Jenkins’ last year in Brussels was dominated by a protracted crisis over Britain’s contribution to the Community budget. The problem was that, five years after Wilson and Callaghan’s ‘renegotiation’ of Heath’s entry terms, Britain was about to become the largest net contributor to the Community, despite being now (measured by GDP) one of the poorer members. The reason was that the Common Agricultural Policy remained far and away the biggest item in the budget while Britain, as a primarily industrial country, drew from it the least benefit. Some of the other initiatives, like regional policy, from which Britain was supposed to gain compensation, had never fully taken off. Callaghan had been gearing up to demand a rectification of this imbalance before he lost office; now Mrs Thatcher had taken up the cudgels and was determined to get what she called ‘her’ money back. As President of the Commission, Jenkins was keen to promote a settlement, partly on the merits of the case, because he believed that Britain was indeed paying more than her fair share; and partly because it became increasingly clear during 1980 that Mrs Thatcher’s single-minded focus on getting her way ensured that no progress would be possible on any other front until she was satisfied. He became exasperated with her counterproductive method of fighting her case, which merely antagonised her partners and alienated potential allies. But it was a peculiarly awkward issue for him, just because it involved his own country. Hitherto he had been careful to give his colleagues and critics in Brussels no ground for thinking he was a British stooge. That had not been a problem over the EMS; but over the BBQ (the British Budgetary Question, or the ‘Bloody British Question’, as it came to be known in Brussels) it was difficult for him not to seem to be taking Britain’s side. It did not help that the other Commissioner whose portfolio included the budget was Christopher Tugendhat.
He had his first meeting with the new Prime Minister just two weeks after she took office on 21 May 1979. She was ‘very anxious to be pleasant’ and began by offering him a drink, which he ‘primly refused’, thinking twelve o’clock a little early. ‘Let us have one at 12.30,’ he suggested. ‘It will give us something to look forward to if the conversation goes badly.’88 In fact it went quite well. Mrs Thatcher was ‘very determined to get something on the budget’, but at this stage she also wanted to be positive. She intended to fight for British interests, but wanted to be a better partner than the previous government, and even held out hope of joining the EMS, though not immediately. As they talked, however, she became more worked up. There had to be ‘give and take in the Community’, she conceded, ‘but so far as Britain was concerned it was all give’ and this was ‘fundamentally unjust. She could not understand why the others did not understand this.’ Jenkins disputed some of her figures and warned her not to be too demanding. ‘Without goodwill on the British side and readiness to co-operate’, the others would be ‘very tough’. They did not accept the argument that Britain was relatively poor. On the contrary, the Europeans – he was doubtless thinking particularly of Helmut Schmidt – felt that ‘the British had great human resources, they had immense oil and coal reserves, and their industrial problems were in many ways their own fault’. Mrs Thatcher had to agree with this, but claimed that Britain’s unfair budget contribution was inhibiting her efforts to put them right.89 Jenkins came away reasonably encouraged – except by her tendency to equate the EEC with NATO and ‘one or two frankly foolish remarks about starving the Arabs to death by cutting off North American wheat supplies’ – and went straight on to lunch with Leslie Bonham Carter at the White Tower, before recording a television interview in the afternoon and attending a dinner in the evening.90
It was at her first European summit in Strasbourg a month later that the other leaders realised what they were up against. When Giscard and Schmidt tried to patronise her, Mrs Thatcher ‘immediately became rather too shrill’ and then picked an unnecessary quarrel with Schmidt, ‘which was silly because he was absolutely crucial to her getting the result she wanted’. Jenkins – whose role at summits was now accepted – had to intervene to keep the peace.91 Three weeks later he was invited to dine at Chequers, which gave him another chance to advise her on how to press her case: he told her that she should ‘endeavour to break up the endless exhibition waltz between Schmidt and Giscard which has been going on for too long, and which left the Little Five, and indeed Italy as well, as rather bored wallflowers sitting at the edge of the room’ – in other words, that she should seek allies and not expect to get what she wanted simply by demanding it.92 Unfortunately this was advice she failed to heed.
