European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  SATURDAY, 8 OCTOBER. Brussels and Villers-le-Temple.

  Breakfast rue de Praetère for James Schlesinger, the United States Energy Secretary, with a great party of officials. A rather sticky occasion–I hate working breakfasts in any case–and I didn’t take greatly to Schlesinger. No doubt he is an able man, but I rather dislike his habit of carrying on a conversation by a series of laconic, not very funny, wisecracks, with too much straining after epigram. It was rather like talking to a less witty Ken Galbraith196 whom one did not know.

  To Villiers-le-Temple for the Belgian ‘Schloss Gymnich’ weekend. This wasn’t quite Leeds Castle but it took place at a rather attractive hotel called La Commanderie, converted out of a sort of mixture of priory and barracks for Knights Templars. Everyone, except Guiringaud, was there for lunch. David Owen was asked to begin by giving an account of the British position after the Labour Party Conference, which he did in somewhat complacent terms. I then said I thought the Callaghan letter did mark a step forward, although I could not entirely agree with David’s view that it had buried the issue in the Labour Party for ever; it had probably buried it for this Parliament, and possibly the next if the Labour Party won, but by no means necessarily with the Labour Party in opposition.

  I also thought there were grave dangers in at least one sentence of the letter, that which expressed the view that enlargement was to be welcomed as an almost inevitable weakening of the Community. This provoked others, particularly Genscher and Thorn, to complain slightly more strongly along the same lines; Genscher said it was very nice of the British not to ask for another renegotiation, implying strongly that if we had that would have been the end; but also committing himself, which was satisfactory, to a view that on the contrary enlargement must mean a strengthening of the Community. However, there was not tremendous pressure upon David.

  There was some complaint about Crispin not having distributed to the Little Five the text of the communiqué which had been agreed upon, though not for publication, at the Washington meeting of Summit ‘sherpas’, and I defended him vigorously on this, saying that he could not possibly stand out against the unanimous view of the others that there was to be no communication of this, except to the heads of governments represented at the Summit. Inevitably a slightly difficult issue as we are in a way there as the representative of the Little Five, though also, of course, nominally as that of the other four, and if they give us no support for action helpful to the Little Five, it is very difficult for us to know how to strike the balance.

  Then a four-hour, more formal session in the afternoon. We opened with an institutional discussion on enlargement, and then I did about a twenty-minute exposé on monetary union. This was not at all badly received round the table, notably (as one would expect) by Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, but also by Denmark, Holland and even Genscher for Germany. David Owen was sceptical, but not particularly hostile or indeed particularly informed.

  There was a curious flare-up at dinner. We got on to Summitry and the question of future representation, Guiringaud playing this in a relaxed way and also Dohnanyi who had by this time replaced Genscher, partly of course because they knew, as most of the Little Five were beginning to find out, that there was not going to be a Summit during the Danish presidency, but only during the German presidency. This made the question of the representation of the presidency, as opposed to the Commission, fairly academic. On Commission representation, the strong impression which emerged from Guiringaud was that we would not have the same trouble from Giscard next time round. Giscard, he implied, had had enough of the issue.

  Then Guiringaud, supported by Dohnanyi, with Forlani giving silent acquiescence, said that he had no objection at all to the communiqué of the Washington official meeting being distributed to the governments of the Little Five. So I said, ‘Excellent.’ Whereupon David got into a most excited state and said he couldn’t possibly agree without, as he foolishly put it, the explicit approval of his Prime Minister who took a great interest in these matters. I said that there was no need for anybody to get excited because I only had one copy with me and therefore could not distribute it immediately; and if David wanted to speak to his Prime Minister, that was clearly a matter for him, though if by chance his Prime Minister wished to stop the distribution, it would then be for me to act on my own judgement and responsibility, which indeed I would do. This was what the Little Five wanted to hear, so it somewhat calmed them down.

