European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  The mise-en-scène was that of a 1940s film, with three violinists playing throughout and a feeling that Adolphe Menjou should be the head waiter. Then suddenly the three turned into two who advanced up the room, doing a serenade to Kissinger, and I realized—though it took a moment or two to do so—that they weren’t two of the three hired performers but were Isaac Stern and Zubin Mehta. Afterwards Stern made Mehta do an extraordinary double-talk act with him, in which he said, ‘Now I will make a little speech in which I shall start each sentence and my friend will have to finish it. Then he will start the next one and I’ll finish that.’ Mehta looked slightly apprehensive about this, but in fact did it extremely well: Stern did it brilliantly, and the whole thing was an extraordinary tour de force for about five to seven minutes.

  I sat between Mrs Mehta and Happy (or Unhappy as she is now known, I fear) Rockefeller, with Kissinger on the other side of Mrs Mehta. A lot of people of some note present–Javits8 inevitably. Jack McCloy 9 - I cannot really think who altogether. Baddish speeches, including a rather indifferent one from Henry, but not as bad as those a (to me) unknown Senator and an unknown Congressman had made earlier. The hostess’s was well above the average, even including her extraordinary act of saying, ‘Now we have got Henry’s book, which is the greatest book for a very long time, but not perhaps as great as the Bible, therefore, I am opening the Bible on this higher stand and opening Henry’s book on the other stand a few inches below it.’

  SUNDAY, 20 JANUARY. New York.

  At Marietta’s large dinner party there was a bizarre interchange between Sam Spiegel10 and Nicko Henderson, neither knowing who the other was, but neither being able to understand that they didn’t know someone as notable as the other obviously was. It all arose over a discussion of the Christmas holidays, when Heath had somewhat surprisingly spent two weeks more or less alone with Sam Spiegel in the West Indies. Nicko couldn’t think who this man was with whom Heath had spent such a long time; and Spiegel couldn’t think who this man Henderson was who knew Heath so relatively well.

  MONDAY, 21 JANUARY. New York.

  To the vast, dismal Hilton for my dinner with the Economic Club of New York, which I had last addressed ten years previously. As is their habit, it was a double billing, with Reuben Askew, ex-Governor of Florida, Robert Strauss’s replacement as Special Trade Commissioner. I greeted the occasion with foreboding, having been told by some rather foolish man the previous evening that it was a useless audience (which was contrary to my previous recollection) and the only thing to do with them was—as apparently old Lord Thomson (Roy not George) and done several years ago—to tell them an endless series of rather risqué stories, which was not my intention, desire, or capability.

  In fact it turned out a very good occasion: an audience of nearly a thousand and I made quite a brisk speech, with even some oratorical flourishes. We then had a good question session, including one about what were my intentions in relation to a centre party in British politics. I recalled Al Smith’s 1924 riposte, which was at least appropriate in New York, when he got off the Twentieth Century Limited from Chicago, was prematurely asked whether he was a candidate (for President) and said, ‘I have not yet reached a decision upon that grave matter. But even had I done so I think it extremely unlikely I would wish to communicate it to the nation, through you, from this railroad platform.’

  TUESDAY, 22 JANUARY. New York and Washington.

  Nine o’clock shuttle to Washington. At 11.00 a curious meeting with Brzezinski and Vance jointly, in Brzezinski’s White House office. It was never clear who was in charge.

  Then, at 11.30, a three-quarters-of-an-hour meeting with Carter. I saw him first in the Oval Office alone and had the normal agreeable conversation and photographs, and then had a rather good exchange with perhaps a total of fourteen people round the table, fairly evenly balanced conversation and not difficult. He was looking on much better form than when I had last seen him in Tokyo at the end of June, but this is not surprising as that was a very low period for him, and this is an up period after his crushing defeat of Teddy Kennedy in the Iowa primary.

  I then went to the State Department in Vance’s car and had a half-hour’s meeting with him, followed by a two-hour luncheon. The meeting was better than routine, partly because we completely floored him over sanctions against Iran. In a polite way I told him why I was sceptical about them and found to my surprise (it’s a bad thing that the US State Department should think things out so incompletely) that he had no real answers, and not much conviction either. Over lunch we ran through a range of issues -Yugoslavia, Turkey, China. It was better than previous meetings at the State Department, because we had more to talk to them about and it was in no sense a contrived agenda.

