by Roy Jenkins
WEDNESDAY, 4 MAY. Brussels and Luxembourg.
Lunch at home for Emanuele Gazzo, the remarkable and wise editor of Agence Europe, a cyclostyled sheet which comes out every day in four languages and contains a great deal of detail about what goes on in the Commission, as well as some very sensible leading articles, and has considerable influence in Brussels.
Then by train to Luxembourg for the fourth of my inaugural visits. An hour with Thorn in his office before dinner. He had expressed himself very strongly at the Council the day before and repeated this to the press, coining a good phrase on my Saturday exclusion. The Community isn’t only a Community for Sundays,’ he announced. Privately, however, his view was that we had not done too badly even though he held the position of the French and the British to be fairly intolerable.
I asked him about the British presidency and Britain’s general standing in Europe. He said the presidency was going fairly badly and that the sense of disillusion was considerable. Perhaps unfairly, they put up with things from the French they wouldn’t put up with from the British because they were used to the French and they were used to playing a tiresome game with them, and they could have one country doing this but they could not have two. Furthermore they had thought that when the British came in, while we would not bring great economic strength or wealth—but this they did not mind; indeed to some extent, in comparison with the past when we were much the richest country in Europe, they rather liked it—they had thought that we would bring a democratic infusion, and therefore our hesitancy over direct elections was a mystifying disappointment. And they had also thought that we would bring not so much a sense of efficiency, but a sense of fair play to our chairing of the various Councils, and therefore our handling of the Agricultural Council and of the Research Council had also been damaging.
THURSDAY, 5 MAY. Luxembourg and Brussels.
I awoke with some sort of allergy, producing monstrous weals. There was no particular evidence that I felt unwell, although obviously rather apprehensive (what a farce if I could not go to the Summit after all!). I rang (Dr) Ann Phillips in Brussels and consulted her, she taking a reasonably reassuring view, and also made tentative soundings with Antony and Anne Acland,110 with whom we were due to have a drink at 12.30, about the possibility of getting a doctor. One and a half hours’ meeting with about half the Luxembourg Government, and then to the Grand Ducal Palace for an audience with the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess.
They were thoroughly agreeable—he charming, she sharper, sister of the King of the Belgians, but very unlike Baudouin -despite the fact that I had refused their invitation to dinner that evening on the thoroughly good grounds, which they appeared completely to understand, that I had to get back to Brussels and prepare for the Summit. The conversation essentially took the form of their asking me what I had thought of Carter and my describing this rather anecdotally, and then going on to the same thing at their prompting about Mitterrand, and to some sort of general discussion about Euro-Communism and the difference between the position and attitude of the Communist Party in France and Italy. The atmosphere of the Court was, curiously, slightly more formal and more like our own than the monarchies of Belgium and Holland.
Lunch with Thorn and a large collection of Luxembourgeois notables—at a late nineteenth-century château (Senningen) in rather pretty woods about five miles out. During lunch it became pretty obvious to me that the improvement of my allergy was not being sustained. Nevertheless to a press conference with Thorn, a briefing of the ambassadors of the Nine and then to the new Jean Monnet building for an opening ceremony with the Grand Duke and Duchess and speeches from Thorn, the Chairman of the Comité des Anciens, i.e. those who had been there with Monnet from the beginning, and me.
Then at 7.15 to see Dr Schau, who was said to be the best doctor in Luxembourg. He was agreeable, competent and not at all reassuring. He said it was a very bad allergy and he was by no means sure I would be all right for the Summit, which was of course beginning to obsess me. It would be a superb piece of irony, and indeed bathos, if, after all the fuss, I were ill and unable to be present for that reason. He then gave me two injections and suggested I take anti-histamine tablets as well. Michael Jenkins and I then drove to Brussels, where things seemed worse again and I went to bed in great gloom.
FRIDAY, 6 MAY. Brussels and London.
I woke to find that a miracle had occurred and that there was not a single trace left of the tribulations of yesterday. Received Houphouët-Boigny at 11.30 and into the Commission for one of our routine formal meetings, before taking him for a quick lunch at Val Duchesse. Speeches on both occasions. He is an agreeable, able, moderate, little man, much more so than Mobutu, but at the same time not easy to do a French conversational dance with. He was reasonably forthcoming, with none of Mobutu’s pretence of being a demi-god, but showed a curious self-centredness, a lack of interest in anything to do with one’s own life, a complete absence of conversational initiative.
