The "scandal" was debilitating because it touched what was thought to be a vulnerable flank of the Commission. Particularly in Britain, but in some other countries too, it was widely regarded as a symbol of "fleshpot" living. No doubt my own predilections a.s.sisted the caricature. But in fact it was largely unjustified. The Secretary-General of NATO lives immensely more grandly in Brussels than does the President of the Commission for the very good reason that he is provided free with a house and a household establishment, whereas the President pays for them out of his own income. Equally, the main difference between ourselves and governments in the use of private aircraft (which became another point at issue) was that we hesitated because we had to hire them specially, whereas they used them more habitually because they were permanently at their disposal.
Haferkamp had undoubtedly behaved foolishly and sometimes extravagantly, although never dishonestly, but even his hotel bills needed to be seen in the context that he was the nominee of almost the richest country in the world, and that his choice of caravanserai in, say, New York was no more opulent than that of the then deeply indebted British Government.
The only amus.e.m.e.nt which I derived from this sad saga was the light which the Cour des Comptes reports shone upon the differing peccadilloes and prejudices of the several nationalities. The German temptation was undoubtedly the grand Babylonian palace hotels of the world. The Italians, per contra, wanted only to go home, as frequently as possible, and preferably at public expense. The French were addicted to a lavish supply of flowers for their offices, a minor vice one would have thought, even if accompanied, as it was, by an iron determination not to give the names of those whom they entertained in their reasonably modest use of their expense accounts. The Belgians were equally reticent here. The British, I have to recall, were boringly impeccable. Christopher Tugendhat was spotless.
The late spring was dominated for me by two elections, the British one on 3 May, and the Community-wide first direct election for the European Parliament on 7/8 June. I took no part in the first, but made speeches in all the nine countries except France (where I judged that an intervention would not be welcome) for the second. These speeches were directed to the importance of the const.i.tutional development and not to support for particular candidates or parties.
The British election resulted in the beginning of Mrs Thatcher"s long government. I had mixed feelings about the result, believing on the whole that a change of government would help Britain"s relations with the rest of the Community. With the new Government my relations were on the whole good. I often disagreed with Mrs Thatcher, but I found her friendly to deal with, undismayed by such disagreements, and in no way resenting my not being an agent of Whitehall. With the new Foreign Secretary my relations were, paradoxically, closer than they had been with the outgoing one.
My hopes for Britain becoming much more communautaire were however substantially unfulfilled. Mrs Thatcher did not take to Europe like a duck to water. She was a duck who remained on a bit of offsh.o.r.e land. Furthermore she was almost immediately involved in a dispute with the Community which was to dominate the remainder of my presidency and to absorb much of the energy of the Community for at least four years after that. Britain, one of the poorer countries of the Community, made a net budgetary contribution almost as large as that of Germany. This was essentially for two reasons: we imported more from outside the Community than did the others and therefore paid more in import levies; and our small (but efficient) agriculture made few demands on Community outgoings. The so-called "renegotiation" of 19745, which produced the minimum results with the maximum ill-will, had made only a small impact on this problem, which had however conveniently disappeared underground in 19767. It resurfaced during 1978, and Callaghan expressed concern to me at our meeting of 2 November (see page 333 supra).
It was a nettle which Mrs Thatcher had to grasp, and her hand did not flinch. The question is whether she grasped it skilfully. I thought not, from several points of view. The micro reasons emerge from the diary, although perhaps more strongly in 1980 than in 1979. The macro one was that she caused a justified but limited dispute (the total Community budget within which her marginal argument took place has never been more than 2 per cent of the member countries" public expenditure and substantially less than 1 per cent of their national income) totally to dominate the Community for five years and to run into the sand any hopes of, or ambitions for, a British leadership role within the Community.
The European elections produced from Britain an appallingly low poll and a vast Conservative preponderance. From the rest of the Community a greater sense of European commitment and a fairer electoral system produced a much higher partic.i.p.ation and less distorted party balances. For the Commission, however, it produced a potentially formidable new Parliament, twice the size of the old, which we approached with a mixture of respect and apprehension. In retrospect I think our hopes were better founded than our fears. The directly elected Parliament had at least a good first six months.
In late June I went to Tokyo for my third Western Economic Summit. It was dominated by the second oil shortage and price increase, which had already destroyed the Bonn Summit plans for coordinated growth, and which the world statesmen there a.s.sembled, with all the prescience of flat-earthers who saw no reason why spring should follow winter, a.s.sumed would be permanent. Tokyo also provided the background for the last b.u.mps of the rather queasy six months of the French presidency.
During the autumn the two inquiries which had been set up at the end of 1978 completed their reports. Giscard"s trois sages had, however, so disappointed their instigator that the French Government lost interest in the publication of that report. They had at least done no damage and provided some sensible reflections. The findings of my Spierenburg inquiry were available to us by early October, were accepted by the Commission, and substantially implemented. The rigidity which kept some people in useless sinecures while others of equal rank were overworked was modified. So was the national grip on particular posts. But the firm and sensible recommendation that as the Community was enlarged big countries must give up their right to nominate two Commissioners withered on the bough. So the position of too many Commissioners chasing too few jobs, with which I was confronted in 1977, was exacerbated by Greek entry in 1981 and Spanish and Portuguese entry in 1986.