  At 3.15, I saw the Secretary of Commerce (Klutznick) who Carter told me would explain the exact US position about the restriction on the export of high technology to Russia, but discovered they were still in a totally confused state about this.

  The Spaaks had a huge dinner for me, forty-eight I think, with his fairly normal but rather good selection of people, a few Senators, a few Congressmen, Harrimans, Chief Justice Burger, Vangie (Bruce), I think no ambassadors of the Nine (other than Nicko), a few White House people, Lloyd Cutler,11 Henry Owen, Dick Cooper—all quite well done and well organized. The only difficulty was that Madame Spaak was distinctly gloomy, as she thought that when Fernand went back to Europe she would lose not only her embassy but her husband,12 and therefore reproached me for agreeing to his return. (I had no alternative. He had done four very effective years and wanted a change.)

  SUNDAY, 27 JANUARY. East Hendred.

  The Rodgers’ to lunch; found them on good and friendly form, Bill’s political position not having changed much: i.e. much tempted by movement but had to wait until the autumn.

  MONDAY, 28 JANUARY. East Hendred, London and Brussels.

  A Savoy lunch at which I presented the Granada journalistic awards of the year. Then the 4.45 plane to Brussels, on which I easily beat all my records doing the door-to-door journey, central London to the Berlaymont in 1 hour and 41 minutes.

  TUESDAY, 29 JANUARY. Brussels.

  At noon I received the Minister President of North Rhine Westphalia, Herr Rau,13 for a talk alone, followed by a short luncheon. He seemed all right, not vastly exciting but quite interesting enough to go on with. A Social Democrat Landpresident in coalition with the FDP.

  Made a brief speech at a farewell party for Alan Watson, Director of Television in the Commission—in which difficult job he has done very well.

  THURSDAY, 31 JANUARY. Brussels, Bonn and Brussels.

  Up at 7.40 with my speech on Afghanistan to the Political Committee of the Parliament (a great public affair with television, etc.) rather weighing on my mind. I worked rather frantically on it before going to the Palais d’Egmont for the much-publicized hearing at 10.00. The fifteen-minute speech seemed to go fairly well, and I had no great difficulty with the exchange of views afterwards, which went on for about two hours. Brandt made a rather wobbly speech, Scott-Hopkins a pompous one about butter, but up to a point I seemed to satisfy him. I was slightly concerned as to whether I had not, on butter and other agricultural export sales, gone a shade further in the direction of banning anything going to the Soviet Union than was compatible with the 16 January decision of the Council of Ministers.

  Then a singularly ill-timed COREPER lunch. It was my lunch for them, but I arrived slightly late and more than slightly bad-tempered. I was immediately nobbled by Luc de Nanteuil with an attemptedly menacing complaint about my speech that morning. I don’t think he had read it, but he kept on saying that it would be studied very carefully in Paris and if I had said we weren’t going to sell butter there would be remous in Paris, and the French Government would deeply disapprove, etc., to which I was fairly off-hand, being fed up with Luc always treating Paris as the areopagitica of Europe, and just ill-temperedly and dismissively said, ‘Quel dommage!’

  However, the ro
w persisted during lunch, when Dillon (the Irishman) was at least as bad as Luc, and nobody was very helpful except for Butler who is somewhat counterproductive. I again got rather bad-tempered at one stage during lunch, saying that it would just firmly stick in my mind that the whole reaction of COREPER to Afghanistan was an argument about butter and they seemed unable to raise their gaze out of the milk churn.

  I left feeling dissatisfied with them and with myself. They weren’t all quite as bad as they might have been: Poensgen wasn’t there, Eugenio Plaja was trying to pour oil on troubled waters and Riberholdt wasn’t too bad. But Dillon and Nanteuil and one or two of the others were extremely tiresome.

