European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  Then a series of engagements, including a ‘discussion’ lunch with the Speaker and forty members of the Parliament, a call on the head of state and a lecture to the Indian Institute of International Affairs, until the Prime Minister’s dinner in the ceremonial rooms of Rashtrapati Bhawan, which was fortunately brief, 8.15 to 10.15. Ten-minute speeches at the end of this, one from Mrs Gandhi, one from me. She was agreeable at dinner, and got on particularly well with Jennifer, who was on the other side of her. Dinner I suppose for about a hundred people, impressive surroundings, no alcohol, but rather good food.

  SATURDAY, 3 MAY. Delhi.

  At 10.30 saw Bahadur Singh,38 the now retired Indian diplomat who had beaten me on my second time round for the presidency of the Oxford Union. Agreeable talk with him, although he was healthily free of Oxford schwärmerei. At 12.15 a meeting with the Minister of Commerce, followed by a lunch with him and perhaps forty others in the Taj Mahal Hotel. Press conference at 5.30 and then a long television interview. Provocatively anti-EEC interviewer to whom I replied with some animation and firmness. Then at 7.30 a briefing of the ambassadors of the Nine followed by dinner at the Italian Embassy—their ambassador seemed an ass, which is most unusual in the Italian diplomatic service, but the others were not too bad.

  Jennifer had been that day for an expedition to Agra, and had survived remarkably well in a temperature of 118°F in the shade. Temperature in Delhi was about 110°F. No humidity.

  SUNDAY, 4 MAY. Delhi and Udaipur.

  Flew to Udaipur (very high-class sight-seeing) in a comfortable but non-jet Indian Air Force plane. By boat to the Lake Palace Hotel on an island. The hotel is a very splendid place. In the evening we sat for two hours on a sort of rampart having a drink and watching one of the most memorable sunsets I have ever seen.

  MONDAY, 5 MAY. Udaipur and Bangalore.

  Flew for four and a quarter hours in the same slow plane to Bangalore, which despite its reputation as a much-favoured, healthy British garrison town, failed to enthuse me.

  TUESDAY, 6 MAY. Bangalore and Mysore.

  Helicopted to Mysore. To the Mahal Palace Hotel—a vast 1920s mansion—about three miles from the town, at which hardly anybody except us seemed to be staying, and were installed there in huge vice-regal-style rooms with a splendid view. Left fairly soon afterwards to drive to the Samanthapur Temple about twenty miles away, accompanied by the Curator of Monuments for Karnatica, an erudite and enjoyable man. This early temple has extraordinary carvings done in the special stone of the locality which is very soft when quarried and therefore can be most intricately and delicately worked, but then becomes very hard and therefore preserves itself over the centuries.

  Afternoon visit to the main palace of the last Maharaja of Mysore, fairly modern, vast ironwork structure inside, all cast in Glasgow at the end of the nineteenth century, the ensemble bearing a considerable resemblance to the Winter Gardens at Blackpool. There is a striking similarity between English late Victorian and Edwardian pier architecture and the style favoured by Indian maharajas a little later. The Mysore buildings, which are on a very grand scale, were all built in the last decades of princely power.

  WEDNESDAY, 7 MAY. Mysore and Bombay.

  Helicopted for about twenty-five minutes to the Bandipur game sanctuary where we drove in jeeps through the bush or forest. (It was not tropical rain forest, but it was more than scrub.) We did relatively well for animals: no tiger—but it is now almost impossible to see a tiger anywhere—but two herd of wild elephants, one very close, and the other moving fast with a great trumpeting from the leader; a lot of rather beautiful gazelles, a lot of fine birds; and some other relatively rare creatures. Returned to Mysore for lunch and then left for Bangalore, again by helicopter, at 4.15, and on to Bombay by commercial flight on a clear, hot night. Drove the long distance into this immense city, which has a curious Manhattanlike appearance after dark, to the Taj Mahal Hotel where Mrs Sawhny, rich Bombay widow, Tata sister, gave us a dinner party which was very much an Indian version of a smart but enlightened New York occasion. A Tata brother (not the head of the firm), the leader of the local Liberal Party, several ladies much interested in the preservation of old Bombay, and nearly anybody involved in some form of good works.

  THURSDAY, 8 MAY. Bombay and East Hendred.

