief intervention. In the afternoon I worked in the Cravat Hotel, trying to clear my thoughts by writing a sort of letter to myself in advance of the Bremen Summit. Then I saw Deane Hinton, the American Ambassador, he having come to deliver some sort of démarche which I, or indeed he, didn’t take too seriously, about the dangers of the MTNs going wrong in Geneva. This was a predictable artillery barrage before the engagement.

  In the evening I drove in pouring rain down to Ehnen on the Mosel and the German frontier, where I had last dined on a baking evening almost exactly two years ago, and where on this occasion I gave Gaston Thorn, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, a three-hour dinner. I discovered that he had been fairly well briefed, but not shown the paper, about the Clappier/Schulmann work, having received a visit the previous day from Clappier. Clappier had done Luxembourg and Rome, and Schulmann it appeared had been to Belgium, Holland and Denmark. Nobody, alas, had thought to go to Ireland.

  WEDNESDAY, 5 JULY. Luxembourg, Bonn and Brussels.

  A difficult Commission meeting from 9.00 to 10.15. Ortoli tried to make a great row with Vredeling because of the insulting remarks which Vredeling had made about the French Government at a press conference in Rome following the breakdown of the Social Council, at which the French had been isolated and intransigent. Vredeling had some justification, although he had obviously blown off rather foolishly. What was striking on this occasion was that this hot-tempered, irascible man didn’t rise much to Ortoli’s complaint, which, as Francis told me subsequently, was a great disappointment to him. Vredeling confined himself to saying that he had been mistranslated, that he had used the Dutch word ‘dum’, which he implausibly claimed meant ‘without reasons given’, rather than, as one might assume, ‘stupid’, ‘imbecile’. (I was subsequently assured by the Dutch Foreign Minister that what it meant was precisely ‘stupid’, if not something stronger.)

  Crispin and I then left to motor to Bonn. Rather good country between Trier and Coblenz, though the weather was dismal as on every recent day. Bonn at 1 o’clock (German time) for lunch with Schmidt, for once not alone, but he with Schulmann and I with Crispin. This lasted until 3.40 and was immensely worthwhile. Schmidt began by saying, not altogether untypically, that he was feeling very unwell. He had got some bug in Zambia, as a result of which he could not eat much. He drank a rather eccentric mixture of port and coca-cola, and ate at least as much as I did, but this was because the meal was, by any standards, strictly inedible, and he was presumably used to it. At one stage he told us how he ran the whole of Germany from the Chancellery with a staff of, I think, thirty-eight, and it was at least clear that none of the thirty-eight was a qualified chef.

  However, the conversation more than made up for this. He described his various plans for Bremen, and who had been consulted and who had not. I told him about Callaghan’s slight sense of being left out and warned him he ought to try and deal with this. He gave us the paper, and also gave us some British paper which had been sent to them but of which I had never heard previously, and indeed never heard of again. We also talked about MTNs, about which he expressed some apprehension, having obviously been pressurized by the Americans a little, as we had, and being quite willing to give way to them, but I said the moment for that had certainly not arisen. But it was altogether a highly satisfactory and friendly conversation, in which at one stage he went out of his way, which was peculiarly gracious for him, to say that I underestimated how much an influence I had had at our various meetings on the whole development of his thought on European monetary affairs and, indeed, European affairs in general.

  Crispin and I then drove back in filthy weather to Brussels and went into the office for about an hour and a half. Ortoli insisted on coming to see me at 7.15 and I gave him a brief rundown on Bonn, including, with slight hesitation, showing but not giving him the Clappier/Schulmann paper. Schmidt had given it to me with great stress on secrecy, saying, which was true, that the Little Five, and indeed I believe the Italians, had not actually seen the paper, which made me a little hesitant about showing it to anyone else, particularly knowing the state of Schmidt/Ortoli relations.

  THURSDAY, 6 JULY. Brussels and Bremen.

  12.15 avion taxi for Bremen and the European Council. The proceedings began with a lunch in the Rathaus, a magnificent building, three hundred years older than the Hamburg late nineteenth-century edifice. There was a notable absence, which was generally interpreted as being deliberate, of Callaghan and Owen. Then a very good speech from the Burgomeister, a slightly less good one from Schmidt.

  We started the Council in another room in the same building at 3.30, the British having arrived just before, marching in in single file, like a jungle expedition,3 first Callaghan, then Owen, Palliser, Hunt, Couzens, McCaffrey,4 McNally,5 etc., and then about fifteen bearers carrying thirty red despatch boxes. God knows what they were all supposed to have in them. The afternoon meeting lasted until 6.30, which was longer than I expected, and dealt, inter alia, with the Ortoli paper on concerted growth which I introduced and about which there was not too bad a discussion.

