He had not only Wahl, Francois-Poncet"s replacement as Secretary-General of the Elysee, present as a note-taker, but also Francois-Poncet himself, which seemed to me slightly over-egging the custard. I had Crispin. It was a perfectly tolerable meeting in form, though not a particularly good one in substance. And, indeed, even on the form, as Crispin remarked afterwards, while Giscard is mostly polite, he is never warm. He made it clear early on that he wished to discuss the European Council at Strasbourg, rather than that and Tokyo together, this no doubt being an expression of his reluctance to admit my locus in relation to Tokyo. However, he managed to link it to the reasonably persuasive argument, which indeed I had used the previous year, that Bremen (the European Council) should in no way be subordinated to Bonn (the Western Summit).
In practice this did not make much difference to what we discussed. We had a reasonably constructive discussion on energy, though it emerged curiously that Giscard"s position on a number of issues was closer for once to the American than it was to the German. Then we had a discussion about the British budgetary problem arising out of his meeting with Mrs Thatcher two or three days before. He expressed himself, but again without warmth, as reasonably impressed by her, and indicated his willingness to give a remit to the Commission at the Strasbourg European Council to study this matter and bring forward proposals. But he then indicated, almost as an afterthought, though it certainly was not that, that this would be conditional on the British agreeing in Strasbourg (had it not been done previously) to an agricultural price settlement, involving a light increase - 1 to 2 per cent, he implied-for agricultural products, possibly exempting milk, but certainly nothing else. I said bluntly that this was not acceptable to us as a Commission, but if he could get the rest of the Nine to agree I suppose he didn"t need us.56 He let this pa.s.s without challenging our Commission determination to stick to the overall freeze. He also added that a British willingness to settle on fish would be a condition for the Dublin European Council (in December) agreeing to any recommendations which we might bring forward.
Then, in a slightly embarra.s.sed way to be fair to him, he said: "There is just one issue to which I must refer, and that is the question of the Strasbourg press conference. I was very surprised when in Paris in March you made a statement slightly different from mine, and then in your answers to questions took a quite different view. I am sure you will understand, as an homme de politique, that it is not possible for the President of the Republic to share a press conference with anyone else."
I looked surprised at this, and said, "It is absolutely habitual that, under all other presidencies, we share the press conference, and at the two European Councils under Schmidt I did exactly as I had done in Paris in March. Indeed, at the press conference at the end of the Brussels Summit, when he was rather exhausted, I answered nearly all the questions at his request."
Giscard then said, "I see two possibilities: either that you can, if you wish, give a totally separate press conference on your own, or that you may come to mine and I will make my statement and answer questions, then I will leave, and you can make your statement and answer any questions there may be to you."
I said I would reflect upon which I considered was the better of these two not very attractive proposals. I thought either of them would give rise to adverse comment. However, I knew already that I would not be anxious to have a great row with him about this immediately before Tokyo, where we were supposed to be jointly representing the Community. We then parted on reasonably polite terms.
Lunch with Francois-Poncet at the Quai d"Orsay. A third of the way through, we got down to the difficult Euratom issue. Not a bad discussion on this, a statement of position on both sides, no complete agreement, but no ill-temper either. He, to my surprise, showed himself ill-briefed on one particular question, but otherwise was as competent as usual. I said that an early French approval of the Australia/Euratom agreement would lead to a great improvement of atmosphere. He clearly didn"t totally exclude this. I said that I had divined since our last meeting that the approach of Niger to the Commission for a general agreement had been somewhat difficult for France and we had no intention of interfering with the France/Niger agreement.
Train, even later than the morning TEE, back to Brussels, where the Harlechs had arrived to stay.
SUNDAY, 10 JUNE. Brussels.
Took the Harlechs to Waterloo, where, for the first time since my childhood, I climbed up the mound to the lion and wondered why on earth I hadn"t done it during my previous two and a half years in Brussels. It may have obliterated the sunken road, but it gives a very good impression of the battlefield. Then to the farm at Hougoumont, which is always rather moving to see. Then on to a picnic place at Villers-la-Ville where we had arranged to meet the Tickells and the Andrew Knights (editor of the Economist and considerable friends of the Harlechs). We climbed up above the abbey and picnicked in sunny but slightly heavy weather, on a very good site.