  I then asked the Five, and particularly Andersen, who had been making a great fuss, to note that Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs felt unable to take a decision without consulting his Prime Minister, and would they therefore stop blaming my official, even if a peculiarly self-reliant and fairly senior one, for not having taken a decision in Washington on his own to go against the otherwise unanimous view of the meeting. I am not quite sure how much David liked this slight teasing, but he had behaved foolishly. He showed no sign of bad temper towards me, indeed specifically asking for a long talk for the next morning.

  SUNDAY, 9 OCTOBER. Villers-le-Temple and Brussels.

  After the short morning meeting I had an hour’s talk with David Owen. We started with the news of Prentice’s197 switch to the Conservative Party in the Observer, which had just arrived. But David did not know him as I did. The trouble with Reg is that, while he has many admirable and rare qualities, he is a heavy-footed elephant crashing through the jungle. He is in a curious way an extremist, not a moderate at all, and he is inconsiderate of other people, which makes him difficult to work with. Still, this is better than being hopelessly trimming as so many people are; but I feel sorry for people who supported him closely, like Shirley (Williams), and who are still in British politics. David was cheerful but not intolerably euphoric after the Labour Party Conference. He was rather agitated by news of the strongly anti-British briefing on the Callaghan letter which Genscher appeared to have done on leaving the meeting the previous evening.

  MONDAY, 10 OCTOBER. Brussels.

  The day of departure for Japan. 11.43 TEE from the Gare du Midi to Paris. Dismal day, raining as usual at Mons and across the Somme and indeed into Paris. Took off from Charles de Gaulle at 4 o’clock on a remarkable and indeed memorable flight. During the first three and a half hours, when I worked extremely hard on the Japanese briefs, flying on a more easterly route than usual we went over Norway and Finland. Meanwhile it got dark, but with a red rim remaining on the south-western horizon. During dinner it began to get light, on the same day, of course. We had turned westward and were galloping through the time zones in that latitude. By the end of dinner we had got into a cold grey winter dawn light, a little brighter to the left of the aeroplane, while to the right, over the North Pole, about four hundred miles away, we could see the night sitting like a patch on an eye. We flew in that unchanging dawn for three or four hours, with no cloud, so that we could see a sort of packed ice which looked like ranges of low hills down below us in this curious, haunting, endless half-light.

  After a short sleep I awoke to full light, all still the same day, with strong sunshine on the massive snow-capped mountains of western Alaska. Then we came into horrible Anchorage in a much less good light. Very soon after take-off from there, the most ghastly shuddering began, and went on for over ten minutes. From the agitated tone of his voice, curiously instructing us not to smoke, I don’t think the Air France pilot liked it at all. However, it eventually died away.

  TUESDAY, 11 OCTOBER. Tokyo.

  Tokyo just before 6.30 p.m. A great line-up on the tarmac of the ambassadors of the Nine, plus representatives of the Japanese Government. Some of the Nine had apparently been reluctant to come–the French and, more surprisingly, the Italians–but they had been brought into line by the Belgian presidency. Drove to the Imperial Hotel with Nishibori, the Japanese Ambassador in Brussels, who had come over the day before and accompanied me throughout the visit. I came to find him a nice, increasingly helpful man.

  T
he old Imperial in which I had stayed twelve years ago has completely gone. The Frank Lloyd Wright honeycomb has apparently been moved to some sort of Japanese Williamsburg about a hundred miles away, and in its place there is a new, anonymous, but well-appointed building in which we all had rooms surrounded by security guards on the sixteenth floor.

  WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER. Tokyo.

  Sunny, temperature moving up to about 70°. At 8.45 the Foreign Minister came to call on me in the hotel; very considerate on his part to have suggested this in view of the heaviness of my programme, and we had about forty minutes’ general exchange of views. I then saw George Howard, who was staying in the hotel, for five minutes, before going to the Imperial Palace for an audience with the Emperor at 11 o’clock. I had been warned that these audiences tended to be sticky as he is difficult to talk to unless one is a great expert on marine biology. I did not find this. The audience went along reasonably smoothly, just the Emperor, an interpreter, me obviously, a sort of Court Chamberlain, who had been Ambassador in London, and one other Court official.

