European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

MONDAY, 2 OCTOBER. Brussels.

  Received Stobbe, the Governing Mayor of Berlin, for a meeting and lunch. I like him and think he is a very impressive young man. He is only about forty and has rather a stolid appearance, but is bright and quick. At 3.30 a meeting with about fifty representatives of the Berlaymont unions to explain to their somewhat suspicious minds what we were planning to do about the review body as a result of Comblain La Tour. Not sure to what extent I persuaded them; certainly they were not enthusiastic for change, but they could hardly be expected to be, as they know how inefficiently some of them are sitting on golden eggs, if that is not a mixed metaphor.

  An hour’s talk with Sam Brittan38 which was quite satisfactory though he is more pro full monetary union than he is pro the EMS. Then, as an act of courtesy, I went to listen to Stobbe’s lecture to the Institut Royal, where he had a good audience. He gave a dullish short lecture in English, which left time for lots of questions, which he answered brilliantly, with a great delicacy of touch and some emotional force, on quite difficult subjects.

  TUESDAY, 3 OCTOBER. Brussels, The Hague and Brussels.

  Train to The Hague. A meeting from 12.30 to 1.30 with a lot of ministers, presided over by van der Klaauw, the Foreign Minister. That went very well. The Dutch are nice and sensible, and also I had an agreeable feeling, which I certainly would not have had a year ago, that I have a greater command of the various issues of Community business than any of them—although that obviously should be the case. Van der Stee, the Minister of Agriculture, I liked very much as on previous occasions. Van Agt, the Prime Minister, joined us just before the end of this meeting, and between it and lunch I had a quarter of an hour alone with him and van der Klaauw, during which we talked a bit about the Giscard letter, with a fairly good common approach, and I also tried out the idea of Witteveen on them, about which they were enthusiastic. Back to Brussels by the afternoon train.

  THURSDAY, 5 OCTOBER. Brussels and Manchester.

  Five ambassadors with credentials. Then a meeting with fifteen British agricultural journalists, and then over to the Charlemagne, very reluctantly, for a COREPER lunch. The lunch was one of the most dreary of the series. We spent the time discussing pointless detailed issues about the agenda for the Council of Ministers.

  Home, cutting it rather fine, to change into a dinner jacket, before catching the 6.10 plane to Manchester. It was the only sensible way of arranging things, although it seemed an odd dress for an air journey (almost unknown since the days of Imperial Airways, although I believe passengers then mostly dined on the ground). To the Midland Hotel and the Manchester Chamber of Commerce dinner. It was a large gathering of about three hundred packed into the room, and was generally a good occasion. My speech, although a bit long, was about the Community’s industrial policy and the best I had delivered for some time.

  I started by replying to the comments on my wishing to abolish the motor car, accompanied as it had been in some papers by suggestions that, in that case, I might start by giving up either the Mercedes or the Rover. The point was use not possession. I was a devoted train traveller. When I had been on an official visit to The Hague two days before, and they had very kindly brought a motor car on to the station platform in order to drive me the short distance to the Catshuis, I said, ‘Do you always do this for official visitors?’ And they replied, ‘We don’t know. No official visitor, except you, has arrived by train for twenty years.’

  I was joined after dinner by Jennifer, who had been addressing the Victorian Society in Manchester.

  THURSDAY, 6 OCTOBER. Manchester and Paris.

  A rather beautiful morning. The weather in my experience is always good in Manchester. Plane to Paris, to the Embassy at noon, and then to the Paris Hilton for a luncheon speech to the Cercle de l’Opinion. Oddly it was the first public speech I had made in France (apart from to the Parliament in Strasbourg), and was therefore of some importance. There was a large audience of over five hundred, including a lot of notables—Poher, President of the Senate, Maurice Faure, Couve de Murville, Lecanuet, Pontillon, Olivier Giscard d’Estaing (Giscard’s brother, who is Chairman of ELEC which is associated with the Cercle).

  It was an exhausting occasion. They kept on having speeches all through lunch; fortunately they suspended service for mine, although it was before the main course, and there was good attention for thirty minutes. The question period afterwards was chaotic and unsatisfactory. On balance the occasion was worthwhile.

  Back to the Embassy and worked in the garden before a short walk around the Concorde and the Rond Point. We dined with the Hendersons and Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais (Jacques being ill again, although only with ‘flu).