Enlargement negotiations probably absorbed less of my time and attention than in 1977 or 1978. The Greek treaty of accession was signed in Athens in June, and that was that for the time being. The Spanish and Portuguese negotiations were in a midstream calm, although by inviting the Spanish Prime Minister (then Adolfo Suarez) for a Brussels weekend in December I made a reasonably successful attempt to give them a new momentum.
I travelled outside Europe more than in 1978: a three-country West African trip in January; a major visit to China in February; j.a.pan for the Summit in June; and Egypt in October. It was, however, the only year of the four in which I did not go to the United States. In Europe, outside the Community, I went only to Greece in June and Austria in October.
Over the summer and during the autumn a substantial part of my interest began to move back to British politics. My working a.s.sumption during 1977 and 1978 was that I had finished with them, even though I would stay only the normal four years in Brussels. After that I had little idea of what I would do, although I was sufficiently confident in March to reject without hesitation both James Callaghan"s kind suggestions of a peerage and of the governorship of Hong Kong.
Then (this, and the reverse, can sometimes be the case) horizons began simultaneously to widen in several directions. An invitation to give the Dimbleby television lecture (on any subject that I liked, although I think the expectation was that it would be a European one) came in May, and my thoughts gradually settled on the idea of using it to propound a new, anti-party approach to British politics. Much of my working leisure, to coin an oxymoron, of the late summer and autumn was devoted to composing what I wished to say.
At the same time there was an agreeable boomlet fostered by some governments and by some Commissioners in the view that I should stay on as President, breaking the post-Hallstein pattern, for a further two or four years. I was flattered but not particularly attracted by this prospect, except insofar as flirting with it might enable me to avoid a lame-duck year. I had come to think of the Commission presidency as a sort of Grand National course, with the fences and the ditches occurring at predictable intervals, and four times around it seemed to me enough. But it was agreeable to have a prospect of the option and this, together with the blood-coursing effect of Dimbleby, meant that I approached and survived the Dublin European Council (Mrs Thatcher"s charge of the Light Brigade, except that she had more resilience than Lord Cardigan) and the turn of the year 1979/80 in a higher state of morale than at any of the times under survey except for that period of 1976 when I had the illusion that Europe was open before me, and the spring/summer of 1978 when, with less illusion, I believed we were quickly fashioning the European Monetary System.
MONDAY, 1 JANUARY. Hatley.
Francis Pym,1 the new Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, came over for a drink and a talk. Although I had been in the House with him for years and indeed had an old Monmouthshire connection, our fathers having been members for adjacent const.i.tuencies and, across parties, quite close, so that Pym"s father gave me a wedding present, I had hardly ever had any direct talk with Pym himself. I found him rather impressive, firmly pro-Europe although not starry-eyed. He thought the European cause was quite a difficult struggle but one which had been allowed to go much too much by default in the Conservative Party. He is brisk, quite self-confident, no great intellectual range, no great phrase-maker in conversation but everything said sensibly, succinctly, even powerfully, and there was clearly complete confidence on his part that, unlike the previous shadow, John Davies, who was probably destined (illness apart) to be only a shadow, he, Carrington or no Carrington, Soames or no Soames, would be Foreign Secretary in a Conservative Government.
FRIDAY, 5 JANUARY. London and Brussels.
I became extremely depressed on reading the newspapers, and decided that the French monkeying around on MCAs and holding up the start of the EMS meant that Europe was in danger of falling apart and that I had better try and do something about it. Therefore I did some vigorous telephoning to Brussels and set up a meeting for the Sunday morning in Paris with Barre with the intention at least of trying fully to understand the French point of view. The commercial planes being totally unreliable, I set up an avion taxi from Northolt to Brussels at 3.45.
In the meantime I had an early lunch with Harold Lever at Brooks"s and found him buoyant and very sensible on nearly everything. My agreement with him, as with Shirley, is now very close indeed. He is of course much more interested than Shirley in economic and monetary matters and remains a firm partisan of EMS. He is depressed about the Government, but not excessively so, and thinks it might easily win the election. He intends to stand himself again and is obviously quite keen to go on in the Cabinet if he can. But when I suggested to him at the end that if they were still in office after Nicko2 and wanted to make a political appointment to Paris he and Diane would do it well, he responded rather enthusiastically.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 6 JANUARY. Brussels and Paris.
To Paris by plane in the early evening. To the Emba.s.sy and then out to dinner at Lipp with Nicko. I had a long talk with him about the mysteries of the French switch of line, why they had become so adamant about MCAs. I am not sure that he understood things a great deal better than I did, but referred to some important conversation which Barre had had with the German Amba.s.sador in which he had laid down the position, and said that I would no doubt discover more about it in the morning. He was, however, in some ways as exasperated by the French as I was. He also said that he thought Francois-Poncet had been made Foreign Minister partly because Giscard wanted to get rid of him from the Elysee, but that may be unreliable hearsay.