The Harlechs left to catch their plane at 5.20. They had been very good guests, easy and enthusiastic-David always easy, Pamela always enthusiastic, and both of them a bit of the other. David, however, has the advantage of extremely wide interests and is determinedly pleasure-seeking, but in the best sense, and never gives the impression of being bored. He was remarkably calm in view of the fact that his much-publicized mission to the African states to try and soften up their position on Zimbabwe/Rhodesia was due to begin the following evening.
I had to go into the Berlaymont shortly before midnight to receive the results of the European elections and make some comments on radio and television. The results were extraordinarily badly presented by the elaborate organization we had set up there, and clearly the British poll, 31 per cent, was a deep disappointment, much worse than I had expected. However, the polls from other countries, most notably Italy, were much better. In Britain the Labour Party did slightly better than expected, winning seventeen seats, whereas I thought they might win only eight.
MONDAY, 11 JUNE. Brussels.
A meeting with Gundelach so that he should know of the salient points Giscard had made to me before his (Gundelach"s) meeting with the French Minister of Agriculture that afternoon. (Gundelach then lunched with Andrew Knight and leaked it all to him, which however did not come out in a too damaging form, but which I had carefully refrained from doing with Knight the day before.) Then to lunch with the Australian Amba.s.sador-a long way out -for Peac.o.c.k, their External Affairs Minister: an agreeable man, as I have always thought him, and very keen to get on with us. Gundelach had improved the atmosphere a good deal in his talks with the Australian Government, but Peac.o.c.k was at no pains to conceal his differences with Fraser, or indeed his pleasure that he had come out better than Fraser in a recent public opinion poll.
TUESDAY, 12 JUNE. Brussels, Luxembourg and Brussels.
Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg. It began very late-the French presidency is particularly bad at beginning late. The new British Government was represented for the first time. Carrington was not there, but Ian Gilmour, Nott, the Minister of Trade, and Douglas Hurd were. Nott, I thought, did rather well. Ian only had to make one brief intervention. I had a drink with him afterwards, during which he pressed on me the importance the UK Government attached to the UK/Australian uranium agreement. Douglas Hurd, vastly pro-European, found himself with a very restrictive brief on Lome questions, and locked into an even more isolated position than the Labour Government had mostly occupied.
Back to Brussels by train and dinner rue de Praetere with Laura, for the last time as she is off in thirty-six hours. Rather sad.
WEDNESDAY, 13 JUNE. Brussels.
A farewell party of about fifty for Laura, rue de Praetere. A moderately good speech from me and a better one from Laura. Then a dinner for Lee Kuan Yew, the Prime Minister of Singapore, and his wife (plus Laura). Harry Lee may have political faults but he is almost unique amongst world leaders in being an extremely good talker and a very good listener as well, so I enjoy seeing him very much. His wife is also highly intelligent.
THURSDAY, 14 JUNE. Brussels, Paris and Brussels.
7.30 train to Paris for the second time in a week, for a visit to OECD which I am each year pressed to do and which each year seems equally or more pointless to me. It is a day of diplomatic contacts without specific purpose, rather like publishers milling around at an international book fair. I began with an hour"s bilateral meeting with Warren Christopher, Cy Vance"s deputy at the State Department. I thought him, as always, a highly sensible, agreeable man, though we didn"t in fact have much of great importance to talk about. Then I went into the session for a short time and listened to some rather boring speeches and afterwards had a forty-minute meeting with Blumenthal, the American Secretary to the Treasury, and found him, curiously in view of the current low popularity and authority of the Carter administration, more confident and more relaxed than on previous occasions. Perhaps the general decline of the administration improves his relative position.
Then back again for a very short time into the session. Before lunch I had moderately useful talks with Geoffrey Howe, with Pandolfi the Italian Minister of Finance, and with two or three others. After lunch I walked up and down the terrace with the Turkish Foreign Minister, feeling and looking like a bad caricature of a diplomatic stage set. What he (the Foreign Minister) wanted was that I should be firmly in favour of a visit to Turkey of Haferkamp, accompanied by the Foreign Minister of the country holding the presidency. It was a modest ambition. I said I would endeavour to set that up. This he seemed extremely pleased with.