  A slightly stilted conversation inevitably, the Emperor having fairly carefully rehearsed his subjects—general welcome, importance of Japanese/European relations, some request for information about how the Community operated; then a reference to my books, with my responding with a reference to his and saying I understood that he had published fourteen. ‘Oh, no, no,’ he said. ‘I had a certain small hand in them, but I am afraid I don’t really write myself; I engage scholars to do it for me.’

  Then, ludicrously, about seven minutes on croquet, about which he knew practically nothing, but of which he had been told I was a keen player and about which he therefore politely spoke with a show of interest. I left him about 11.40. He seemed an agreeable, serious-minded man, looking remarkably fit for his seventy-eight years. The palace is modern, built about 1968, but the park and the views on to it from the large windows are rather splendid.

  Then to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for an early lunch and a prepared speech to an audience of about three hundred, mainly Americans, Australians and Europeans, but about a third Japanese as well. The speech went fairly well, I thought, questions rather less so.

  In the afternoon I went to the Parliament building, and started with an interview with the President and his deputy, whom I think I persuaded that their principal European relations should be with the European Parliament rather than with the loose Council of Europe.

  The building is in fact 1936, but looks like an earlier example of Pullman-style comfort. I watched a Budget Committee, attended by all the members of the Government who have to sit there all day for about nine hours and make constant replies to a whole range of questions which can be brought up without notice. We heard Prime Minister Fukuda, the Secretary of the Cabinet who is a politician, and also the Foreign Minister within a very brief space. They have no desks in front of them, are completely exposed, and therefore have no opportunity to get on with any work of their own: a most extraordinary arrangement.

  At 7 o’clock to the Prime Minister’s residence for the central talk of the visit (one and a half hours) and his subsequent dinner. We were about eight strong, the Japanese about ten, including the Foreign Minister and one or two others, plus officials. It was all done through interpretation, of course.

  Fukuda began with a welcome, then went into a description of what had happened in the Japanese economy and how he saw the economies of others since the Downing Street Summit, skilfully though perfectly pleasantly putting us on the defensive for having failed to attain our growth targets, whereas the Japanese claimed to have done so, and allowed that the Americans were not too bad either. I then did quite a long response, partly with the object of getting out of this defensive corner and partly to raise for their own sake some wider issues about the Third World, about the equal need for a stimulus to the developed economies, and about the change in relationship between employment and the business cycle. What became clear to me was that I could not stop without raising our bilateral complaints, otherwise there might be great difficulty in ever coming to them. This meant that I made about half an hour’s statement including the pauses for interpretation, but I think that Fukuda was pleased with the wide-ranging approach, and probably took the particular bilateral points better in this context.

  The point which he seemed to take in, allegedly for the first time, was that our problem with deep Japanese penetration of particular markets was not so much a balance-of-payments problem as an employment problem. On the opening of their market he was reasonably sympathetic, and in particular gave a fairly good response to my suggestion that they should buy the European Airbus,198 which would have a psychological impact, as well as a quantitative impact, on the level of trade.

  There were then about fifty guests to a very good dinner with French food and wine. Short speeches afterwards from Fukuda and me; I spoke unprepared and I think this went better as a result. After dinner we were intended to go fairly quickly, but Fukuda kept me talking over the coffee, raising new subjects, Euro-Communism, the rigidity of political systems, and his reminiscences of 1930s Europe until about 10.45. The Prime Minister’s residence, incidentally, is also a Frank Lloyd Wright building, but again in danger of being pulled down because they do not think it large enough.

  THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER. Tokyo.