Then, Nicko having gone off to catch a night sleeper to Gren.o.ble, I called on Ortoli in the rue de Bourgogne and went over the whole business with him. He had been seeing a lot of people and was clearly nervous about forthcoming rows with the French Government. However, we managed to hammer out a common position on which he was perhaps just a little wobbly but to which I think he will hold at any rate for the time being. He said that there was a view in Paris that the Commission was too frightened of a vote of censure in the Parliament. It was not absolutely clear to me why we shouldn"t be a bit concerned about that, though no doubt "frightened" is not the right impression to give. I stayed the night in a completely empty Emba.s.sy surrounded by a frozen Paris, one or two servants, but no Hendersons, no other guests, a rare experience.
SUNDAY, 7 JANUARY. Paris and Dakar (Senegal).
To Matignon to see Barre at 10.30. Barre received me as friendlily as ever and we had quite a useful talk for fifty minutes mainly in French. Crispin and Barre"s man, Jean-Claud Paye, were there taking notes. I explained that our interest was overwhelmingly to get the EMS in position as quickly as possible, that we were very disappointed at the delay, which we found extremely surprising, and I feared that whatever had happened the French hold-up had prevented it being born en beaute. However, that was so. What I now wished was to see it in place, but my other, and equal, priority was not to let any agreement undermine the essential need for freezing farm prices otherwise we would be in a hopeless position with surpluses.
Barre attempted to explain why MCAs were of such importance to them, but this was a general statement based upon a long-term objection to the unbalancing of the market between France and Germany and certainly did not amount to any explanation of what had happened between 7 December and 31 December to make them become of such dominating short-term importance. On a price freeze he was reasonably sympathetic, without absolutely committing himself. On the budget, he said that they would be as hard as a rock in principle, particularly in relation to the future, but would seek compromise on the present budget. He was not I think too well-informed about this and didn"t contradict any of the arguments which I put forward, including my view that while we wanted to avoid a resort to the Court, because we thought a political solution was much better, if a political solution was not forthcoming I did not see how we could avoid ending up in the Court. On the EMS, in response to a request from me, he specifically denied that the French were using MCAs as an excuse. He denied that there was any French cooling off on the basic desirability of the scheme.
At 1.00 I took an Air France Concorde to Dakar3 where it was a rather nasty cloudy day with the sort of clouds which would produce rain in Europe, but apparently don"t in Dakar at this time of the year. The city, more or less surrounded by sea, looked reasonably agreeable. There was a ceremonial welcome by the Prime Minister at the airport and we then drove to the Residence Medina, a government guest house; not a very attractive building, I fear, and sited, for some mysterious reason, on almost the only spot in Dakar from which you cannot see the sea.
One and a half hours" meeting with the Prime Minister (the second man, the President being the head of the Government) who seemed to me agreeable and sensible.4 He is enormously tall, very black, and known as "the Giraffe". Dinner with the Commission delegate.
MONDAY, 8 JANUARY. Dakar.
A call on Senghor, the President, from 11.00 until 12.15. He is a little, bright man, looking much younger than his seventy-two years, completely French having been a Socialist Deputy for fifteen years before independence, having lived in France during the pre-war period, having had, as he is very fond of telling one, a lot of literary salon life, and still being a great litterateur, composer and translator of poetry. However, on this occasion the conversation was mainly political, and largely carried on by him. He expounded a hard anti-Communist line, complaining that the West did not take the Russian threat nearly seriously enough and didn"t do enough in Africa to combat it. He didn"t necessarily want European troops, but when he put Senegalese troops into Zaire it would be a great advantage if we gave them some financial support. He expressed interest in a West African defence community though without the "Marxist/Leninist states" in it. He made an attack on Algeria for racist policies, and put forward a whole series of views, some of them sensible, some of them less so, but worth listening to.
Lunch at the rather magnificent residence of the French Amba.s.sador which we were told had been built by Louis de Guiringaud, but was hardly a constructional success as nearly all the pigeons of Dakar congregated under the roof.
In the late afternoon we went by motor launch across a narrow strait to the island of Goree which has been occupied by almost everybody, Dutch, Turks, Danes, British and French, from about 1500, and which has achieved great recent fame as a result of Roots drawing attention to its position as a departure point for slaves. We made a rather gruesome but notable visit to the Maison d"Esclaves, seeing all sorts of horrors. It is now run as a sort of black museum with a lot of American visitors. The whole island, apart from being too windy, had a considerable quality of its own and was well worth visiting.
Dinner with Senghor in his Presidential Palace. A party of about ten, including four of Senghor"s ministers. It was quite a remarkable occasion, epitomized by the authoritarian choice of drink: before dinner there was only Jack Daniels Sourmash, and at dinner only an excellent pink champagne. Senghor led the conversation, for two and a quarter hours, before, over, and after dinner, without raising any political subject. It was entirely cultural, general intellectual conversation, a little pretentious I thought occasionally on his side, as no doubt he did on mine. He claimed not to be able to speak English, but to read it fluently, as he had translated the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot into French, which would by any standards require a very remarkable command of written English.