  London at 6.15 a.m. (9.45 Bombay time) and East Hendred at 7.15. It has been an interesting, worthwhile and not at all exhausting Indian trip.

  FRIDAY, 9 MAY. East Hendred, Paris and East Hendred.

  This, alas, was not a day of relaxation, for I set off for the 8.30 plane to Paris, which got me into the Schuman celebrations39 in the Grande Salle of the Sorbonne by about 11 o’clock. There I made a fifteen-minute speech, wholly prepared text, in the midst of other dignitaries like Barre, Mme Veil, Colombo, etc. Lunch with Marie-Alice. East Hendred at 6.40 in good time for an expedition to the Downs in magical light.

  MONDAY, 12 MAY. East Hendred, London and Brussels.

  Lunch with the British Biological Research Institute at the Savoy. Solly Zuckerman was the great panjandrum of this, and present, though not in the chair. Large audience of four or five hundred, mainly from firms concerned in these matters, some scientists. I had quite a good Crispin speech of substance which I embroidered with a joke about Solly and Mysore monkeys. (Our room in Mysore had been invaded by monkeys one afternoon, and my story, which owed a certain amount to fantasy but not everything, was that one of them came and sat close, looking at me, and that such is the obvious intelligence of a monkey—unlike any other animal—that you feel in order to be polite you have to make an attempt at conversation. I could not at first think on what subject to address it, but after a bit I decided, so ubiquitous a presence is Solly in the world, and so close had been his contact with primates, that the best I could do was to ask him whether he knew my friend Lord Zuckerman, whereupon the creature nodded gravely, appreciatively and affirmatively. Politeness had been observed, and I was able to return to my book.)

  To Brussels for one of my regular dinners for Ortoli and Gundelach—Davignon was away. Hard pounding on BBQ as is now usual.

  TUESDAY, 13 MAY. Brussels.

  Briefly to dine with the Tickells to meet for the first time Michel Rocard.40 He is not a dominating personality. Indeed it is a little difficult to imagine him as President of the French Republic, but then it is always difficult to imagine such things before they occur, if they do. But he was both highly intelligent and highly agreeable. He made a particularly good impression because, when I asked him if he remembered Jean Loudon (formerly Jean Norman, Wantage doctor’s wife with whose family she had told me he had stayed as a very young man immediately after the war), his face lit up and he said, ‘Jean Norman, not possible, how is she? Vous la connaissez? I remember that summer vividly. J’avais dix-huit ans, et elle en avait deux de plus. J’étais tellement amoureux d’elle. She was the first love of my life. Comment va-t-elle maintenant?’ It would be difficult to imagine Giscard reacting with similar naïve nostalgic enthusiasm.

  WEDNESDAY, 14 MAY. Brussels.

  Commission meeting with a fortunately light agenda. Then I had to greet the Grand Duke of Luxembourg who, accompanied by the Grand Duchess, had come for a head of state visit which took the normal form of a short talk with me alone first, then an hour’s session with the Commission, then a lunch. He was agreeable and interested, and all went well.

  An early evening visit from Muskie, the new US Secretary of State. I have known him for ten years, I suppose, and fortunately we had him to dinner at rue de Praetère about a year ago. So we started, certainly on his side, on terms of almost exaggerated friendly intimacy. He is a man with an agreeable, impressive manner. How much he knows about foreign affairs, I don’t know, but he seems self-confident, perhaps a little over-so, making clear that he was going to be a more political Secretary of State than Vance.

  I asked him whether he had not hesitated over taking the job. After all he had been in the Senate for twenty years, and a Senate
seat was a big thing to give up for what, while I did not wish to predict the result of the election, might turn out to be no more than an eight-month spell of office. He said no, he had not hesitated for a moment, he was thoroughly fed up with the Senate. He had had to fix one or two personal affairs before he had given an affirmative answer to the President, but on the substance of the issue he had not had a moment’s doubt.

  Then rather late to a dinner given for Muskie by Tapley Bennett, US Ambassador to NATO. The dinner was far too large and therefore pointless. There were about forty people present, four tables, and I had some rather dull diplomatic neighbours. After dinner, Muskie made a longish, homespun, moralistic speech which was not too bad, not too good either. Then after he had sat down at the end of it, he proceeded to try and hold the whole room for about a quarter of an hour by telling some less than riveting self-centred anecdotes. I thought they were not greatly to the point and began to feel rather impatient with the amiable ex-Senator.