Then I had a meeting with the Portuguese Foreign Minister, de Freitas-Cruz.1 He gave me a pessimistic but intelligent a.n.a.lysis of the Portuguese position, and I in return told him to make sure he had a talk with Larosiere, the Managing Director of the IMF, who was there, as there appeared to be some misunderstanding on his part as to whether or not the Portuguese were prepared to settle.
Back to Brussels by the 5.44 TEE, and rue de Praetere just before 8.30 where I had David Steel to dinner. A rather gossipy talk with him, more about the election than the current and future political situation. He was pleased with his election campaign, although disappointed with the votes obtained, and went rather out of his way to tell me that, as a result of it, he had become a major public figure, possibly the best known after Callaghan, Heath and Mrs Thatcher. In other words, he was, I think, underlining in the nicest possible way that in any future political arrangement he wasn"t to be treated as an office boy. Very strongly anti-Thorpe. Anti-Mrs Thatcher, still rather pro-Callaghan.
FRIDAY, 15 JUNE. Brussels.
A special all-day Commission meeting at La Prieure2 to discuss our relations with the directly elected Parliament. Some sensible decisions were arrived at, not the least of which was Burke"s sudden announcement that he was going to hand in the Parliament portfolio. He might have told me beforehand, but that was as nothing compared with the relief that he had vacated this now important job which we had reluctantly given him in 1977, and which was not at all his metier. A few other sensible decisions were made, such as that Commissioners should have their individual names on replies to written questions. What had hitherto been the practice was that they were just answered in the name of the Commission and that what was everybody"s responsibility became n.o.body"s responsibility, except that of the rather insensitive services.
The evening was taken up with the visit of President Senghor of Senegal: a substantial meeting and then a Val d.u.c.h.esse dinner for him and his wife, with no speeches at his special request. I found him agreeable, sensible, very moderate on Rhodesian questions, but perhaps not quite so interesting as in Senegal four months before.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 16 JUNE. Brussels and the Somme.
An expedition to the battlefields of the Somme with Jakie Astors. We met them for lunch at Roye just off the Paris motorway. In the afternoon we drove around the huge Lutyens memorial and then a Canadian memorial, with a lot of remains of trenches, but half grown over so that they looked (the sh.e.l.l holes in particular) almost like bunkers in a well-kept golf course. Then we went through Albert and had a remarkable view across country to Amiens Cathedral about twenty miles away-at least as good a view as that of Chartres across the Beauce. Stayed in an hotel near Compiegne.
MONDAY, 18 JUNE. Brussels.
I began to deal with the question of Burke"s replacement as Commissioner responsible for relations with the Parliament. In view of the composition of the new Parliament it clearly had to be, in the currently developing jargon, a centre-right Commissioner, i.e. it would not be sensible to appoint a Socialist, and this meant that there were only three possibilities: Natali, who was probably the most obvious one, apart from linguistic difficulties; Davignon, who was very heavily charged already, but manifestly capable of doing this or any other job; and Tugendhat, who had the disadvantage of being the same nationality as me, but the advantage of being already linked with the Parliament owing to his budget responsibilities.
I had a sneaking fear that Natali would be too nervous of the Parliament, as he had somewhat ill.u.s.trated by his behaviour in the budget crisis in the spring; and that with his pessimistic and worried, though extremely agreeable, general demeanour he might keep us all in a constant state of apprehensive gloom. I decided therefore to have Davignon in and sound him out. He immediately announced that he was against Natali for much the same reasons that had caused me to hesitate, that his candidate was Tugendhat, but, when asked by me, agreed that he might do it himself.
TUESDAY, 19 JUNE. Brussels.
Interviews for Die Welt and the Kyoto (j.a.panese) News Service. Vredeling to a fence-mending lunch at home alone, as I had been told that he was feeling rather miserable and neglected. He wasn"t disagreeable and talked quite interestingly on one or two points. Then I saw Ortoli to talk to him about the Commissioner for the Parliament. He was in favour of Natali, but when I told him Davignon might do it, thought that Davignon would be even better, but said he would be perfectly happy with either of them. He was against Tugendhat.