  SUNDAY, 8 OCTOBER. Paris and Brussels.

  The weather as perfect as ever. This October is the most exquisite month imaginable at any season of the year. Jennifer and I did a pre-lunch drive through south-east Paris, Boulevard de Montparnasse, Boulevard de Port Royal (where I stayed in the two summers before the war), Avenue de Gobelins, Place d’ltalie, Bois de Vincennes, and then up to the heights of Bellevue and Ménilmontant near Père-Lachaise and back through the Place de la République. It is a segment of Paris redolent of 1870–1939, yet largely hidden from foreigners today. Another lunch in the Embassy garden with the Hendersons alone. 5.44 TEE from the Gare du Nord. A splendid sunset on the way out of Paris but dark for most of the journey. A very satisfactory weekend in Paris. The Hendersons were extremely welcoming, and I thought more reconciled to retirement than when we last saw them there in June, and therefore talking much more (and with enthusiasm) about returning to England.

  THURSDAY, 12 OCTOBER. Brussels and Milan.

  Plane to Milan for an official visit. Three hours late because of fog there, which is only too usual in that distinguished city I fear; it was a beautiful day in Brussels. Got to the Savini Restaurant very late for my lunch with eight or ten Italian editors and the Lombardy industrialists who were organizing the visit. Most of the editors had waited, and we had a rather good discussion with sensible questions. Then to the Hotel Principe e Savoia before a call on the Prefect, a bouncy Sicilian of conversational verve (an interesting appointment to Milan). And then on from there to the Municipio for a meeting with the Syndico, a little right-wing socialist. Last there was a dinner with a not frightfully good speech from me on monetary union and a few questions.

  FRIDAY, 13 OCTOBER. Milan and East Hendred.

  A quite testing round of meetings (regional council, Lombardian industrialists), little speeches, press conference, TV interviews, etc. from 10.00 until 4.00, including a Confindustria lunch.

  Then on the most beautiful afternoon I squeezed in a visit to Santa Maria delle Grazie to see the Last Supper, which I had not done for about fifteen years. It is noticeably deteriorating, the balance of the composition is still absolutely spectacular, but the colour and the line and the detail and the clarity have almost totally gone.

  My plane for London took off at 6.30, only an hour late. Then we were stacked over Kent for nearly one and a half hours, because London Airport was only half open. East Hendred after a misty drive at 10.30.

  SUNDAY, 15 OCTOBER. East Hendred and Brussels.

  Donaldsons, Harlechs, Douglass Cater, Caroline and Jane Gilmour to lunch. I left with the Harlechs, who dropped me at London Airport for a Brussels plane which yet again was over an hour late. Rue de Praetère just after 9 o’clock for a postponed three-hour dinner alone with Pandolfi–the fairly new Italian Minister of the Treasury. He is very much a Lombardian, from Bergamo, I think. He speaks good English and we had a satisfactory talk about Community affairs in general, but obviously and particularly the EMS. His will to come in is very strong, and, whatever Italian hesitations there may be, I believe he will try and overcome them. The Italian main interest in the ‘concurrent studies’39 field seems to have switched from a shift in the balance of European agriculture (although they still attach some importance to that) to a large programme of loans with subsidized interest rates fo
r major infrastructure projects. He talked about a nationwide environmental improvement scheme, which sounds a little airy-fairy, but I don’t think, as conceived in his mind, it is so. Indeed he took exactly this view himself about a Messina Straits bridge, which he thought was far too ill-defined a project at the moment for vast sums of public money to be committed to it.

  MONDAY, 16 OCTOBER. Brussels and Luxembourg.

  Motored to Luxembourg to attend the Ecofin Council all morning and again for an hour after lunch. It was a depressing and disturbing meeting. I listened but didn’t speak at all in the morning and only briefly in the afternoon to warn them that they were all drifting away from the objectives of the Bremen communiqué. In contrast with the September Ecofin meeting, when there was a solid front of eight countries, with the British isolated but not too intransigent, at this meeting there were about three floating groups with different positions on a whole range of issues and, if anything, it was the Germans who were becoming isolated on an excessively hard line, put forward in particular by Emminger, the President of the Bundesbank.

