European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  Back to the Berlaymont at 5 o’clock, where the report of the Cour des Comptes had arrived. I had changed my plan and got Murphy to deliver it by special messenger, as I thought it was a mistake to be waiting for it all over the weekend. I had read it by about 6 o’clock. It was not a very good report. The first part, written in English on frais de représentation, was better and fairer than the second part, written in French, on frais de mission. The general impression was neither very good nor very bad.

  MONDAY, 25 JUNE. Brussels and Anchorage.

  At 11.00 I saw Murphy of the Cour des Comptes, he anxious to be friendly, I rather chilly and pointing out what I thought were the weaknesses of his report. A little feeder plane at 2.10 from Zav-entem up to Amsterdam for the 4.15 JAL plane for Anchorage and Tokyo. The dismal weather of the Low Countries persisted the whole way, giving the impression of a world almost totally enshrouded in cloud. However, a relatively comfortable journey because of the good and comfortable sleeping berths which JAL had made out of the hump of the jumbo.

  TUESDAY, 26 JUNE. Tokyo.

  Tokyo at 4.30 in the afternoon (9.30 a.m. Brussels time). Helicopted in to within half a mile of the New Otani Hotel. The security precautions were prodigious. The Japanese had virtually closed down a sector of the city about the size and nature of that from Hyde Park Corner to Kensington High Street. We had to enter the hotel through the older part and walk through an immensely long arcade of about 250 yards, with shops on either side and a hundred or so guards, a lot of them female, standing silently with their backs to us the whole way along. This was quite apart from the posse of ten or twelve armed policemen who accompanied us.

  I was installed in a large suite on the thirty-eighth floor, with a considerable view over a large part of the city, and surrounded by the rooms of the rest of our party which filled that antenna of the hotel. The Cour des Comptes would not have liked it, had the Japanese not been paying, but what else we could have done, even if they were not, I do not know. Despite cloud and rain the temperature was around 90° (a weather combination about as unpleasant as possible) but the air conditioning was quite good.

  WEDNESDAY, 27 JUNE. Tokyo.

  At 11.00 I went to see Ohira, the Japanese Prime Minister, almost the only time we went out of the hotel during that long dismal day of waiting. A moderately useful conversation with rather stately consecutive translation. The Japanese briefing after this meeting, I think unintentionally, was rather tiresome, as it indicated that I had said (which indeed was a phrase I did use) that the European oil import target was not a fait accompli- i.e. it depended upon what others would do—whereas they interpreted it as meaning that it was something which was not firm. However, this caused only a mild ripple in (typically) the French press, but not more than that.

  Back in the hotel I went down one floor to see Joe Clark, the new Canadian Prime Minister, before lunch. I had met him twice before. He had been to call on me in London in 1976 and had sat next to me at the Governor-General’s lunch in Ottawa in 1978. I had found him quite good in London, rather unimpressive in Ottawa, but now on this third occasion better than I expected: fluent, seemed in reasonable command of himself and fairly firm in what he wanted. He was anxious to be friendly to the Community, but did not dissimulate when I raised with him the question of ordering the Airbus and said (1) that they had a firm policy of not interfering with state corporations, and (2) they were pretty sure that Air Canada was going to buy Boeing.

  At 6.30 James Schlesinger (US Energy Secretary), Cooper, and Henry Owen came to see me. By this time I was in a fairly bad temper, partly through having spent the whole day incarcerated in the hotel and partly because it had become by then abundantly clear that Giscard was not going to relent and ask me to the European dinner which he had organized for Mrs Thatcher, Andreotti and Schmidt that evening. It was a silly discourtesy as it made it extremely difficult for me to know what was going on in the European camp, and indeed caused mild irritation amongst all the others.

  I therefore worked off a certain amount of my bad temper on these three Americans, Schlesinger in particular deserving it as he talked a great deal of nonsense, appealing for sympathy because American indigenous oil was becoming exhausted as they had used it up so fast in order to help Britain during the war. ‘Oh, God,’ I said, ‘surely we don’t have to have that “blood on the oil” history at this stage? I can’t attach a different moral value to one barrel of oil than another.’ He looked mildly shocked by this, but came off his line very quickly, and, indeed, we were told subsequently that this meeting had led to their going back to Carter saying that the Americans must be more forthcoming than they had hitherto intended to be. So bad temper for once brought some benefit.