I next saw the oddly named Eddie Mirzoeff from the BBC, who turned out to be extremely nice, to discuss, a long time in advance, arrangements for my November Dimbleby Lecture. Dined at Leon Lambert"s, a big dinner of farewell for General Haig. I had quite a long post-dinner talk with Haig. He is clearly still harbouring high political ambitions. He is rather in favour of a German as Secretary-General of NATO when Luns goes, though he thinks this will not be soon. He was not against an Englishman, but certainly not in favour of any Englishman. I don"t think Ian Gilmour"s kind idea of Mulley3 would run with him.
WEDNESDAY, 20 JUNE. Brussels.
I saw Natali before the Commission. I had a perfectly agreeable conversation with him. He clearly wants the Parliament job. I told him that I wasn"t sure he wasn"t too busy what with enlargement and his need to travel to Italy a great deal, and that Davignon was a possibility and I was hovering between the two and hadn"t made up my mind. He took this quite well, though obviously a bit disappointed.
The morning Commission meeting was extremely difficult at the end because of the question of the United Kingdom/Australia uranium agreement. Last July the British Labour Government had submitted to us the terms of such an agreement which were unacceptable in a number of ways. Brunner had written to them pointing out these objections, which they had dealt with by modification. They had therefore come back to us expecting (Maitland particularly) a clear run through. However, in view of a Court judgement having intervened, we did not think we could endorse even their modified agreement without risking the Commission position falling apart, unless they were willing to put a time limitation on it. Crispin was extremely keen on forcing this, and very courageously keen, as the British-and in particular UKREP4 -were very hot on the issue and blaming him for the hold-up.
In the Commission itself Davignon argued strongly in favour of the time-break clause; Tugendhat argued in favour of the British position and was supported by Brunner, who gives way to everybody but who is the responsible Commissioner; and Ortoli, no doubt on French grounds, was in that direction too. Therefore it was extremely difficult to hold the position, but I just succeeded in doing so, saying that I would have a hard go at negotiating the break clause with the British Government, which I thought there was a chance of doing provided there was no leak of the split position in the Commission. (Needless to say this was a slightly overoptimistic hope, though in fact no leak appeared in the press, but it certainly got back to UKREP.) Home late for lunch with Nicko Henderson on a pre-Washington briefing visit to Brussels, with, rather ironically, two of my pro-British Government adversaries of the morning, Brunner and Tugendhat. Nicko was informed and a little probing, but frustrated by me.
Back to the office to receive a portentous telephone call from President Murphy of the Cour des Comptes, telling me that the dreaded report was ready and that he was willing to come to Brussels, either on the Thursday, Friday or the following Monday, secretly but ceremoniously to hand a copy over, and indicating that it was going to be pretty tiresome. "The press will have a field day," he said lugubriously. I arranged for him to come on Monday.
I then saw Nicoll of the UK Representation, Maitland already having gone to Strasbourg for the European Council, and made a little statement to him following the Commission meeting, which he received disappointedly.
THURSDAY, 21 JUNE. Brussels and Strasbourg.
Avion taxi to Strasbourg accompanied by Ortoli, etc. Then to the Terminus-Gruber Hotel opposite the station, where the French Government had put us up. It was said to be a resort of ill repute but in fact turned out to be an improvement on the Sofitel.5 Giscard gave us lunch at the Prefecture. I was placed, surprisingly, between Peter Carrington and Mrs Thatcher, Giscard no doubt thinking it was good to have all the English cuckoos in the same nest, but it was amazing that at her first European Council he didn"t have her next to him. Peter Carrington started by saying, "I am very angry with you." I said, "Oh, yes, I suppose it is about UK/Australia, but you certainly should not be angry as there is no reason at all why you shouldn"t agree to what we want." He then made no pretence of being seriously angry and listened to what I had to say without I think knowing much about it.