  Then we reassembled—it was not clear whether for an early dinner or for a meeting of heads of government and me before dinner. The ‘Big Three’ were missing and so the rest of us chatted away in our usual desultory fashion. The first of the ‘Big Three’ to arrive, as indeed was appropriate as he was the host, was Schmidt, looking very gloomy, who came up to me and said, ‘Things have gone very badly with Callaghan.’ Ten minutes later Giscard arrived and gave Thorn, Tindemans and me an equally dismal report, though rather differently expressed, saying that he had had another go at Callaghan after the tripartite talk and it seemed as though he wished to stand out; nothing more could be done with him.

  Then Callaghan arrived, obviously not in a very good mood either, and, indeed, his demeanour at din
ner, when he sat at the end of the table in a way at once aloof and dejected, can best be described as surly. However, nobody’s mood was very good so that we had a thoroughly pointless dinner, neither gossiping nor transacting any business. Nobody, not even as on some previous occasions Giscard and I, managed to get any general conversation going at all, partly because I was feeling too gloomy about the news to want to try. Whether he was equally gloomy I don’t know.

  At about 9.30 we settled down for the restricted meeting proper. This continued until midnight and went much better than I would have expected from the pre-dinner reports and the atmosphere at dinner. Schmidt began by asking Giscard to introduce their joint paper. This was put round and there was an adjournment while people read it. During this I told Giscard across the table that he had left out one rather important point: that was the deposit of equivalent amounts of national currencies to the amounts deposited in gold and dollars with the European Currency Fund. This he accepted perfectly well, and then asked me, rather surprisingly, whether I had shown the paper to Ortoli, to which I simply said, ‘Yes.’

  We then settled down to a general discussion. In contrast with Copenhagen three months before, a substantial part was played by Italy and the Little Five. There was no question of it being just a foursome between the Big Three and me. Andreotti, Thorn, Tindemans, Jørgensen, van Agt and indeed Lynch all spoke quite a bit. Callaghan attracted the most attention. They wanted to see which way he would jump, and on the whole he did not jump too unfriendlily. At one point he raised the question: ‘What was the relationship of the problems of convergence and the transfer of resources with the currency point which was being put first? Ought they not all to advance together?’ He put this question to Giscard, who said I had better answer, so I did, incomprehensibly to everybody else—at first at any rate—but successfully from Callaghan’s point of view, by quoting the old bit of Walcheren doggerel:

  Great Chatham with his sabre drawn

  Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan.

  Sir Richard, longing to be at ‘em

  Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.

  In other words, waiting for everything to advance together was a recipe for never advancing at all.

  This went rather well with Jim because he knew the jingle, though got it wrong when he tried to requote bits of it back to me, but it put him in a good humour, and generally from that moment onwards things went rather better. Towards the end of the evening it seemed possible to draft a highly constructive introduction to the paper itself which would enable it to be published, without any definite commitment on anybody’s part, except a definite commitment to work on this scheme, to refine it by 31 October and to take a decision in December. Eventually I got a form of words accepted by everyone including Callaghan as a working hypothesis.

  Then, a curious sub-committee, consisting of Schulmann as one of the authors of the paper (Clappier was not there), Lynch because he had been particularly concerned about transfer of resources, and me, sat down at the end to try and put into detailed words what had been agreed. Schmidt stayed behind, hovering around us, and, eventually, after about twenty minutes, I got something written out which was accepted as being satisfactory and was taken away to be typed. Bed only at 2.15 (3.15 Belgian time) but in a state of considerable exhilaration at the dramatic upturn after the low point of dinner.

  FRIDAY, 7 JULY. Bremen and East Hendred.

  To the Rathaus for the so-called ‘family photographs’ at 9.45. We assembled for these in the Sea Captains’ Hall, comparable in scale to the main hall of the London Guildhall, and so named because it is where a traditional banquet to say goodbye to the sea captains was held. But the main thing that we appeared to be saying goodbye to that morning was the degree of agreement which we had reached the previous evening. Schmidt came up to me saying that Callaghan was running out on what he had agreed and was getting some support from Andreotti and maybe van Agt. This was confirmed by a brief interchange which I had with Callaghan himself and a word which I overheard him having with Andreotti. Their reasons for caution were quite different. Callaghan was not much in favour of the scheme politically, Andreotti was very much in favour of the scheme politically, but was doubtful whether Italy could sustain a place in it without substantial support.

  The session began at 10.00 in an intimate and satisfactory little room, and we quickly got down to the European currency part of the communiqué and argued over this for, I suppose, two and a half hours. At times things got rather bad-tempered between Callaghan and Schmidt, less so between Callaghan and Giscard, mainly I think because Giscard cared less than did Schmidt whether Callaghan came along. From a fairly early stage it was possible to see verbal compromises which could be satisfactorily incorporated and this was what we eventually did. But Schmidt and particularly Giscard were leaving Callaghan to wriggle on his hook at this stage, and saying that they wanted no papering over of cracks where real differences existed.