  Crispin went to dinner with some of his Summit ‘sherpas’ and I rather gloomily and uselessly went to a restaurant with Audland and Fielding.6 Returning, I met Schmidt at the beginning of the long corridor and had about ten minutes’ talk with him. He seemed rather fed up with the European dinner, and implied it had been useless, which was a slight comfort.

  THURSDAY, 28 JUNE. Tokyo.

  Up at 6.15, last-minute work on Summit papers, but diverted by Mount Fuji, which for the first and only time during our visit suddenly came up clear on the horizon for about an hour and then disappeared again. Then to the first session of the Summit, which started at 9.45. The session took a rather extraordinary form. Ohira opened with a brief statement, outlined a sort of agenda, and then asked if we would like to go round the table on the agenda, with five-minute statements. Carter spoke for about five minutes, Giscard spoke for about five minutes, Andreotti spoke for about four, Mrs Thatcher spoke for about ten. Schmidt then spoke much along the lines he did in Strasbourg, quite well, but for twenty-five minutes. Then Clark, then me, also for about ten minutes, doing a review of how things had gone in a variety of fields since Bonn, and coming on to specific energy points at the end.

  Ohira made a few remarks himself and then said he thought we ought to adjourn for coffee, which amazed everybody as it is not the practice and we had only been going for at most one and a quarter hours. The coffee break took a good forty minutes and when we reassembled he said, ‘At this point on the agenda we are supposed to discuss the macroeconomic situation, but it seems to me that that was covered to a substantial extent earlier this morning. Collaborators are not yet quite ready with the communiqué on energy, so it is rather difficult to know what we should do.’

  Mrs Thatcher then said she would like to make a few remarks on inflation, and made them quite well, saying that she was against it and announcing that Keynes was out of date. Schmidt then agreed with Mrs Thatcher in substance but sprang to the defence of Keynes, saying it was not Keynes who was out of date but Keynen-sianism as he rather curiously called it. There then followed a slightly academic exchange of views between Giscard, Schmidt and me about the extent to which Keynes would be a Keynesian today, followed by a point of mine, which Mrs Thatcher took up, about it being desirable to have a price index which excluded energy price increases, otherwise trying to restrain inflation and trying to restrain energy consumption ran head-on into each other.

  When we came to the end of this somewhat desultory conversation, at 12.10 exactly, Ohira said, ‘Lunch is at 1 o’clock and I think perhaps we all need some rest before that, so I suggest we now adjourn and assemble for the photograph at 12.45/This we proceeded to do, totally at variance with previous Summit practice which is to go on talking and talking and always adjourning late, and obviously rather to the displeasure of those who particularly like talking. Nobody tried to prevent my being photographed with the heads of government, although Giscard looked slightly baleful. Perhaps that particular aspect of the comedy is behind us—but not others.

  I lunched with the Finance Ministers. The heads of government were in the same room, but stayed on at their table, so that the session did not resume until 4.15. This led to a considerable cock-up as it was not at all clear what they had been agreeing to or not agreein
g to over the luncheon period. Giscard, to the annoyance of Mrs Thatcher, the embarrassment of Andreotti, and indeed I think even the mild irritation of Schmidt, had propounded—which the Americans and the Japanese wanted—individual European country targets within the total of 470 million tonnes for the Community as a whole,7 provided the Americans would make some unspecified concession. But nobody seemed quite clear exactly where we were and Giscard indeed at one stage, as became apparent during the afternoon session, had been prepared to agree with the Americans that a 1979, instead of a 1978, base should be taken. This would have been disastrous for the Community, for whereas we were just on the 470 million tonnes in 1978, we might be as low as 425 million in 1979, and would therefore either have a figure which we could not hold until 1985, or we would be in the ludicrous position of having to import oil we did not need during the second six months of 1979 in order to preserve a statistical base.