  At the September meeting, mainly as a result of the Aachen arrangement between Giscard and Schmidt, there were eight countries for moving from the ‘basket’ to the ‘grid’ so far as the system of intervention was concerned. This had been subsequently modified by the so-called ‘Belgian compromise’, which was more favourable to German ‘hardline-ism’. Having won this victory, the Germans ought to have been content. Instead, they tried to use it as a jumping-off ground for a further retreat (from Bremen), and also produced an extremely unconvincing scheme for, in effect, getting away from the 25 billion écus (European Currency Units) of credit, although pretending that they were not in fact doing so.

  As a result of all this Healey was able to recover a good deal of the initiative, which he exploited skilfully to get support from Pandolfi and from Colley (Irish Finance Minister) and also on some issues from Monory40 (French Finance Minister), and even, occasionally, from the Belgians and the Luxembourgeois. Only the Dutch and the Danes were solid with the Germans. Matters improved a little, but not much, in the afternoon, when Lahnstein rather than Emminger was leading for the Germans. Emminger is, I fear, anxious if he can to block the EMS and, if he cannot, to be dragged into it only by his hair, screaming, and with as puny a scheme as possible.

  I then moved into the Foreign Affairs Council, which met for five hours and did a certain amount of routine business. As a result the three-a-side dinner that Dohnanyi was giving me at the Hostellerie Gastronome did not start until 10.30. However, he was as agreeable as ever and so indeed were those with him, even Sigrist being almost sparkling. Unfortunately they had ordered an elaborate dinner of five courses, which we were forced to sit through until about 12.30.

  TUESDAY, 17 OCTOBER. Luxembourg and Brussels.

  I attended a Concertation Meeting41 on the Regional Fund between representatives of the Parliament and of the Council. The Council were giving remarkably little to the Parliament, although the previous evening, to my surprise, the Danes had proposed a significant move forward which the Germans had been willing to accept, which we had supported strongly, but which had been blocked by the French and the British. At this Tuesday morning meeting Dohnanyi presented the Council position softly and rather well, and was then replied to by a combination of the Irish Senator Yeats and Donald Bruce,42 who did his piece well without being too bad-tempered, but pointed a finger firmly at the British and the French. I think he was more concerned to have the British in his sights, but the French took it as a tremendous attack on them and lèse majesté against Giscard.

  Luc de Nanteuil in response put on a peevish performance, first ostentatiously putting Le Figaro up in front of his face and then, getting bored with that journal, throwing it on the table, crossing and recrossing his legs, and generally miming a man in a bad temper. However, when I saw him in the afternoon he seemed to have completely recovered his good humour. He is a strange man; in most ways I like him very much, but he is not good at translating the sometimes extreme instructions of his government into firmness without petulance.

  I later spoke to Johannes Witteveen on the telephone in Houston, Texas, and tried, I fear unsuccessfully, to persuade him to accept the chairmanship of my outside review body for the Commission.

  At 6 o’clock we had the formal opening of the Portuguese negotiations for about an hour, at which Dohnanyi and I made speeches, followed by the new Portuguese Foreign Minister (Correia Gago) who seemed a bright and agreeable man. The questions at the press conference were, as nearly always, asked by the British more than anybody else, the inevitable Château Palmer starting off, and rather to my surprise they were mostly directed at me. Avion taxi to Brussels.

  WEDNESDAY, 18 OCTOBER. Brussels.

  Saw Gundelach on the difficult issue of whether we were going to take the British to court on several fish conservation measures. I was sceptical on the major one, not because I was against taking the British to court but because I feared that on the legal opinion we would not win. Gundelach was clearly under considerable pressure from the Danish Government and also believed it might strengthen his negotiating hand with the British. Eventually we agreed to set in train the legal process in all four cases, but not to get ourselves into a position from which we could not draw back from any one of them.43

  A short-notice dinner party, rue de Praetère, for Maitlands, Denmans, Tinés and Laura. Donald Maitland was far more relaxed than I had seen him before. It was obviously rather a good idea to have him to a ‘scratch’ party. He has become a new man in the last few months: (i) he is much more courageous vis-à-vis London, (ii) he is more communautaire, and (iii) he is much funnier. Jacques Tiné as agreeable and funny as ever. As a result they stayed much later than I had intended.