I asked him who he thought were the two outstanding French poets of this century and he mentioned two people of neither of whom I had ever heard. He then asked me who I thought were the two outstanding French novelists, and I swallowed and said Proust and Simenon (treating "French" as embracing Walloon). He said, "Proust naturellement, mais pourquoi Simenon?" It would have been more original to have put it the other way round. We had a good deal of Proustian conversation later in the evening linked to his wife"s property between Caen and the sea, which, as I pointed out, meant that it was very near Cabourg, and we then both of us tried to remember what Cabourg was called in a la Recherche. I had it on the tip of my tongue, but I had the impression that it was a little further back in the recesses of his mind. However, on the way out I suddenly remembered Balbec, and announced it to him, by which he seemed remarkably struck.
It was a somewhat stilted dinner and I went away with some doubt as to whether anyone so self-consciously intellectual and literary has not an element of the bogus in him.
TUESDAY, 9 JANUARY. Dakar and Bamako.
Amba.s.sadors of the Nine for a briefing, and then a press conference. The Prime Minister came at 11.30 to take me to the airport, bearing various farewell presents with him, including the Grand Croix of the Legion d"Honneur of Senegal-an enormous green sash with a star and G.o.d knows what, and a letter from Senghor conferring this upon me and making it fairly clear that it was done mainly on the basis of my literary knowledge and in particular my ability to produce the name of Balbec!
We then flew to Bamako in Mali in a very luxurious private Senegalese plane. We were greeted by a whole stream of ministers and, so far as one could tell, a large part of the Malian army, with flashing helmets, some of whom formed various guards of honour for inspection. Also there were all the Western amba.s.sadors, in other words two: the German, who was broadly in charge from the Community point of view, and a little American career lady (a French Amba.s.sador exists, but was away).
To the Hotel de l"Amitie, an enormous fourteen-storey building set back half a mile from the River Niger, which at that point is nearly a mile wide, thousands of miles from the sea though it is, and were installed on the top floor in a very comfortable suite with a good view. We were informed by the Commission delegate (a fairly elderly Italian with great knowledge of African culture and African art and several books to his credit-but not, I thought, a great grasp of actuality) that a coup, a peaceful coup he opined, was imminent and might easily affect the head of state. However, we became increasingly sceptical of this because the ministers with whom we had dealings, including President Traore himself, didn"t seem particularly nervous.
First, I had a short meeting alone with the said Youssouf Traore, then a drive up the hill to a sort of ministerial compound, where we had what seemed a very long meeting, mainly because the Minister of Planning made a complaining speech lasting nearly an hour and going into immense detail, which was obviously thought inappropriate by his colleagues. Then to a large garden party in the dark at the house of the Commission delegate. Afterwards to dinner with the German Amba.s.sador (Schraepler), a nice man of unusual charm with an agreeable French wife.
WEDNESDAY, 10 JANUARY. Bamako, Timbuctoo and Bamako.
Took off at 8.20 in a curious twin-engined, high-wing, old Russian plane which I viewed with apprehension and dismay, but which in fact proved to be extremely stable for the three-hour slow journey, diverting in order to see things like the Silingue Dam and to follow the course of the River Niger to Timbuctoo (Tomboctu in French and therefore in Mali).
I was greeted at the airport by the military governor, mayor, etc. and then at the entrance to the main square, five miles away, by two Nubian maidens, one of whom presented me with some dates, which I ate, and the other with a bowl of camel"s milk, which I put to my lips but refrained from drinking as it had the most nauseous smell. Then into the square where the whole population seemed to be lined up. Fortunately the population of Timbuctoo is now only about 8000, as compared with 100,000 in 1500, so it was not quite as formidable a gathering as it might earlier have been. A lot of music and cheering, though quite whom or what they thought they were cheering I am not sure. Then I walked round the square and decided that the only thing to do was a Richard Nixon, plunge in, shake hands and then move on fifty yards and plunge in again.
Then a tour of the town with an excellent guide, seeing the mosque, which was very old, various houses where European explorers of the early nineteenth century had lived (and mostly died), and the starting point of the old caravan routes across the desert. I rode on a camel for a mile to lunch. It was my first camel ride since c. 1928 at the London Zoo, and a distinctly hazardous enterprise.
We had a rather nasty lunch in a rather nasty hotel. After having consumed bits of three or four courses I a.s.sumed that the lunch was over, but there was then a sudden stirring at the windows which were thrown open, with the curtains widened, and in came the most enormous roast camel, trussed like a sort of monstrous turkey, though about seventeen times as big, borne in upon a stretcher and laid down with great cheering. Then they performed the old desert trick of taking a whole roast sheep out of the inside of the camel, a whole roast chicken out of the inside of the sheep, a little pigeonneau out of the inside of the chicken, and an egg out of that, and one had to eat a little of everything. The camel seemed to me to have rather a bland taste, not nearly as objectionable as its milk. Then back to Bamako for a Government dinner with speeches and the presentation to me of another Grand Croix du Legion d"Honneur. (Crispin got a Chevalier.) THURSDAY, 11 JANUARY. Bamako and Accra.