This dinner – the first time he had been to Chequers for several years – was a curious occasion. The only others present were Denis Thatcher and Jenkins’ old friend Woodrow Wyatt, now an ardent Thatcherite and an intimate confidant of the Prime Minister. ‘Woodrow,’ he noted with some surprise, ‘is on very close terms with her, talks freely, easily, without self-consciousness, says anything he wants to.’ Denis, too, ‘while a caricature of himself in some ways, is not in the least afraid of her and talks a good deal, perhaps because he had had a few drinks by that time. But he doesn’t talk altogether foolishly . . . Whether he is exactly out of his depth I don’t know. He is rather his own man, I think.’ The third thing that struck him was that Mrs Thatcher was ‘remarkably indiscreet in front of me’, though she was tactful enough to criticise his particular friends in the Cabinet (Gilmour, Carrington and Whitelaw) only by implication, by pointedly leaving them off a list of ‘the sound men – Howe, Biffen, Joseph, Nott . . . (a slightly frightening list) – who were fighting tooth and nail on her side for public expenditure cuts’. He was disappointed that there was only white wine with dinner (‘two moderately good German wines’), but he must have drunk quite a bit of it because he drove himself back to East Hendred ‘rather gingerly – it is a long time since I have driven myself any distance home after dinner’.93 He did not normally worry about drink-driving.fn10
The first real effort to resolve the BBQ came at the Dublin summit in November. Before that, in late October, Jenkins had another ‘rather wild and whirling interview with Mrs Thatcher, lasting no less than an hour and fifty minutes’:
She wasn’t, to be honest, making a great deal of sense, jumping all over the place, so that I came to the conclusion that her reputation for a well-ordered mind is completely ill-founded.
‘On the other hand’, he acknowledged, ‘she remains quite a nice person, without pomposity’.95 Crispin Tickell’s minute as usual gives the full flavour of her anti-European prejudice and Jenkins’ mild attempts to counter it. She began by threatening to withhold payments above a certain level. Jenkins warned her that this would break Community law:
Mrs Thatcher said that she would fight by the Queensberry rules so long as others did so; but if they did not abide by the rules she would hit below the belt. Mr Jenkins said that he understood Mrs Thatcher’s feelings, but the essential was for her to get the result she wanted . . . Something manifestly illegal would not help the British cause.
Then – ‘if he could venture a word of warning’ – he urged Mrs Thatcher not to expect to get everything she wanted at Dublin. After an argument about precise figures, during which Mrs Thatcher said that ‘she would not continue to fill the begging bowls of other members of the Community’, Jenkins told her it was a mistake for any member to think it would always be in balance. She disagreed vehemently, saying the CAP and fisheries agreement had been ‘catastrophic’ for Britain and demanding what benefit Britain had so far got from membership of the EEC (Jenkins, rather weakly, was unable to give a snap answer). Warming to her theme, Mrs Thatcher then alleged that ‘the French were trying to take her money and her fish and she would not let them have a penny piece . . . France was the kept woman of Europe.’ When Jenkins urged her at least to get Chancellor Schmidt on her side, she agreed that Schmidt was ‘the kind of man to do business with’, but repeated several times that the others were ‘a pack of squealing children’ and generally ‘a rotten lot’. She thought she
had joined a reasonable club, ‘but as far as she could see the British were the only decent members of it’. Jenkins ‘enquired what the British had done in recent months to show their particular decency’. When Mrs Thatcher replied that they had made their contribution to the Lomé Convention (a trade-and-aid agreement with fifty-odd Third World countries) he answered that so had everyone else.