  THURSDAY, 19 OCTOBER. Brussels and London.

  11.15 plane to London. I arrived to discover Jennifer in (for her) a considerable state about the ludicrous build-up of the story which had begun as a trickle in Tribune and then, the British press feeding off itself as usual, became a flood, announcing that we had not paid our Labour Party subscriptions for several years. It was wholly untrue, the subscriptions had been paid by banker’s order, and the whole thing had obviously been motivated by a malicious Trot. in the North Kensington Labour Party. By this time we had had about five separate, quite prominent newspaper stories and two (rather funny) cartoons, and our attempts at denials had been quite unable to stem the flood. We eventually sent off a rather good, non-portentous letter to The Times, which gradually achieved the staunching operation.44

  A dinner speech at Grosvenor House to the Council of British Shipping. This turned out to be almost the biggest dinner I have ever addressed, with about 1100 people. Agreeable neighbours in the shape of Ronald Swayne, the chairman, and John Ropner, whom I hadn’t seen since we crossed the Atlantic together on the Queen Mary on my first visit to the United States in 1953.

  SUNDAY, 22 OCTOBER. Rome.

  Dressed in the extraordinary costume of white tie, evening tailcoat, black waistcoat, decorations, which was required for the Papal installation,45 I set off for St Peter’s just after 9 o’clock. The Mass (in the open air) began at 10 o’clock and went on until 1.15 in steadily improving weather, so that the umbrella I had cautiously taken manifestly became unnecessary by about 11 o’clock. Most of the first hour was taken up by the homage of all the cardinals, and I wished that I had a key to them. Emilio Colombo (next to me) wasn’t bad and pointed out about fourteen, but even his knowledge seemed far from perfect. The Duke of Norfolk, in the next row, offered pungent comments about one or two of them. The second hour was taken up by introductory parts of the service and by a half-hour sermon, delivered seated but with great force by the new Pope, who has a remarkable linguistic ability. There were passages in French, Spanish, German, English, Serbo-Croat, Polish obviously, Russian, Czech I think, and Portuguese, all thrown in on the Italian base and all rather convincingly done.

  In the thir
d part of the service, the Mass itself, communion was distributed by an immense fleet of priests to everyone in the reserved area, and so far as I could make out also to vast numbers of people in the crowd below the bottom of the steps, which was said to number 250,000. The music was on the whole good, though not quite so memorable as it had been in San Giovanni in Laterano at the Aldo Moro service. It is more difficult to get the peculiarly haunting lilt of the Roman Mass music in the open air.

  The ceremony over, we got away with quite remarkable speed. I walked out with Andreotti and Forlani and was in my car and moving off within ten minutes. Lunch (changed) soon after 2 o’clock with Laura and Crispin and Delli Paoli (our protocol man) in the most beautiful weather. Delli Paoli succeeded in getting the restaurant to move one table outside for the sun-worshipping English. Then a very good expedition for one and a half hours to two basilicas, San Giovanni and Santa Maria Maggiore, plus the Janiculum Hill (for the view) and the Campidoglio.

  The British Ambassador (Alan Campbell), Leslie Benson46 and Milton Gendel,47 amongst others, to dinner at the Bolognese in the Piazza del Popolo. Raymond Barre was also dining at the restaurant.

  MONDAY, 23 OCTOBER. Rome and Brussels.

  A half-hour interview on general subjects for Italian television on the balcony of the Hassler. I then dressed again in the elaborate costume of the day before, improved slightly on this occasion by my wearing one of Laura’s black silk scarves as a cummerbund to cover the gap between my hired black waistcoat and my semi-stiff shirt. The audience ceremony (at 11.30) turned out to be much too long and rather a bore. The Pope was late arriving, having given private audiences to the King of Spain and one or two other heads of state. He made a quite good but, in the circumstances, rather too long speech in French, and then started on his list of individuals who were each taken up to the throne and had perhaps two minutes with him. The European Community counted as an international organization, so came towards the end with NATO, the United Nations, etc. at about 2 o’clock. By then I was anxious to have it over, and so I suspect was the Pope though he showed no signs of boredom. When I mounted the steps of his dais he paused to see what language I would talk in, and as he had sounded equally good in English and French I started in English, but found him more halting than I expected, although still a forceful personality at close quarters as at more distant ones.