European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  THURSDAY, 19 JANUARY. Khartoum.

  Flew for about thirty-five minutes soon after 9 o’clock to visit the Gezira irrigation and general development scheme in the triangle between the Blue and the White Niles. Walked around this for too long and then flew back for a luncheon with the Vice-President and Foreign Minister on a Nile boat. Nice temperature, perhaps nearly 80° but no humidity and quite pleasant provided one was not actually in the sun. Altogether rather a good river trip, surrounded partly by diplomats and partly by a variety of other Sudanese ministers, as well as the host.

  At 5 o’clock to the opening of the International Fair. This was a fairly chaotic occasion. No speech from President Nimeiri,7 as a result of which indeed neither I nor Jennifer was at this stage quite clear which he was, but various manifestations of bands, processions on camels, etc. Then suddenly a wild rush and movement from the dais in the square where this was all taking place, through to the European Pavilion where the next phase was about to occur. We managed with some difficulty to get our way through the crowd and to arrive more or less intact for me to make my speech there. I spoke for about twenty minutes to again a rather chaotic gathering of a few hundred people, with Nimeiri and all the Government listening quite carefully, and the speech appeared to go all right.

  FRIDAY, 20 JANUARY. Khartoum.

  A long morning meeting with various ministers: a mixture of discussion about fairly hard bilateral subjects with a broader perspective on the renegotiation of Lomé8 and the progress of North/South dialogue. Then visited the Commission delegation and planted a tree; then a brief tourist visit to the Presidential Palace which is an attractive Blue Nile-side building, built originally, I suppose, in about the late 1870s, a good deal changed, but still with a certain atmosphere of Gordon, and retaining the horseshoe staircase on one side of which he was killed.

  Then to Khartoum North on the other side of the Blue Nile for a lunch given by the German Ambassador as the acting President of the Community ambassadors (no Danish Ambassador in Khartoum). He proved an extremely intelligent man. Back to the Fair, where I had to give a long reception in our pavilion. Then to a late supper party at the residence of Watterson, Commission representative, British, forestry expert, ex-Sudan Civil Service.

  SATURDAY, 21 JANUARY. Khartoum and Luxor.

  Meeting with Nimeiri in the Presidential Palace from 9.00 to 10.15. I rather liked him. Slightly ponderous, conversation a little slow to get going, but quite sensible; seemed reasonably sure of himself, but at the same time not full of pomposity, ideas of grandeur or deity; very anti-Communist, indeed rather seeing ‘reds under the bed’ and feeling himself surrounded on every side except the Egyptian one. Perhaps the most surprising indication of feeling surrounded was his view that Kenya was becoming very penetrated and might easily go over when Kenyatta went. Nevertheless he thought it desirable that Kenyatta should go as soon as possible, because this was the only possibility of pulling the country together again at all as it was now deteriorating very rapidly under his corrupt régime. Nimeiri was quite sensible about Sudanese development possibilities, neither too utopian nor too grandiose.

  Then drove to Omdurman, crossing the White Nile for the first time for an hour-long press conference. Then to the airport for a great ceremonial goodbye from the Vice-President, various ministers, all the ambassadors, etc. Eventually set off, after too long a wait, in a tiny new Cessna plane (which we had privately hired) for the four-hour flight to Luxor, a long time to be in a small plane unable to move; and a horrible long time it would have been had the weather been disagreeable. However, it was perfect all the way. The plane flew at 7/8000 feet and as a result we had a magnificent impression of the Nile Valley; occasionally going about a hundred miles away from the river, cutting across bends, but basically it was a flight down the Nile, first over the scrubland on the East bank, then across the river near Atbara and into real desert for the first time, then over Abu Simbel, Lake Nasser, and down to Luxor in the evening light between 4.30 and 4.45. We drove into Luxor and installed ourselves in the Winter Palace Hotel, which is extremely agreeable, quite good rooms, beautiful view over the Nile and out beyond towards the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens on one side and on the other a view over the old garden, rather reminiscent of that at the Marmounia Hotel in Marrakesh.