A meeting with President Traore at 8.30. He showed no signs of having been deposed during our absence in Timbuctoo and indeed, though saying nothing memorable, seemed to me a good deal more self-confident and also rather more interesting than when he had come to see me in Brussels.
We took off for Accra at about 12.30 and got there at 2.15, arriving in steaming heat quite different from the relative coolness of Dakar, the moderate heat, 75 perhaps, of Bamako, and the considerable but very dry heat of Timbuctoo, where it may have been 85 in the afternoon. But in Accra (mysteriously January is the warmest month of the year, despite it being 8 north of the equator) it was 93, sticky and horrible.
We were met by the Chief of the Defence Staff, in effect the Prime Minister in a presidential system, called General Hamadu, whom I saw a lot of and got rather to like, and the new lady Foreign Minister, of whom I didn"t think much.
No sooner had we got out of the airport than the most dreadful thing happened. I had thought it would happen sooner or later on one of my visits because of the ludicrous way in which motorcycle escorts behave. One of them shot out from the airport into the main road to hold up the traffic, utterly failed to do so and was completely crushed by a huge lorry which came down upon him. Fortunately, I suppose, I didn"t actually see the accident, though I saw the corpse afterwards, but most of the others did, including the General who was with me and who was a good deal upset by it, as he ought to have been.
We first had a meeting with the General, the tiresome lady Foreign Minister, and an excellent man called Dr Abby who is the Commissioner for Economic Planning and a highly sophisticated economist with a lot of English and American training.
Then we went to see the head of state, Colonel Akuffo. This was an unsatisfactory meeting, mainly because it was foolishly organized, with about thirty people sitting in the room, apart from a press of journalists who were allowed to stand inside the door. The Colonel was talking so quietly that they could hardly hear what he was saying, but I was louder. A slightly stilted three-quarters of an hour, partly about the Lome Convention, partly about the state of Ghana. He announced himself firmly resolved that they would hand over power to the civilians in the summer, though obviously not overconfident about the result. He was very critical of his immediate predecessors but less so of Nkrumah.
Indeed the general note about Nkrumah at my various meetings was surprisingly favourable. He has gone through a process of considerable rehabilitation, mainly by reference to how badly things have been run since, though in fact there is only too much evidence of his extravagant, grandiose and unattractive building mania. The whole town looks full of stadiums built in cracked, discoloured concrete. The whole country looks appallingly run down: great laagers of cars unable to move through lack of spare parts, for example. There is a strong sense of near-disintegration, and needless disintegration, as Ghana is inherently quite rich, but with an inflation rate of 150 per cent; the complete neglect of basic products, notably cocoa, has brought its obvious result.
Then a dinner given by General Hamadu at army headquarters. Hamadu raised a surprising point for a General, the undesirable pressure of Western arms salesmanship in Africa, which, in his view, was doing great harm.
I then spent two late-night hours finishing The Sea, the Sea, feeling that the combined effect of staying in this rather gimcrack State House in this steaming, rundown country, and Iris Murdoch"s phantasmagoria, was having a distinctly unsettling effect on me.
FRIDAY, 12 JANUARY. Accra and Paris.
Quite a good morning expedition to the Kpong Dam about fifty miles away. It is a major enterprise, with a lot of Commission money in it, and was worth seeing. Also it was an opportunity to get some impression of the countryside of Ghana, which is much more scrubby, less vegetated than that of Nigeria. I travelled in the car with Abby both ways and had quite a useful talk with him. He is fairly pessimistic and thinks maybe there is about one chance in three of pulling the country round. He was critical of many things, like the foolishness of trying to run a chain of state hotels, which merely means that ministers run up bills they don"t pay.
Lunch with the French Amba.s.sador to meet the other six Community ones, who were quite an impressive lot. The German (Herbert Weil), as is often the case in African countries, was probably the best, an old wartime refugee and BBC employee in London during the war.
UTA plane to Paris via Lagos at 9 o"clock.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 13 JANUARY. Paris and Brussels.
Roissy at 7.25 a.m. France was covered in snow and freezing as when we left. Rue de Praetere at 11.30. Lunched with Jennifer alone. There was a lot to talk about, what with Africa and what had been happening in England about which I was signally ill-informed. She was surprised that I hadn"t realized how the country seemed to have plunged into chaos during the previous week and how there was a mood of deep morosite and how ill-judged Callaghan"s remark about "What crisis?" had been as he returned from Guadaloupe the previous Wednesday or Thursday.5 FRIDAY, 19 JANUARY. Brussels.
Dinner party, rue de Praetere, for General Haig plus wife. We expected the Harlechs, who were due for the weekend, but had been frustrated by British Airways. Therefore we had a slightly truncated party with only the Tickells and the Davignons to help entertain the Haigs. It went just tolerably well, I think, no more. It was a little difficult to get it to jell, but things improved later on. Haig is a strange man, with a simple manner and very right-wing views, very critical of Carter, full of political ambition and I think rather overrating his chances. She is more agreeable than I had thought on the previous occasion.