  The main interest for me of the evening was that Simonet had come up to me before dinner and said that the Belgians, who had previously been strongly pushing my continuation in office, now thought the gap between Britain and the rest of the Community was so great that the time had not arrived when any Englishman could be President of the Commission almost indefinitely, which eight years would amount to. I was insistent that it did not affect me, because, as he knew, I did not want another term. I had decided four years was the right time, but it was nonetheless interesting and significant that he should have said it, and the reason that he gave. It made a pattern with my Strasbourg dinner with Davignon a month ago.

  THURSDAY, 15 MAY. Brussels, London and Sheffield.

  To Sheffield for a university-sponsored lecture on the Community and International Trade. Formidable audience of nearly a thousand, I cannot think where they got them from, who nonetheless seemed interested in a not very exciting but quite sensible lecture.

  FRIDAY, 16 MAY. Sheffield, London and East Hendred.

  7.55 train to London through spectacular May sunshine, which gave even the flat and dull East Midlands countryside an unusual iridescence. George Thomson to lunch at Brooks’s. He expressed great enthusiasm about the prospect of a party realignment, and said that if he had known I was going to do anything like this, he might not have taken on the chairmanship of IBA, as it would inhibit him in what he could do; a pity. Motored to East Hendred, where so brilliant was the evening that we went up to the Downs twice, once before dinner and once in the twilight.

  SATURDAY, 17 MAY. East Hendred and Naples.

  Avion taxi to Naples for a Foreign Ministers’ meeting, and to the Villa Rosebery on the sea to the north of Naples. It is curious that it should have so firmly maintained its Rosebery name, as he only owned it for twelve years. Lunch at 2 o’clock and then a fairly informal session from 3.30 to 6.45. The session was frustrating in that attempts by Peter Carrington, and to some extent by me, to get some serious discussion on the overhanging issue of the day, the BBQ, got nowhere. Colombo did not force it, and Genscher, who was inevitably the main potential interlocuteur as the representative of the country which would have to pay the most, was obviously not anxious to get involved.

  SUNDAY, 18 MAY. Naples and Brussels.

  Discussion over a general breakfast from 8.30 to 10.45, when we stopped. Then a calming walk (I hope) on the terrace with a very frustrated Peter Carrington. Then a brief visit to the Capodimonte Museum, which I had been to only once before. Ran into a whole posse of French diplomats, Nanteuil and his Hedwige (COREPER, thinking that the BBQ was being discussed, had insisted on being at hand in Naples, which meant they had an entirely free—in both senses—cultural weekend), Jacques Tiné, who was passing through, the French Ambassador to Rome (Puaux) and, I think, maybe yet another. Then to Brussels.

  FRIDAY, 23 MAY. Brussels and Lucca.

  A special Commission meeting, again on BBQ, which went doubtfully well. 1.10 plane to Milan. Spent about three hours working in the VIP room at the airport there and then plane to Pisa, and to La Pianella (Gilmours) by taxi only at 8.30. Arrived, typically, in rain. Coming from Northern Europe and India, it was the first rain we had seen for three weeks past.

  TUESDAY, 27 MAY. Lucca and Brussels.

  Ian and I, called by the rigours of the BBQ, had to leave at 4.00, so the visit was very truncated and the weather, as so often at this season in Italy, very shaky. We flew off in a British Government plane from Pisa to Bonn, Ian going to see Dohnanyi. I motored from Wahn to Brussels, then took a special late Commission meeting from 9.30 to 11.45 trying to get our budget paper into shape. Only moderate success. Late-night meetings are always difficult to move to a decision.

  WEDNESDAY, 28 MAY. Brussels.

  Saw Cheysson at 10.15, Davignon at 11.15 and then had a Commission meeting, perhaps if anything more difficult than the night before, all on the BBQ. Then gave Henri Simonet a late and brief lunch, my mind very much on budgetary problems as we were returning for a meeting in the afternoon.