Plane to London and via Ladbroke Square to the Downing Street dinner, at which we had been requested to arrive at 7.48 (!) and which we did exactly punctually, although it seemed a little ludicrous.
I was received by Callaghan and then went upstairs to find David Owen and Denis Healey. I was of course asked to be the first—as the most junior—of the delegations to arrive. The others then came in fairly thick and fast and I was greeted extremely warmly by Carter and Vance and Blumenthal; by Trudeau,111 whom I had not seen for about eight years; by Schmidt; by Andreotti; by the Japanese—I had forgotten that Fukuda, the Prime Minister, had been Finance Minister when I was his opposite number in the late sixties; and indeed perfectly courteously by Guiringaud, who was the only French representative present.
On arrival, however, I had been far from pleased to be told that there were three tables and that I was to sit, not at the heads of delegation table, not indeed even at the Foreign Ministers’ table (although this perhaps did not matter), but at the Finance Ministers’ table. This was a gratuitous piece of nonsense by Callaghan. Having lost Giscard for his dinner—and Giscard, incidentally, that morning had told Le Monde that it was my presence which was preventing him from coming—the least he could have done was to play the thing with some style.
SATURDAY, 7 MAY. London.
Inevitably a frustrating day of waiting, heel-kicking and over-febrile preparation at home in Ladbroke Square. At about 12.00 Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais arrived, mainly I think as an expression of anti-Giscard solidarity. I shuffled her out of the drawing room and downstairs into the dining room and garden with Jennifer, because Crispin, Ruggiero and Hijzen, the Dutch Director-General of External Affairs, were due and I thought her French diplomatic presence might appear rather confusing, perhaps not to Crispin, but certainly to the other two!
The Buckingham Palace dinner was, in the circumstances, a surprisingly agreeable occasion. The Royal Family plus courtiers were extremely nice and forthcoming to me; so indeed—no reason at all why they should not be—were the Owens, and even the Healeys. However, I had no contact with Callaghan at all, which was probably as well. Jennifer sat at dinner between Barre and Martin Charteris.112 I sat between Mrs Macdonald, the wife of the Canadian Finance Minister, and Forlani, the Italian Foreign Minister. But I certainly could not complain about placement as I was next but one to Callaghan. Standing about before dinner, Giscard, who with Carter, as heads of state, had been allowed to arrive after the rest of us, suddenly emerged from behind my shoulder, swept up, seizing me by the hand, saying, ‘Ah, mon ami Jenkins, bon soir. Comment allez-vous?’ ‘Bon soir, Monsieur le Président de la République.’ I replied fairly, but not excessively, coolly. He then seized Jennifer’s hand and kissed it, and swept on.
I had another encounter with him a little later, when we were standing talking—Jennifer and I and Carter, and he and Martin Charteris—and Princess Margaret came up and said, ‘Ah, two Presidents together.’ ‘No, no,’ said Giscard. ‘We are three Presidents. Monsieur Jenkin
s is President of the Commission.’ So I said, ‘We are all Presidents, except Sir Martin Charteris, and he is going to be a Provost, which is even better.’ Slightly edged raillery was the keynote.
After dinner, Barre, having talked to Jennifer throughout dinner in French, made a point of having a long and friendly conversation with me in English, and when we said goodbye to him he insisted on inviting us to come and see him at Matignon whenever we were in Paris. I found myself at one stage having a conversation with the Queen in French, which was mainly because Barre was also there and Trudeau had come and joined us and she started very politely to talk to Barre in French, but he and Trudeau remained rather silent so one had the slightly ludicrous spectacle of the Queen and me going on exchanging conversation in French for about ten minutes. Her French is better than mine.