Mrs Thatcher didn"t mention it. She, however, was quite chatty at lunch and concerned as to how she should open up the budget. contribution question and eager to have it first in the afternoon, which apparently she had just more or less arranged with Giscard. I told her that this was a mistake. She must have it the first day, certainly, but to start on it cold was not in my view right. However, she had arranged it on the agenda, so I supposed it had to be done.
After lunch Giscard suddenly announced that the Foreign Ministers would go off somewhere or other, but the heads of government and me (at least I presumed I was included) were to do a walk round the old part of Strasbourg. This we proceeded to do in extremely chaotic fashion for an excessive time. It lasted twenty-five minutes in a temperature of well over 80F and a great deal of pushing and shoving. Giscard, Mrs Thatcher and Schmidt were in the front row, the rest of us in the second or third rows; it was not agreeable but mildly amusing. I was told subsequently that Giscard decided on it at short notice because he thought Mrs Thatcher might do a walkabout on her own-perhaps he was confusing her with the Queen.
Then four hours of session in a good room at the Mairie-not quite as good as the Bremen Rathaus room but, that apart, the best we have had. Giscard did not give Mrs Thatcher a chance to open, as she thought he had said he would. I think she was lucky, but she subsequently thought he had cheated her.
The first item of substance was a report from the Governor of the Bank of France, Clappier, on the working of the EMS, a neutral, reasonably optimistic report. A brief discussion on that in which Mrs Thatcher announced that they would be making deposits (which she expected to have a better effect than it did) and I suggested that we ought to have a serious discussion at Dublin with a view to moving on to the European Monetary Fund, but Giscard indicated that he thought this too early.
Eventually we got on to the convergence/budgetary issue, which he asked me to open. I did so, moving fairly rapidly on to the budgetary aspect of convergence and putting the matter in a reasonably but I hope not excessively pro-British way. Mrs Thatcher, who I thought had been quite good in her previous interventions, immediately became shrill, and even more so in her quickly following second intervention. The prospect began to look distinctly uncertain, as Giscard was wavering, and van Agt, Jrgensen, and indeed Lynch were back-pedalling and asking only for a study to be made, i.e. no proposals requested from the Commission.
Mrs Thatcher meanwhile had got into an argument with Schmidt, which was silly as he was absolutely crucial to her getting the result that she wanted. She also had circulated bits of paper which looked as though they had come from the Commission; indeed she said they were Commission figures, but I had firmly to deny responsibility for having put them around, as although I thought they were broadly correct I was not going to be cross-examined on them, which Schmidt showed a certain tendency to do. When Mrs Thatcher tried to intervene for a third time, I had to stop her by intervening myself instead (which she accepted fairly graciously) and proposing the solution which was eventually accepted, that we should go to the Ecofin Council with a neutral statement of the facts, and then, not waiting for their authority, prepare a programme of remedies to present to the next European Council. She accepted this gratefully and graciously as indeed she should have done. It was not a bad afternoon and, on balance, not a bad performance on her part, except for this one fairly major tactical mistake on what was, after all, much the most important subject for her.
Dinner on an immensely hot evening at the Chateau de Rohan. Before dinner there was a typical little Giscard ploy. In the afternoon he had announced that he was giving ecus to everybody, adding, with the unintentional bad manners which are curiously natural to him, that there were gold ones for the heads of government and silver ones for the Foreign Ministers, but believing that he had balanced it by saying this was merely an indication of French attachment to bimetallism. Therefore, there was a certain amount of doubt as to which I would get. However, he advanced upon Schmidt and me before dinner, with two golden ecus in boxes in his hand, presented one to Schmidt and then presented the other to me, saying, "Ah, but Monsieur Jenkins, there is just one difficulty: yours is not inscribed. If therefore you will let me have it back, I will have it appropriately inscribed and sent to you as soon as possible." I suppose he could not decide until the last minute whether I was to get a gold or a silver one!
The dinner was rather grandly done. A beautiful room with everything manifestly brought down from the Elysee-plates, wine, not food I presume, but chefs certainly-and typical Giscard elaboration. There was fairly desultory foreign affairs conversation at dinner. Mrs Thatcher, still more surprisingly again not placed next to Giscard, did rather well on Rhodesia. Talk after dinner about China, Euro/Arab dialogue and one or two other subjects, but nothing very conclusive.