  Then I drove off with Crispin on a filthy day, all the external circumstances unpropitious at the moment, to Bonn for Schmidt at 6 o’clock. Schmidt was very late, not emerging from a meeting of the National Security Council until 6.45, having apparently been at it from 2.00. He complained a good deal about his health (he apparently has some nasty form of angina), but this didn’t prevent his looking more or less all right and proceeding to have the most extraordinary wide-ranging, ‘brain-storming’ conversation, which lasted, first with Crispin and Horst Schulmann present, from 6.50 until 8.45, and then with Schmidt and me alone until 10 o’clock, so that the whole encounter was well over three hours with no dinner, one or two drinks I thought rather reluctantly brought in, a few kleine essen, and nothing else.

  It was an amazing conversation, much of it fascinating, and it covered almost every subject under the sun: mainly the world strategic balance, his distrust of what the Americans had done in relation to Afghanistan, their lack of any overall concept, the closeness of his relationship with Honecker,14 into which they had been forced by a mutual nervousness of their superpower leaders, the fact that there were very few people in the world to whom he could speak in great confidence—Gierek15 (surprisingly) was one, Brezhnev was not, Mrs Thatcher was not, Giscard was, Carter was not, maybe Vance was, maybe Carrington was, he didn’t know him well enough.

  This led on to the one positive proposal to come out of the meeting, which was that I would try and arrange for him to have a private meeting with Carrington as otherwise I could see no way forward on the British budgetary question, on which he had become distinctly hard, moving back to a position less favourable than he had been prepared to take in Dublin. I therefore said, ‘Let’s see if we can’t arrange a meeting, as you say you would like to talk to him about general things. It is difficult to do this in a normal way in London because you would then have to do it with Mrs Thatcher.’ He said, ‘It is difficult to do it in the normal way in Bonn, because I then ought to have Genscher with me and he is the touchiest man in the world.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you come to my house in Brussels? I will arrange a dinner there.’ He replied, ‘What about England?’ and out of this began to germinate the possibility that he might come to spend the weekend, nominally seeing his daughter, who lives in London, and that we might arrange something at East Hendred. It did not seem to me likely that anything would come of this, but at least it seemed worth trying.

  Although no practical progress was made on the wretched British budgetary problem, and although the conversation was basically depressing, I got closer to the nub of matters with him than I have perhaps done before, particularly the nub of the difficulty of the British position in Europe if the Franco-German position was as locked-in an alliance as, he quite frankly explained, it has inevitably become.

  A part of the hour’s private conversation I had with him alone was political, a reversion to the possible Carrington plan, some of it was what one might call gossip about our responsibilities, my talking to him about future German Commissioners, for instance, and some of it was just conversation, with his talking about his pattern of life, his reading (he had amazingly just been reading the complete plays of Oscar Wilde, and the night before had read a whole Agatha Christie novel during a long insomniac spell). He struck me as being in an attractive mood, in some ways a bit unhinged, but on balance, as always, an interesting and formidable man.

  I left him feeling nearly as exhausted as he said he was. Crispin and I drove back on a still most filthy night, getting to rue de Praetère just after midnight. I went to sleep feeling distinctly uneasy about the Political Committee speech, the reactions to it, and the fact that I had probably been too cassant with Luc de Nanteuil and not much better with Dillon and the other members of COREPER. It had been an extraordinary day and no one could say that the interview with Schmidt was dull or that relations with him were inhibited. But these close personal relations don’t seem to be leading to any solution of the budget problem.

  FRIDAY, 1 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  Commission meeting at noon. Rather an awkward time on butter, as there was strong feeling, reasonably courteously put on the part of Gundelach, Ortoli and Cheysson, that I had gone too far on banning butter sales in the Political Committee the day before. No doubt some of them had been nobbled by their governments. However, I was able to hold the thing without too much difficulty, getting quite strong support from dear old Natali and fairly dear old Haferkamp. Still it was quite an awkward little storm, slightly bigger than in a teacup.

  Then Henry and Shirley Anglesey arrived to stay the weekend. I went to the Berlaymont, first to telephone Cossiga in Rome, and then to have a short hour’s meeting with Andov, the Yugoslav Trade Minister who was here to try and conclude our long-drawn-out negotiations for a contractual link agreement with the Yugoslavs. I was very keen on this happening, particularly as I proposed to go to Yugoslavia at the end of the month and had to get the agreement out of the way before this would be possible. Andov seemed at first a rather dour Soviet-looking little man, but I slightly warmed to him later when I took him to the lift.