  On these sorts of points we negotiated, not very successfully—the meeting at times breaking down rather like the merry-go-round in La Ronde- for several hours. It wasn’t really a discussion session but a sort of negotiating conference on figures in the communiqué, with it not being clear from time to time whether we were in session or not. There was a general impression of mild chaos amongst the Europeans because, despite our firm overall Community position, it was not remotely clear what hand Giscard (as the President-in-office of the European Council) was playing, though it was certainly not a Community hand or, indeed, a very effective hand at all.

  Giscard, in my perhaps prejudiced view, was on notably unimpressive form throughout this Summit. I think it was because he was not treated as the belle of the ball. The Japanese made a considerable fuss of everybody, including me, of whom in all their papers (which had vast supplements about the Summit) they had a full biography, just as with the heads of government. But amongst the heads of government Carter was the most important one to the Japanese, because when they think of a President of another country, they think of the President of the United States as being, as it were, their President. Also, he had been paying a three-day state visit and got a lot of publicity from this. Next, insofar as there was an individual who aroused particular curiosity, it was Mrs Thatcher, because she was new and a woman.. And third, insofar as the Japanese think of a European country with which for a mixture of good and bad reasons they feel affinity, it is Germany, and therefore Schmidt was at least as big as, probably a bigger figure in their eyes than Giscard. Giscard therefore ended up only about number four, not really much more prominent than Andreotti, Joe Clark or me, which isn’t at all what he likes.

  Schmidt got increasingly impatient and bored throughout the proceedings, partly because when Giscard behaves badly Schmidt switches off, rather like a husband who pretends not to notice if his wife gets drunk, and partly because he was frustrated by not being able to make his long quasi-philosophical tours d’horizon.

  Carter was subdued, spoke very quietly, not a great deal, but when he had to speak did so quite effectively and did not seem jumpy or on edge: diminished but not neurotic was how I would describe the general impression he made. Ohira, partly but only partly for language reasons, was an appalling chairman. The Japanese just don’t think in terms of the normal discussion meetings of which we are so fond, they don’t like rambling around the intellectual horizons themselves and probably don’t therefore see why anyone else should do it; and they may be right. However, his chairmanship was sufficiently bad that I think even he noticed it, and indeed at the end he apologized, as the translator put it, ‘for my inadvertent chairmanship’.

  One advantage of his ‘inadvertent chairmanship’ was that the sessions were mercifully short. We were back in the hotel by 6.30, despite the fact that I had been held up for a few minutes by having to walk out to her car with my new friend Mrs Thatcher, who asked if I was leaving and hoped we could leave together in order to protect her I think from being surrounded by the press to whom, quite sensibly, she didn’t want to give ‘on the hoof’ conferences. She had done quite well during the afternoon, though she was expressing considerable impatience with the form of the meeting and, in particular, with Giscard’s performance.

  Then we had the Emperor’s dinner at the Imperial Palace. Here again, so far as I was concerned, there was Giscard-ordained segregation. In other words the heads of government were received by the Emperor and the other members of the Royal Family in one room and then came and joined the Foreign Ministers, the Finance Ministers and me after about twenty minutes. However, whether accidentally or not, the Emperor frustrated this by sending the Court Chamberlain to bring me up to him and I had a good ten minutes of imperial conversation before we went into dinner. As in 1977, I quite enjoyed talking to him. It is done through an interpreter but it is about quite serious subjects, about Japan in a sort of socio-geographical sense, and he is serious, well-informed and reasonably easy.

  I also had a rather good place à table at dinner, between the wife of the Emperor’s younger brother, who looked rather younger than she could have been as she had stayed at Buckingham Palace under King George V on her honeymoon in 1931, and a former Prime Minister, who was curiously interested in what one might call English Gaitskellian politics, had known Hugh well and indeed Tony Crosland also.

  FRIDAY, 29 JUNE. Tokyo.