Foreign dignitaries treat the Royal Family differently from the way in which they are used to being treated in England. However they rolled quite well with this punch. Schmidt was smoking before the main course at dinner (an activity in which he was quickly joined by Princess Margaret) and stubbing the ends out on very high quality plate. And at the end, instead of the Royal Family withdrawing, as is normally the case, and everybody then shuffling off when they wanted to, people began to go on their own, coming up to them, saying, ‘Thank you very much, it has been a very nice party but we must now get off and do some work.’ But the Queen sensibly accepted this and stayed until the end so that everyone went up and thanked her on the way out and said goodbye in exactly the same way as one would do at a normal, non-royal, party.
SUNDAY, 8 MAY. London and East Hendred.
Downing Street at 10.30. We spent the morning on two main subjects: first, North/South, which Giscard was asked to introduce and did very well. I intervened about fourth and then several times subsequently. We then went on to MTNs, which I think Carter introduced but said little about, and which therefore in effect I introduced with the second speech. The discussions were both quite good without being sensationally so. Probably, I regret to say, Giscard performed the best, looked the most ‘statesmanlike’ figure, all done in a very head-of-state way. Callaghan was a pretty good chairman, adopting the attitude of a bluff common-sense man, although once on the Special Action Fund he made a major tactical error and put the British in a very difficult position for some time, from which Denis Healey half extracted him. Fukuda of Japan spoke surprisingly effectively through the linguistic barrier, and the others listened to him attentively. Andreotti did not make much impact.
Trudeau did a sort of strip-tease. He had been wearing a velvet suit on the Friday evening, but on this occasion he was wearing a slightly trendy pin-stripe, of which he proceeded to divest himself during the morning. First his coat came off, then his waistcoat, then his tie was loosened. Somewhere in the course of the proceedings, the yellow rose which he wears most of the time was put into a glass of water in front of him. He occasionally intervened, not powerfully but pertinently. Schmidt talked powerfully, confidently, in English as he usually does, but rather too much and in a sense rather too much of a gramophone record. A great number of the phrases and arguments we had heard at Rome came out a second time. Carter did not speak much and adopted a modest, anxious-to-learn attitude, which was quite effective. What is difficult to evaluate is how much this effectiveness was due to his being President of the United States, with a national income of rather over 40 per cent of the total of those seated round the table. If he had been a new Prime Minister of Canada, or of Italy, would he have been regarded as a rather marginal contributor? Probably.
Lunch at Carlton Gardens with the Foreign Ministers, which was solely occupied with a drafting session on the communiqué. David Owen (who was not very effective throughout the whole Summit, acting too much as Callaghan’s office boy) was less good at the English redrafting than I had expected, so that Vance and I did most of it. We then had another two and a half hours on the communiqué in full Downing Street session.
Then to the press conference in the Banqueting House. I sat at the end of the front row without, as was subsequently widely reported, a microphone, although I was not aware of this. I knew that I was not going to be allowed to speak, as the elaborate compromise which had been worked out was that I should sit in the front row (I had declined to sit anywhere else, saying that I was either the head of a delegation or nothing) but had been forced to accept the mute role. The press conference was interminable. After Callaghan as chairman had spoken, the others were supposed to make statements of two or three minutes; in fact most of them spoke for more like twelve or fifteen minutes, and as there had to be subsequent translation, the whole thing lasted until 7.45. The best statements were made by Fukuda and by Carter.
This over, I went to the Stafford Hotel where I did three or four television interviews and held my own press conference in which I tried to strike a balanced and fairly up-beat note, although I am not sure how much this came through. Drove down to East Hendred for the night.
My thoughts at the end of the Summit were (1) immense relief at it being over, (2) almost equal relief at having got rid of the beastly allergy, (3) embarrassment at the extreme and constant awkwardness of the position, (4) a mounting resentment against Callaghan, and a greater but slightly diminishing resentment against Giscard, and (5) a hope that on the Sunday at any rate I had played a tolerably useful part.
MONDAY, 9 MAY. London.
Lunch with David Steel113 in an attempt to stiffen him in his pressure on the Government about direct elections. He was agreeable, but certainly needed this stiffening. Speech to a European Movement dinner–a discreet fund-raising affair–at the Reform Club, which was attended by about sixty or seventy people, and was a remarkable roll call of the great and the good, insofar as they exist, of British business.
TUESDAY, 10 MAY. London and Strasbourg.