Repeatedly Mrs Thatcher insisted that she wanted a rebate of £1,000 million and would accept nothing less. ‘She knew what she wanted at Dublin and she would get it.’ At one point she came close to threatening to leave the Community: ‘She could not help thinking that Britain would do better with its own food policy, its own fish, its own industrial policy, its own customs tariff, with of course its particular clout on defence.’ ‘Mr Jenkins said that Mrs Thatcher should occasionally see the problem through other people’s eyes’. He told her that she would do well to get two-thirds of what she was demanding and begged her not to lose the possibility of a substantial victory by saying that it was not enough. He repeated that she would need allies and would be wise to have some constructive points up her sleeve. ‘He was not against Mrs Thatcher giving M. Giscard a piece of her mind but she should always seek to avoid finding herself alone.’ When he explained that the Commission could only lay possibilities on the table and could not impose a settlement, Mrs Thatcher told him crossly that in that case ‘the Commission must be a rotten organisation too’.96
Jenkins came out ‘slightly reeling after this extremely long tirade’, hoping that he had ‘put a little sense into her head’ on one or two points. ‘I was left with no sense that she had any clear strategy for Dublin, except for determination, which is a certain quality I suppose.’97 A few days later he spoke by telephone to Helmut Schmidt, who said that he had told Mrs Thatcher it was ‘impossible’ to give her everything she wanted and that ‘if she insisted on the full satisfaction of her demands she might find herself obliged to take Britain out of the Community next year’. Jenkins now foresaw ‘a real danger that Britain might in the end leave the Community’. This would not only be ‘a disaster for Britain’, but might also – it is not clear why – ‘lead to the break-up of the Community’.98 Both Schmidt and Giscard claimed to want to help Britain at Dublin, but both insisted that Mrs Thatcher’s demands were ‘unrealistic’.99 Jenkins thus found himself rather helplessly caught in the middle. Just before Dublin – and four days after the Dimbleby Lecture, which ‘at least had the advantage that I could not worry too much about Dublin’: another revelation of where his priorities now lay100 – he had another session with Mrs Thatcher. This time he found her ‘more restrained’, adamant that she had no intention of leaving the Community, but still determined that she could accept nothing less than her full demand, confident that the Community would crack before she did. He shared with her some of his own difficulties with Giscard – ‘rarely had he seen M. Giscard so casuistical and unimpressive’ as at their last meeting – and tried to persuade her that a gesture towards joining the EMS would have ‘a big impact’. ‘It would greatly help if the British Government could give some meaning to its repeated statements of commitment to Europe.’ Mrs Thatcher simply repeated that she was not being unreasonable, but ‘she could not take half a loaf’.101 In his diary, oddly, Jenkins wrote that he ‘could not quite make out whether she intended to compromise or not’.102 But Tickell’s minute makes it pretty plain that she would not.
At Dublin on 29–30 November she was offered only £350 million – one-third of her ‘loaf’ – and duly dug her heels in. She started fairly reasonably (‘a bit shrill as usual, but not excessively so’) and won ‘quite a good initial response’. But then as the evening went on she became ‘far too demanding’. In his diary Jenkins analysed her performance:
Her mistake, which fed on itself subsequently at dinner and indeed the next morning, arose out of her having only one of the three major qualities of an advocate. She has the nerve and determination to win, but she certainly does not have a good understanding of the case against her . . . which means that her constantly reiterated cry of ‘It’s my money I want back’, strikes an insistently jarring note. ‘Voila parle la vraie fille d’épicier’, someone . . . said. She also lacks the third quality, which is that of not boring the judge or the jury, and she bored everybody endlessly by only understanding about four out of the fourteen or so points on the British side and repeating each of them twenty-seven times.103
What infuriated her was that after a bit no one bothered to argue with her. Giscard ostentatiously read a newspaper while Schmidt pretended to go to sleep. She foolishly – and irrelevantly – antagonised the smaller nations by upbraiding them for their ‘pusillanimous’ attitude to nuclear weapons. In the end – after she had ‘kept us all round the dinner table for four interminable hours’ – Jenkins decided that the only possible course was to postpone the issue. Schmidt and Giscard were unwilling to accept this unless Mrs Thatcher promised to approach the next Council (in Luxembourg in April) in a spirit of compromise. Finding her the next morning installed – ‘perhaps incarcerated is the better word’ – for security reasons in Dublin Castle (in the very room where James Connolly had passed his last night before his execution by the British in 1916), Jenkins managed to persuade her to accept a postponement; then Lord Carrington persuaded her – ‘the words coming out of her with almost physical difficulty’ – to give the required promise.104 The leaders left Dublin with relief, to try again another day.fn11