MONDAY, 22 JANUARY. Brussels and London.
To London, taking four or five hours, for a meeting followed by dinner with the Labour Committee for Europe. I had an interesting bilateral conversation with Shirley at dinner, who was in a great state of political gloom and was disposed to agree with me that the big mistake we had made was not to go and support d.i.c.k Taverne in 1973; everything had got worse since then. By an irony we hadn"t supported d.i.c.k when we ought to have, and we had supported Reg Prentice, and although neither of us regretted this, there was a good deal less compelling a case, in retrospect at any rate, for having done it. She thought the election lost whenever it came and that the party would be in a very bad state after it, and she was thinking very clearly in terms of splits and anxious for me to come back.
TUESDAY, 23 JANUARY. London and Brussels.
I was due to make a speech in Dublin to the Irish Confederation of Industry, lunch with them, and see the Taoiseach in the afternoon. We awoke to quite thick snow and I was told that the avion taxi which we had ordered could not possibly get into Northolt and that no commercial flights were running. Therefore I firmly cancelled the Irish expedition (Crispin was fortunately in Dublin already and able to perform on my behalf) and set about the difficult but necessary task of getting back to Brussels. London Airport was announced as closed until 1 o"clock. When I got there at about 12.30 I was told that it was now closed until 4 o"clock and so went away to lunch until then.
There then seemed a good prospect of a Sabena plane leaving, but an endless sub-farce set in. We got on the plane, but were told that the plane was iced up and they couldn"t find any de-icing equipment, and we would have to get off. Then we were told that they had borrowed some de-icing equipment from KLM (Benelux solidarity), then we were told that the de-icing equipment wouldn"t work, so that we would have to get off the plane. So we got off the plane and were off it for about three-quarters of an hour, during which I had some quite useful telephone conversations with both Callaghan (who seemed surprisingly pleased to hear from me) and with Gundelach in Brussels.
Then we got back on the plane again. Then came a frenzied request that pa.s.sengers should please sit down in any seat as the plane was moving away and if we missed the slot we might easily be there all night. Then it was eventually discovered that there were five pa.s.sengers for whom there were no seats. An attempt was made to get the five people who had got on without boarding cards to own up, this being put in high moral terms, the steward saying, There are five of you here not ent.i.tled to be on the plane. Unless you identify yourselves you may prevent 110 people who are ent.i.tled to be here from getting to Brussels at all tonight."
Eventually one man, looking rather like a young version of Christopher Mayhew, did own up; the other four did not. Thereupon an announcement was made that the only alternative was to clear the plane and re-check everybody-although fortunately not first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. This enterprise needless to say took a good forty minutes. Pa.s.sengers came back on, having been cleared, looking as though they had had a successful interview with the Parole Board and were being allowed their freedom again, half sheepish, half pleased. Eventually we got into Brussels at about 10.30, having spent literally the whole day trying to do this simple journey.
THURSDAY, 25 JANUARY. Brussels.
In the late afternoon Noyon, head of the Commission Security Service, accompanied by a British security officer, came in to see me in great agitation and secrecy. Apparently the Belgians had been informed through British sources that there was a serious IRA plot to a.s.sa.s.sinate in the fairly near future a senior British representative (as it was put) in Brussels, and they had narrowed the list of possible targets down to me, Tugendhat, Crispin rather surprisingly, the three amba.s.sadors and, I think, two generals.
There were a few hazy clues, such as that they had set up some sort of watching/firing post quite some time previously outside the house of the person who was the target and that they had reported that his habits were somewhat irregular-which is not true of mine. My morning walking or running habits are only too regular, particularly as this report came from before Christmas, before the snow introduced a certain irregularity. And they also reported that near the house in question there was a school, which posed certain dangers of shooting the children by accident. That seemed to rule out rue de Praetere, although, on the other hand, of all the targets mentioned, I (to the IRA) was much the most obvious one, as well as, presumably, being the best known generally. Crispin, on the other hand, did have a school near him, although on other grounds he seemed the least likely target.
Noyon took it all very seriously and said that we must take much heavier precautions. Obviously I couldn"t ignore the matter completely, particularly as they stressed it was a real threat and that the attack was likely to be made in the course of the next few weeks.
I went home for a short time, rather rushing across the pavement in an embarra.s.sed way, and, looking round the house, realized how incredibly exposed it was for shooting through a window for it is overlooked on all sides.
FRIDAY, 26 JANUARY. Brussels and East Hendred.
I saw the comite des sages, Robert Marjolin, quite well known to me, Edmund Dell, also quite well known to me in a different way, and Biesheuvel, Dutch ex-Prime Minister, who was unknown to me but who, in some ways, made the best, most agreeable and coun-structive impression of the three. I talked to them in a fairly animated way, leading them on to subjects rather than waiting for them to ask questions, for two hours. I formed the impression that Biesheuvel had the concept closest to us, that Marjolin though very sensible on many things had a typical French antipathy to the Parliament, which he refused to regard as a significant inst.i.tution, and that Dell, although broadly a European, was pretty firmly against any form of more effective decision-making and rather complacently satisfied with the Council from his experience of it. What effect I had on them I didn"t know. However, it was a more agreeable two hours than I had expected.