  Commission again from 4.00. A bit of progress but not all that much, and then a bilateral meeting with Ortoli, very hard-pounding, and then home to pick up Charles (my elder son), who had arrived unexpectedly to stay, and drove him to La Hulpe and Waterloo for about an hour. Enjoyable talk with him. Home and a dinner party for Ian (Gilmour), Michael Jenkins’, Tickells, Hannay (Soames’s old Chef de Cabinet now back in the Foreign Office), and Ian’s nice Private Secretary, Michael Richardson. Hannay ground on tiresomely about the new draft of the Commission paper, which he was aware of, and which we had hammered out with difficulty during the day, saying that on one vital point it gave away far too much. Therefore rather a disputatious start to dinner. But everybody else thought Hannay had gone on boorishly for too long and eventually we managed (Ian being very helpful and nice) to get on to some general conversation and cheer up a bit.

  THURSDAY, 29 MAY. Brussels.

  Meeting with Colombo in my office from 10.30 to 11.45. Then the Commission again at noon. I tried to catch back a bit of what Hannay had complained about the previous evening: very partial success. In a minority of two with Tugendhat, which I had never been near in the Commission before.

  The fateful Foreign Affairs Council started at 3.30 and went on, with a break in the middle during which we got our paper ready and presented it, to 8.30 p.m. The gap appeared wide in early exchanges (the Council was entirely devoted to the BBQ, apart from purely routine items). Then we adjourned and dined from 9.15 to 11.15. Neither François-Poncet nor Genscher was there. In the latter case, this did not matter at all as Dohnanyi was active, less inhibited, keen on a solution, and knew the dossier much better than Genscher. In the former case it may or may not have been an advantage. François-Poncet, I assumed, would be harder and sharper than Bernard-Reymond, who had not been particularly difficult in the early session. But at dinner Bernard-Reymond became very awkward and prickly, saying that he could not possibly stay the next day, giving a series of unconvincing excuses about what he had to do in Paris—something to do with the Pope’s visit—but nothing seemed to hold together very well, and Peter Carrington became extremely irritated with him. The atmosphere for an hour or so at dinner deteriorated to such an extent that Carrington was on the point of breaking off the negotiations before they had even started. Fortunately, Ian Gilmour, with great nerve and firmness, got him off that. Even so, it still appeared that, the gap being still wide, though possibly not unbridgeable, the only thing to do was to adjourn and meet again, possibly on the Saturday, which Bernard-Reymond again said he could not do, possibly the Sunday, which was not attractive, or the Monday. However, Colombo, with very good judgement, gently rejected this and said no, no, what he thought we should do was to proceed by a series of individual discussions with the heads of delegations, which he and I would conduct, and see how far we could get.

  Therefore we settled down at 11.30 at night, Colombo and I, Crispin, Renato Ruggiero and Plaja also in the room most of the time, and
proceeded to see everybody. The exact order I cannot remember. I think we began with Bernard-Reymond and Carrington, or vice versa, but without getting particularly far, though Peter by this time had recovered his equanimity and was agreeable and quite skilful.

  Then we saw Dohnanyi, who came in with a great scheme. He thought he could see a way through and he presented his solution with confidence and lucidity, and indeed it seemed to me a perfectly possible basis for settlement. Then we saw Carrington again and I presented it to him. He was not as enthusiastic as I expected, but thought there might be something in it, so we went on with further discussions. We saw the Benelux ministers together, and they did not make too much difficulty, though this was quite late in the night and they were a bit discontented at not having been brought in earlier: the Luxembourgeois in particular, for some reason or other, but the Dutch too, the new Belgian Minister (Nothomb) being rather easier. The Irish were remarkably amenable, the Danes a bit sticky as usual, but not impossible.

  Then we saw the three main ones again several times; this process went on until about 6.30 in the morning, when we seemed to be getting near to a settlement. We then broke up for some time: there had been other intervals during the night during which I had to sustain myself with Irish whiskey, which I do not much like, for the bar for some curious reason had run out of all other supplies. By the morning the only real difficulty remaining, provided the French would accept—it was by no means clear either that they would or that they would not—was the question of a linkage between the 1981 agricultural payments and the supplementary payments to the British for that year. In other words, the French—or anyone else if they so wished—would have an opportunity to block if they did not like the view the British took about the agricultural price settlement. This, rather against my will, was in our paper, and it had been made semi-explicit at the insistence of nearly all the other members of the Commission who took part during the night, Davignon, Ortoli, Gundelach—a powerful trio.