  SATURDAY, 2 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  Filthy weather, and Jennifer, seized with some awful stomach bug, was unable to get up. Angleseys and I left at 11.45 to try and do Waterloo before or after lunch, and to lunch at the now favourite Trois Canards at Ohain. Before lunch we did the Panorama and Hougoumont, but decided that the pouring rain was too much for the Mound. Then a successful and enjoyable lunch and back to the Mound where, despite cold driving rain, we crept in through a hole in the hedge and clambered up the grass bank, a formidable feat.

  After that into the town of Waterloo and the Wellington Museum, which in spite of a number of curious solecisms in the labelling is definitely interesting. Then we had the success of discovering on enquiry, but without too much difficulty, the burial place of the first Marquess of Anglesey’s leg (Uxbridge when he lost it), which is more or less opposite the Wellington Museum, in a sort of water-closet in the garden of what now looks like a nursery school. A very successful day given the weather; Angleseys very good guests, full of enthusiasm and interest.

  SUNDAY, 3 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  Still in filthy weather I took the Angleseys on an afternoon expedition to Malines, where, by remarkable luck, we coincided with the installation service of the new Archbishop, Cardinal Suenens’s successor. A great Mass, a packed cathedral, with people climbing up on pulpit supports and any dais or ledge that they could find. There was a very wide age spread, Catholicism clearly thriving in Flanders. There was a great array of purple in front of the altar, including Cardinal Willebrands from Utrecht, Suenens and, obviously, his successor.

  TUESDAY, 5 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  Peter Carrington and Crispin to breakfast, rue de Praetère, at 8.45. A satisfactory conversation on a variety of issues, but not least because he was enthusiastic about the idea of a meeting with Schmidt, though preferred it to be at East Hendred; and said that he then could handle Mrs Thatcher all right. He agreed with me, not exactly reluctantly, but extremely nervously, that if we could try and get a settlement around 1000 million units of account, maybe he could sell it to her, maybe it was reasonable, etc.

  I sat next to Carrington again at lunch and had a further long talk about my future wishes in relation to the Commissi
on,16 and what I thought about a possible replacement as a British Commissioner.

  In the Foreign Affairs Council Gundelach disposed of the butter issue, for the moment at any rate, rather satisfactorily. He is at his best on an occasion like that, looks confident, is persuasive.

  WEDNESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  We dined with Madame Feher, the widow of the Hungarian chemical manufacturer who made his business into the second chemical firm to Solvay in Belgium. Remarkably good pictures. The dinner was for General Rogers,17 Haig’s replacement, but I did not talk to him much. Talked most of dinner to Marie-Louise Simonet and after dinner to Hedwige de Nanteuil, with whom I had a sort of love-in with messages of how upset Luc had been because he thought he had had a row with me, which he hated, about butter, on which he was acting under instructions, and my sending a message back to him saying it was partly my fault, not on the substance, but I feared that I had shown a lack of courtesy to him before lunch: and there was a great deal of cooing all round, including for two minutes with Luc himself, at the end. It was as well, as we are dining with them tomorrow evening and I am in any event probably the person in Brussels official life who most likes Luc.

  MONDAY, 11 FEBRUARY. Brussels and Strasbourg.

  Schmidt on the telephone at 2 o’clock, with the rather surprising good news that he wanted to go ahead with the Carrington meeting and that he would like to dine at East Hendred on Saturday, 23 February.

  Avion taxi to Strasbourg for the normal boring hour and a half of questions which didn’t start until 6.20 and therefore didn’t finish until 7.50. I thought that was supposed to be a fixed feast, but nothing, alas, is fixed in this Parliament. I did not have many questions and they gave no great difficulty. The only tricky point was when somebody tried to ask me a question not on the paper at the beginning and I had very firmly to say that if the Parliament conducted its business like that it would get into a great mess. There would be imprecise answers and it would be unfair to those who put questions down. They seemed to accept this.