Then to London by a plane which was only one and a half hours late, and to East Hendred.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 27 JANUARY. East Hendred.
On a very cold beautiful sunny day I walked in deep snow over the Lower Downs for three miles. Then with Jennifer to Seven-hampton to lunch with Ann Fleming, who had the Lees-Milnes,6 John Sparrow and a keeper of ma.n.u.scripts at the British Museum called John Gere, whom I liked very much. I also liked the Lees-Milnes more than on previous occasions and much enjoyed the whole occasion. We returned in a perfect winter sunset at 4.30.
THURSDAY, 1 FEBRUARY. Brussels, Paris and Brussels.
I left at 9.30 in lowering skies and heavy rain to drive to Paris for the lunch of the four Presidents which Giscard had summoned, and, arriving at the Etoile by about 12.151 decided to call unexpectedly on the Beaumarchais". Even so, I arrived slightly too early at the Elysee, the first of the Presidents. Kutscher arrived soon afterwards and then Colombo. Giscard, accompanied by Francois-Poncet, only descended when we had all a.s.sembled-rather typical behaviour. However he was out to be gracious and to smooth some of the many feathers already ruffled by the French presidency. It was a bit overdone because he began by saying to me, "Ah, Monsieur Jenkins, vous parlez admirablement le francais maintenant, il y"a quelqu"un qui me l"a dit au cours des dernieres semaines, j"ai oublie qui. Non, non, je me souviens, c"etait le Roi d"Espagne." I said, "C"est un peu etrange, Monsieur le President de la Republique, parce que le Roi d"Espagne et moi avons toujours parle en anglais."
We then proceeded into lunch, which was in its way agreeable, in a small dining room on the ground floor with a burning fire which slightly illuminated the gloom of the day. The conversation was moderately serious, mainly conducted by Giscard and me. It was in French, which was indeed the only remotely common language of everybody, but was a disadvantage for Kutscher and me, as Kutscher is much better in English than in French, and to some extent a disadvantage even for Colombo, though he is no good at all in English.
It was partly about agricultural prices, Giscard advocating some small increase, and my saying firmly that we were against this. Giscard asked at one stage whether I was not worried by having the Commission isolated with the British alone on the price freeze, which was a slightly malevolent way of putting it, and to which I replied that I did not think this would be the case. The Italians and maybe some others would be with us, but, in any event, I had opposed the British sufficiently firmly when I thought they were wrong and I was certainly not going to move from a position I was convinced was right merely because the British happened to share it.
After lunch we had a further forty-five minutes, in another room, mainly about the budget. This gave me the opportunity to say, as I had wanted to do for some time, that the fundamental error which had been made was both for the council to try and control the maximum rate of expenditure (which in my view was not unreasonable since even national parliaments on the whole did not have the ability to spend money except in agreement with the executive-and in any event they had the responsibility of raising the money in a way that the European Parliament did not) and, something else, which in my view was totally unreasonable, which was to try to combine this with control over Parliament"s priorities. It had been clear for some time past that Parliament was giving priority to the Regional Fund, and to resist this on the basis of the sacred texts of the European Council"s decision of fourteen months before was to make a nonsense of Parliament as part of the budgetary authority. If it was intended to try and restrict them in both ways then it was hardly worth pretending that the Parliament had any budgetary powers at all, and certainly a mistake to move to a directly elected Parliament.
Giscard accepted this to a surprising extent and said, "Yes, within a ceiling I see that Parliament must have freedom to manoeuvre." I also trailed the possibility that the Commission would put forward in due course a supplementary budget. It would be necessary because of the EMS arrangements, and we might do it in such a way that we went above the total of 11,000 million units of account which Parliament had voted. Giscard and Poncet did not look very pleased but took no violent exception.
We also had some p.r.o.nouncements from Kutscher about the competence of the Court if the budget issue was put before it, to which on the whole he gave an affirmative answer, with Giscard warning that France would not necessarily recognize the validity of this and a very grave position might consequently arise, etc.
Despite all this, we left on reasonably good terms, with Giscard courteously coming out with us, although we soon discovered that this was because there were a lot of television cameras outside to which he duly spoke and then turned, first to me and then to Colombo and then to Kutscher, for us to add a few words.
I also gave a brief interview to Reuters and then drove off taking Colombo with me in my car as I wished to ask his advice on some parliamentary point. A slight farce then set in. I was proposing, in response to a note Nicko Henderson had sent to me at the Elysee, to go and see him at the Emba.s.sy. For some extraordinary reason, however, we also had in my car, accompanying Colombo (whose car had not turned up), Francois-Poncet"s Directeur de Cabinet, and I was not anxious for it to look as though I ran straight from the Elysee to the British Emba.s.sy. I therefore rather unconvincingly dropped them in the rue du Faubourg St Honore, made another time-wasting circuit by the rue Boissy d"Anglas and left myself only ten minutes for Nicko.