The ‘Bloody British Question’ dominated the first five months of 1980. ‘Not only I but the whole Community was rarely allowed to think about anything else during this period,’ Jenkins wrote later.106 He gave his ‘total priority’ to attempting to broker a solution: trying to get the others to contribute and Mrs Thatcher to accept a rebate of around £700 million (in euro-speak, 1,000 million ECUs) or two-thirds of her ‘loaf’. In trying to achieve an acceptable compromise he found himself for the first time seeming to play a British hand, which strained his relations with his fellow Commissioners as never before: once he found himself (with Tugendhat) in a minority of two.107 In a long, gloomy conversation with Schmidt in January – ‘well over three hours with no dinner, one or two drinks I thought rather reluctantly brought in, a few kleine essen, and nothing else’ – he found that the Chancellor’s position had hardened since Dublin.108 But they decided that the best way of trying to shift Mrs Thatcher might be through Carrington: Jenkins agreed to set up an opportunity for the German Chancellor and the British Foreign Secretary to meet informally over dinner at East Hendred: this took place on 23 February, though Jenkins was not sure it achieved very much.109 Jenkins himself had several meetings with Carrington during February: over breakfast (never his favourite meal) at the rue de Praetère on the 5th he got Carrington to agree – ‘not exactly reluctantly but extremely nervously’ – to try to sell Mrs Thatcher a settlement around 1,000 million ECUs.110 He evidently got nowhere with this since at dinner at the British Embassy in Rome on the 18th they agreed that a solution looked more distant than ever and there was a real possibility of Britain leaving the Community.111 Meeting Mrs Thatcher again in Downing Street on 17 March, however, Jenkins found her ‘a good deal calmer’ than previously and formed the impression that she might be willing to contemplate a deal, ‘provided the actual phrase was avoided’.112 In a speech to the political committee of the European Parliament two weeks later he pointed out that the gap between the two sides amounted to no more than about two weeks’ cost of the CAP. ‘My sum was based on the unspoken premise that there was hardly anybody who was not willing to go to 700 million and I believe the British would settle at 1100 million if not a little less.’113 For this he was portrayed in the French press as a British agent, which ‘though ridiculous and unwarranted was mildly depressing and threw me slightly off balance . . . for a day or two’.114
But again Tickell’s minute of his 17 March meeting with Mrs Thatcher gives little basis for Jenkins’ optimism. She still threate
ned to break the law if necessary (‘If the French could get away with defiance of the Court, why should not the British?’), still declined his plea that she could change the whole atmosphere by announcing her willingness to consider joining the EMS and still insisted that she must have 1,500 million ECUs.115 Robert Armstrong – her Cabinet Secretary – assured Tickell that Mrs Thatcher ‘had great respect for Mr Jenkins. He was one of the few people to whom she listened’; and, on another occasion, that Carrington (unlike most of his colleagues in the Cabinet) was ‘pretty robust . . . and Mrs Thatcher was rarely tempted to take him on’.116 But there was little sign in the run-up to Luxembourg that she was prepared to act on their advice. And so it proved. Mrs Thatcher was initially ‘much quieter, less strident, less abrasive than at Dublin’. In a weary effort to settle the issue, Schmidt and Giscard made her what was widely taken to be a pretty good offer of 2,400 million ECUs over the next two years. But, to general astonishment, when she came back to the table after a long adjournment she again rejected it. When Jenkins tried to persuade her that she was making a great mistake she told him firmly, ‘Don’t try persuading me, you know I find persuasion very counterproductive.’117 Schmidt and Giscard – and all the other leaders who had backed the deal – were furious; Jenkins was embarrassed; but Mrs Thatcher, at a time when her domestic policies were becoming deeply unpopular, was delighted with the headlines that her handbag-wielding intransigence won her in the British press. The next day Jenkins left for his week-long visit to India: he thought of cancelling it in view of the crisis in the Community, but was actually glad to get away.
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