  A morning session from 9.50 until 12.10 once again mainly negotiations on the communiqué and particularly on the energy parts of it. Then an hour’s pause before lunch, during which I asked François-Poncet to come and see me, because I had been worried by a development at the end of the morning in which Carter led Schmidt off into the idea of putting in some denunciatory stuff about OPEC in the communiqué. While not against denouncing OPEC, I wasn’t keen for us all to get hooked on a Carter line hoist largely for internal American political reasons (as subsequently emerged very clearly) and to have it done rather hot-headedly -and Schmidt was certainly in a hot-headed mood by this time—in a heads of government drafting session, which is never a good recipe for good sense.

  A final afternoon session for an hour and a half. The difficulty at this stage was that Andreotti was insisting very firmly and pertinaciously that the Italians would only accept a country target (rather like the Japanese who were in the same position) if it was made so loose as to be almost meaningless. In other words, he wanted a footnote saying that it was all to be seen within the context of the Community target. In the circumstances Mrs Thatcher came in and said wasn’t it much better if we just all jointly stuck to the Community target, and I supported her on this. It would in fact have suited Schmidt much better too, but he was leaning back. Then Giscard intervened, very bad-temperedly; whether against Mrs Thatcher or me, or both of us, was not absolutely clear saying, ‘No, this is an intolerable going back on what we had decided hitherto,’ etc. He then moved round the table to talk to Andreotti. I had a draft to offer and, irritated by Giscard, firmly refused to go on talking until he had gone back to his place and was prepared to listen. Mrs Thatcher was much shocked by his display of bad manners and bad temper, I less so.

  Ohira announced that at the press conference there would be no questions but statements from everybody, including me. So I had progressed from sitting at the press conference with no microphone in London, to sitting silent at the press conference with a microphone in Bonn, to sitting at the press conference with a microphone and being allowed to make a statement at Tokyo!

  Most of the statements were very bad. Probably Mrs Thatcher’s was the best, although she rather tailed off. I at least was short. Giscard and Schmidt were both notably bad, Schmidt just seeming bored. Then I did my own press conference (as did the others) from 6.30 to 7.00, with I suppose about 150 pressmen present, as opposed to the thousand or so we had had for the general occasion, and answered a few questions.

  We could not helicopt to the airport as it was after dark, so we were driven out to the old airport about ten miles away, put on a special plane and flown round for forty minutes unt
il we landed at the new airport, a most remarkable performance between what were alleged to be airports for the same city. The JAL plane was in the air at 9.45, and I managed to arrange that on this journey I should not be brought downstairs at Anchorage. Needless to say, however, I awoke at Anchorage where, mysteriously, it was 10.30 in the morning on Friday the 29th, the day on the evening of which we had left Tokyo, and for once the sun was shining.

  SATURDAY, 30 JUNE. Anchorage and East Hendred.

  London at 6.00 in the morning (3 p.m. Japanese time) and East Hendred at 7.15. Began early telephoning of the Little Five: first, Thorn, then van der Klaauw (van Agt being characteristically away on a bicycle tour), then the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch. Later that morning I got Martens, the Belgian Prime Minister, but failed to get the Danes until Monday. I think this is a worthwhile exercise.

  Jennifer and I went to lunch with Ann (Fleming) at Sevenhamp-ton where there was a large party composed of, amongst others, Mark Boxer,8 Katie Asquith,9 the Levers, Patrick Trevor-Roper,10 etc.

  TUESDAY, 3 JULY. Brussels.

  Saw Tugendhat at 10.30, he anxious to lobby hard for Natali as the parliamentary Commissioner. He was not anxious to do it himself, but would much prefer Natali to Davignon, and argued persuasively, indeed I think decisively, in favour of this course.

  After the annual cabinet luncheon at rue de Praetère. I returned to the office to see Davignon, having made up my mind over lunch, and to tell him that it was to be Natali and not him, which he took thoroughly well. At 7.45 I was warned that Mrs Thatcher wished to talk to me on the telephone and Crispin came around in order to help deal with that. It was about the UK/Euratom arrangement and, without too much difficulty, I was able to negotiate a satisfactory settlement with her. She is fairly crisp at negotiating, but perfectly sensible. She also, I think slightly prompted by Woodrow (Wyatt), who had been trying to organize a meal at his house, asked me if I would come to Chequers for a quiet dinner to talk about European Councils, Summits, etc.