We then drove back to Brussels through pouring rain and a sodden landscape. Berlaymont at 6.45, where there was rather a lot of work, as well as a speech to get into shape for a Val d.u.c.h.esse change of presidency dinner at 8.30. The dinner followed the regular pattern of these occasions. I had Hedwige de Nanteuil on one side and Signora Giolitti on the other. I made a rather serious speech, more so than the last time, which probably wasn"t a bad idea. Sigrist as the outgoing President of COREPER had no difficulty in being equally serious, curiously apologizing for the incompetences of the German presidency, and then Luc de Nanteuil made, if not exactly a frivolous speech, one which was not remotely about policy or substance, but which was exceptionally nice about me, much more so than anyone else had been previously at these dinners.
FRIDAY, 2 FEBRUARY. Brussels.
Drove to Leuven where I was being given an honorary degree. It is an intensely Catholic university. At the Ma.s.s in the cathedral everybody except me took communion, including all the professors. Then a two-hour ceremony in a rather nice hall.
The other degree recipients were the ex-President of Venezuela (Caldera), the Cardinal Archbishop of Kinshasa (Malula), and the Polish composer Penderecki. I had to make the princ.i.p.al speech near the beginning, which was neither very good nor very bad. Tindemans then did an allocution about me, and towards the end the ex-President of Venezuela made a rather good speech in French which is not however the best language for Leuven. Then lunch with the Tindemans and back to the Berlaymont at 3.30, where two days away had produced a pile-up of work.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 3 FEBRUARY. Brussels.
On a beautiful clear, cold morning I drove Neil Bruce7 (staying) and Jennifer to Crupet beyond Namur where after a half-hour"s walk up to and round the village on an extremely slippery surface we lunched at Les Ramiers and then drove back to Namur via the river and walked for another half-hour on the Citadel. A small dinner party for Neil and the Plajas (Italian Amba.s.sador). A lot of talk with Plaja after dinner about the Italian position and some of my complaints about the way the French presidency was conducting itself so far, although my views had been a little a.s.suaged by Thursday"s Elysee luncheon, which had undoubtedly done some good.
MONDAY, 5 FEBRUARY. Brussels.
At noon I addressed a group of about eighty so-called US leaders, who were people from business working in government for a year, or vice versa. They looked quite bright, I spoke to them without a text and spoke quite well, but they then asked very boring questions, mainly about the technical details of tariffs affecting the industries from which they came.
Then to a lunch of about ten for the Spanish Foreign Minister Oreja which Simonet gave in the Palais d"Egmont. The anecdotal conversation was all in French, which meant that I couldn"t tell as many anecdotes as I might have liked! My command of punch lines in French is inadequate.
At 6 o"clock we had the formal opening of the Spanish negotiations, a long speech from Francois-Poncet, a shorter but in some ways better one from me, and a good and serious reply from Calvo Sotelo. Then a dinner for the Spaniards at the Val d.u.c.h.esse, at which Francois-Poncet and Oreja spoke, but not me, and at which I had a good talk with the latter, whom I was next to, and decided that he was an exceptionally nice and intelligent man with a wide range of interests. After dinner I had a prearranged forty-five minutes with Francois-Poncet alone, during which we went through the agenda for tomorrow"s Council and made it clear on which we were going to have difficulty. I told him what we would have to say on the budget and also warned him that we were bound to have a major clash on Euratom questions, where there could be no question of our not upholding the Court ruling, which the French must understand absolutely clearly.8 He took all this fairly well and there was certainly a vast improvement in atmosphere from my very unsatisfactory meeting with him before Christmas.
TUESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY. Brussels.
Still beautiful weather, very cold and clear. Jennifer went to London and I spent the morning in the Foreign Affairs Council. Then lunched with the Council and had another four hours in the afternoon. It was quite a good Council from my point of view and rather morale-boosting. I made an intervention summing up the budget debate in the middle of the morning, then carried on the Euratom argument in the afternoon, getting support from nearly everybody except the French, and eventually putting them into an oddly pleading position of saying would we accept this, would we accept that. We had a long-drawn-out negotiation on this and eventually reached a slightly inconclusive but much more satisfactory outcome than might have been expected. Dohnanyi played his hand well and helpfully on both occasions.
I saw Richard Mayne and was greatly relieved to discover that he was happy to accept retirement from the London office with goodwill and that there was no unpleasantness there. I dined with Davignon, Ortoli and Gundelach (who joined us rather late from the Agricultural Council). Morale was slightly higher than when the four of us had met before Christmas, but not vastly so. I gave them an outline of the Haferkamp affair, and they cluck-clucked in a suitable way, though Ortoli made the perceptive but depressing comment that things would probably swing round on to w.i.l.l.y"s side and that he would be regarded as a persecuted semi-hero and that the rest of us would get nearly as much mud as he did himself without deserving it.