  I had a pointless early talk with Bo, the ineffective Finance Minister. He seemed ill-informed about international monetary affairs and indeed one of his Under-Secretaries there was manifestly more on the ball. Bo had indicated that they were not worried about the depreciation of the dollar and the appreciation of the yen, whereas this clearly in fact is not the case. Then, for an hour, a rather important meeting with Tanaka, the Minister for International Trade and Industry, at which we went into more detail on bilateral questions.

  Then at 11.00 to the Keidanren, the powerful employers’ association. A long and reasonably useful meeting with them, with a venerable figure, Doko, aged eighty-two, in the chair. Then a rather less useful lunch (still with them) when it was not quite clear whether there was intended to be continuous working discussion or not. Afternoon press conference of about eighty people, which went not badly, I thought. I was interested to note that the Japanese woman interpreter (we kept on changing interpreters, whose quality varied—this one was extremely good) quite regularly took one-third longer than I had taken to translate my replies to questions, despite the fact that she spoke much more quickly than I did, and required no pauses for thought. Japanese must be a prolix language.

  At 6.15 to the offices of the EEC Mission for our reception. Great excitement amongst our officials, ambassadors, etc., because Fukuda decided with some difficulty to get the Diet Committee adjourned and to attend himself for half an hour, bringing half his Cabinet with him. This slightly Soviet-leadership-like gesture was obviously intended to be a mark of signal favour and friendliness and was certainly forthcoming on his part.

  FRIDAY, 14 OCTOBER. Tokyo, Moscow and Brussels.

  Our solitary piece of sight-seeing was a drive of about five miles to a shrine, which I had been to in 1965, but is in a nice park. My impression driving round Tokyo was that it appeared much more Westernized that I had remembered it twelve years ago, and also more agreeable, mainly because pollution has completely disappeared. I was struck, not surprisingly, by the sense of prosperity, but also by the American nature of the scene. This cannot be entirely a result of the occupation and subsequent imitation for there are quite a lot of buildings along the main boulevard facing the Imperial Palace of the twenties and thirties, which look very similar to the American buildings of that epoch. But it is not only a question of buildings, it is also a question of general atmosphere—a lot of lean, eager young men, in good, thin, dark business suits, swinging their despatch cases as they hurry to their offices, the traffic also looking American, although no American cars of course; the whole atmosphere not like New York, but more like either Washington or Chicago.

&
nbsp; I then briefed the ambassadors of the Nine at the hotel and left for the airport in the first rain since our arrival. This time the ambassadors attended at the airport less complainingly, the visit having been thought to go well, the Frenchman particularly going out of his way to be agreeable.

  We took off just after 1 o’clock, went northwards across the Sea of Japan, missing China easily, and over the mountains north of Vladivostok. Agreeable lunch, feeling the mission had been accomplished; bad film, some sleep, then across the plains of Siberia as the afternoon wore on: endless flying hour after hour after hour across Siberian wastes, a good deal of cloud but we could occasionally see down to the ground, which was always frozen, for five hundred mile after five hundred mile. When we got west of the Urals, which one hardly noticed because they are pretty low hills, we got into rather worse weather and came into Moscow on a filthy afternoon, landing there after ten hours in the air. A thoroughly disagreeable approach to a disagreeable airport in very low cloud and driving rain which quickly turned into sleet as the temperature was about 30°F.

  A slight contretemps at Moscow as Crispin had rightly decided that the Russians should be informed that we were passing through. They riposted by insisting on sending COMECON to greet us, and COMECON in the shape of three fairly unprepossessing-looking gentlemen—one of whom was known to Denman through trade discussions—insisted on conducting us (although inefficiently in a cold and windy airport bus) to a huge meal which they had prepared in a rather gloomy basement. We were in a bad temper, partly no doubt due to the long flight but also because we do not regard COMECON as our interlocuteur valable, only toyed with the five-course meal—and also made it clear that we were not prepared to engage in any trade discussions of substance. We were therefore reduced to talking about Siberian geography and climatology, and Crispin did particularly well on this.