  The essential point which I stressed several times was that the British should agree to study the scheme put forward, if necessary to try to amend it, but not just to tour all round the intellectual horizon, and this was what was eventually accepted. Callaghan was slightly tiresome in saying he thought the draft produced the evening before went far beyond what had been agreed, which was not remotely true, and indeed was strongly contested, particularly by Giscard who said the draft was wholly accurate, as did at least five other people who spoke.

  The tiresomeness lay in challenging the accuracy of the draft; there was nothing wrong in Callaghan retreating a little, as it is reasonable and indeed fairly normal to have overnight thoughts on matters of this sort, even when less important, at sessions of the European Council. However, in spite of having said that my draft went beyond what had been agreed, Callaghan, as well he might have been, was extremely agreeable to me throughout and thanked me very warmly at the end for having been helpful to him, as indeed did Schmidt and Giscard and the others. It was a very wearing but on the whole satisfactory meeting, with the Commission in a far more nodal position than at previous European Councils.

  The session lasted until 2.30 p.m. After a snack I did the press conference with Schmidt, which was huge and lasted no less than eighty minutes. This was mainly because Schmidt read out an extremely long and boring statement and was also pretty diffuse in answering his own questions. (I had a few, but he had more.) I think for some reason or other he was anxious to be as boring as he could be. He was certainly not sparkling, although—what was more important—he had done extremely well in the Council. He and I then parted on excellent terms. He had offered to take me to Hamburg in his helicopter to get a plane from there, but the long press conference scuppered this plan. So I went to Bremen airport and spent a long but contented time there waiting for a later plane. East Hendred just before 9.00.

  SUNDAY, 9 JULY. East Hendred.

  Gilmours, Willie Whitelaws and Hugh Thomas’s to lunch. A perfectly agreeable lunch, though Willie talked rather too much about Conservative Party politics without saying anything very interesting. He and Hugh Thomas apparently didn’t get on very well together; no doubt he thought Hugh Thomas had become too right-wing! The Gilmours, who brought the Whitelaws because they were staying with them, seemed curiously oppressed by their presence.

  MONDAY, 10 JULY. London.

  Lunch with the Labour Committee for Europe. Quite a successful gathering, though some of them were surprisingly unaware of the significance of Bremen. At 6.00 I went to see Ted Heath in Wilton Street in order, which was not difficult, to line up his support for the Bremen initiative. I found him enthusiastic and anxious to make a speech later in the week. I may say that Willie Whitelaw and Ian Gilmour had been perfectly sound the day before, in considerable contrast with the non-committal statement which had been issued by Geoffrey Howe6 on Sunday and which foreshadowed Mrs Thatcher’s indifferent line in the House of Commons.

  A dinner at the Savoy Hotel for my former Permanent Secretaries, S
ir Richard Way, Sir Charles Cunningham (I hesitated over whether to ask him7 but decided there should be no exceptions; he accepted, I put him on my right and was very glad I had had him). Sir Philip Allen (now Lord Allen of Abbey dale), Sir William Armstrong (then Lord Armstrong of Sanderstead), Sir Douglas Allen (now Lord Croham), Sir Sam Goldman, who was never a full Permanent Secretary but of equivalent rank in the Treasury, and Sir Arthur Peterson, of my second period at the Home Office, with Sir Robert Armstrong, never a Permanent Secretary of mine but now one (he was a Private Secretary and a Deputy Secretary of mine) to make up what I thought would be an appropriate balance of present as well as past. The only one who couldn’t come was Sir Frank Figgures. I enjoyed the occasion and was very glad I had organized it.

  TUESDAY, 11 JULY. London and Brussels.

  9.25 plane from London Airport. I gave lunch to the British journalists, whom I found about as boring as usual. After some routine work in the office I went home at 6.45, where Jennifer had just arrived from London.

  It was the evening of our dinner for the King and Queen of the Belgians. The other guests we had assembled were the Tinés and the Tugendhats. We had intended to have the Dohnanyis, but they chucked in stages, she at two weeks’ notice, Klaus the day before. We asked Laura as soon as Frau von Dohnanyi had cancelled, and we then luckily managed to replace Dohnanyi with Giolitti, whom by rather convoluted logic we thought singularly appropriate as he had just failed to become President of the Italian Republic after a brief period as favourite. The main problem was seating, for it became clear that if Giolitti was to sit on Jennifer’s left, which she was insistent should be the case, the only thing which really worked was for Laura to sit next to the King, which she claimed to be apprehensive about but appeared to enjoy. The King and Queen were agreeable and easy. Marie-Jeanne cooked unusually well. I feared her nerve might have cracked, as she was very excited by the occasion, but not at all. They stayed until nearly 12 o’clock, talking animatedly, and the whole occasion was satisfactory.