Breakfast with David Owen at Carlton Gardens for the Foreign Ministers of the Little Five, nominally in order to debrief them on the Summit. Some discussion after two opening statements by David and me, in which K. B. Andersen asked the only interesting question, which was whether I thought that the arrangements in London had been compatible with the Rome compromise. I said ‘No’, but I nevertheless thought it had been worthwhile that we were there.
Left Carlton Gardens at 9.30 and was in the hotel in Strasbourg only two hours and five minutes later. Answered questions in the Parliament after lunch. Gave a dinner for Colombo114 as President of the Parliament. An enjoyable discussion during which my morale improved, partly because I suddenly realized that I had made a French breakthrough. During my first three months in Brussels I thought it had definitely retrogressed, and even after that had not improved, but it has now jerked forward and I suddenly felt much more fluent and had no difficulty in leading the whole two-hour discussion in French.
WEDNESDAY, 11 MAY. Strasbourg and Bonn.
Very good early Commission meeting, 8.30–11.00. We dealt with several issues of difficulty and substance, such as the internal fishing régime, Brunner’s weak proposals for mixed teams between the Vienna Agency and Euratom,115 on which we turned him down. Then into the Chamber ready to make my statement on the Summit, which lasted ten minutes and went quite smoothly. Then by car and train to Bonn for the fifth of my inaugural visits, arriving just after 9 p.m.
For the first time this year it was almost a summer evening. Drove about forty miles to Schloss Gymnich, the German Government hospitality château. Huge rooms, bedroom, sitting room. The château itself very agreeable and the outlook from the windows attractive, but furnished so as to create a special mixture of modernity and inconvenience.
THURSDAY, 12 MAY. Bonn.
An early start to a long and over-busy day. By helicopter to breakfast with Genscher in the Auswärtiges Amt at 8.00. I had a fairly good talk with him, partly on a number of detailed issues which he wished to raise, partly on post-Summit views, partly on the institutional consequences of enlargement raised by me, and the dangers of a split on t
he issue between the small existing members of the Community and the big ones, and the importance of the Germans as having a key role to play resisting this. Genscher is an odd man. Despite our malentendu over German Commissioners in early November, I found him thoroughly agreeable, perfectly easy, and yet difficult to get alongside, despite the lubricating pleasures of his huge breakfast.
At 9.00 to the Bundestag to be ceremonially introduced by the President. This meant standing up in the gallery and being quite loudly applauded by the two hundred or so members present. Then listened to Schmidt’s statement on the Summit which lasted over forty minutes, much more of an argumentative speech than is the British habit on these occasions. It contained one important passage from the Commission point of view, referring to his satisfaction that I had been present and hoping that this provided a good basis on which to build for the future. This was enthusiastically received. Then I listened to about half of Franz Josef Strauss’s116 rather good debating speech, before leaving for a meeting with Friderichs,117 Minister for Economic Affairs. Then back to the Auswärtiges Amt for a meeting with Dohnanyi and a lot of officials. Then to the Chancellery for a half-hour with Schmidt alone. We had agreed in London that this was not to be a serious business talk, but it was quite interesting to hear that (1) he was firmly resolved to be the host for the next Summit which he thought might take place in January or February 1978, (2) he regarded free trade and therefore progress in the MTNs as being almost the single most crucial German national interest, and (3) his slight defeatism about the prospect of making real reforms in the CAP, despite his desire to do so.
Then we walked across to the old Chancellery for a luncheon of about sixty people. After lunch Schmidt made a long, rambling but quite interesting speech. He had thrown away his text at my invitation before we left his office, saying it looked much too long, and then proceeded to speak for at least twice as long as the text would have taken. However, amongst the things he said was that he and Giscard had decided that it was very desirable that I should become President of the Commission because they wanted a politician of standing who might have become Prime Minister of his own country, and that he himself had complete faith in my ability to do a very good job in this capacity. My only trouble, he said, was that I had wanted to have twelve other potential Prime Ministers supporting me in the Commission, a very rash wish. He would never do that in his own Government. It made things very uncomfortable. It was much better to be surrounded by people who could never be Prime Ministers. It was a friendly but not very European speech, in which he said that Germany did not want to be in the front row. In reply, I said that Germany was inevitably in the front row, the question was in which direction they pushed. But the whole occasion passed off thoroughly pleasantly.