FRIDAY, 22 JUNE. Strasbourg and Brussels.
Three-hour European Council session in the morning on a variety of subjects-the communique obviously, relations with j.a.pan, our paper for the 1990s, on which I opened with a statement about demographic changes and the speed of advance of high technology in j.a.pan and the United States and the danger of our being left behind and uncomfortably squeezed in the middle.
There remained the question of the press conference, following Giscard"s embarra.s.sed dictat at our meeting in Paris two weeks before. However, when I asked what time he was going to start it, he asked if I intended to make a statement, and I said, "Yes, indeed, but it is not finally prepared. However, I will be quite happy to show it to you before we go in." He then said, "What I think we will do is this (it is a slight modification): I will make my statement and answer any questions to me. Then I will stay for your statement and if there are any questions for you afterwards I will leave at that stage." A ludicrous finessing, but I suppose a mild improvement.
In fact, everything pa.s.sed off perfectly smoothly. So a ridiculous but potentially nasty corner was turned not too unsatisfactorily. He and I parted on surprisingly good terms for once, saying that we looked forward to seeing each other in Tokyo.
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 representation, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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, G.o.d," 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 rea.s.sembled 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 communique 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 a.s.semble 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. n.o.body 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 c.o.c.k-up as it was not at all clear what they had been agreeing to or not agreeing to over the luncheon period. Giscard, to the annoyance of Mrs Thatcher, the embarra.s.sment of Andreotti, and indeed I think even the mild irritation of Schmidt, had propounded-which the Americans and the j.a.panese 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 n.o.body 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 communique, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese, 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.pan in a sort of socio-geographical sense, and he is serious, well-informed and reasonably easy.
I also had a rather good place a 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 communique and particularly on the energy parts of it. Then an hour"s pause before lunch, during which I asked Francois-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 communique. 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 j.a.panese 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 circ.u.mstances 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 until 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.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 30 JUNE. Anchorage and East Hendred.
London at 6.00 in the morning (3 p.m. j.a.panese 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 Praetere. 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.
WEDNESDAY, 4 JULY. Brussels.
I told Natali he was to get the Parliament job, which he accepted with pleasure but not ecstasy. The Commission received it at least as enthusiastically as he did, but even more so the news of our settlement with the British, which was received with almost incredulous pleasure. I telephoned Colombo (President of the Parliament) about the wretched Cour des Comptes report, finding him as agreeable as usual but extremely vague as to what ought or ought not to be done about it.
To the Chateau de la Hulpe, which I had decided upon for the change of presidency dinner (essential to change the scene if you can"t change the cast). My speech about the French presidency was based upon a rather elaborate comparison with a bottle of Chateau Lafite 1897, given me by my Bristol wine merchant, which I had approached with a mixture of respect, apprehension and antic.i.p.ation. When my son Charles, with whom I had shared it, asked me the next day what I had thought of it, I had said, "Very remarkable, but one wouldn"t want to drink it every day, would one." This was received just tolerably by the French, well by the others.
THURSDAY, 5 JULY. Brussels.
A visit from the President of Colombia, the impressively named Julio Cesar Turbay. I had a not very satisfactory quarter of an hour with him in my office, mainly because he was interested in trying to draft a communique, to which they attached particular importance; we don"t normally have them for such meetings. Then a rather more successful Commission meeting with him for one and a quarter hours, and afterwards a very successful lunch, when he proved to be a solid, interesting, agreeable man, who sat back in a most curious way from the table to eat-about two feet away from it-but this was a minor idiosyncrasy.
SAt.u.r.dAY, 7 JULY. East Hendred.
At 10.15 we left for Reading, for an honorary degree ceremony. No speech was required, therefore a restful occasion. The large audience received me with apparent enthusiasm. (Perhaps they hoped I would provide the university with some Community money, but that is an ungrateful thought.) Roger Sherfield was the Chancellor and I enjoyed talking to him at lunch, I had previously and mistakenly thought him unforthcoming.
MONDAY, 9 JULY. Brussels.