  At 6.15 a son et lumière performance at Karnak, which was good to begin with but got both cold and boring towards the end with over-colourful text and over-sonorous voices. Dinner at the hotel with a few local dignitaries, the deputy Governor, Mayor, Chief of Police etc., plus our two pilots who were both Sudanese, extremely black and dervish-like, but who seemed excellent pilots and turned out to be absolutely charming men who spoke more than anybody else at dinner and gave us a much more vivid impression of what life in Khartoum was like than anything we had gained on the spot.

  SUNDAY, 22 JANUARY. Luxor.

  Morning expedition to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Omelette lunch in the hotel garden, followed by a swim in the cool pool. Then a visit to the Luxor Museum. Dinner in the hotel, as on the previous evening, was, alas, very bad: typical English 1930s seaside hotel food which lingers on in ex-colonial places from Singapore to Cyprus. The Egyptian wine—Château Ptolemy it was called—was also pretty nasty with a particularly disagreeable bouquet which suggested there was a good deal of the mud of the delta in it. (Nanteuil told me that he had found Château Lafite in the Winter Palace on one of his honeymoons. He must have drunk it all.) However, the hotel produced very good dry martinis. These small difficulties apart, Luxor is a most wonderful place. At this time of the year there is perfect, apparently totally reliable weather, no humidity, temperature down to about 40° at night, up to about 75° in the day, not much wind, wonderful views and absolutely top-class sight-seeing. Agreeableness does not necessarily go with such sight-seeing, and the combination here was quite exceptional. It is a place and a hotel to which I would much like to go back.

  MONDAY, 23 JANUARY. Luxor and Cairo.

  Karnak again early for nearly two hours. Then a quick and cold swim, lunch in the hotel garden, followed by ping pong, my beating Laura by two games to one which was a great shock to her and a great pleasure to me. 5 o’clock plane to Cairo. A protocol reception, plus ambassadors, etc., at the airport, even though the Egyptian part of the visit was semi-private, and then to the Sheraton Hotel and a fine high view. An immediate request to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and see the State Minister. I was a bit reluctant to be so summoned but eventually thought that I had better go and hear what he had to say. Boutros-Ghali, who is a highly intelligent man, had been present at the talks in Jerusalem and Ismailia9 and gave me a good run-down, clearly from the Egyptian point of view—but there is a great deal to be said for the Egyptian point of view—of the position as he saw it. Then to a Foreign Ministry dinner at the Tahir (old Mohammed Ali) Club, where Farouk used to spend a lot of his time.

  Then a midnight drive to the pyramids and the sphinx, which were surprisingly near, under magnificent moonlight. Cairo is an enormous city and a great metropolis, falling apart with the immensity of its problems, but there is no doubt about its dominant metropolitan position in the Middle East. If the rich Arab states were sensible they would put a great deal of money into it, housing, sewerage, underground railway, telephone systems, etc., which would be a very good thing for the area and for the world as a whole.

  TUESDAY, 24 JANUARY. Cairo and Brussels.

  8.30 Sabena plane to Athens and Brussels. Half-way across the Mediterranean we ran into rain and storm, which persisted all across Europe. Brussels just after 2 o’clock. An afternoon visit from George Thomson.

  THURSDAY, 26 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Sigrist, the German Permanent Representative, to see me at 11.30 with a letter from Helmut Schmidt announcing that it was his intention to invite everybody to a Western Economic Summit in Bonn in about mid-July, no precise dates. We were slightly discriminated against in the sense tha
t the letter he gave me was a copy of the letter sent to the heads of government, rather than a direct letter to me, but still this is a vast improvement on the May position; there is obviously no doubt about our presence for a large part of this Summit.

  A COREPER lunch in the Charlemagne building at 1.15. COREPER in my view no better than it usually is; bitty, lacking any leadership, and I feel it a slight waste of time to see them so often.

  FRIDAY, 27 JANUARY. Brussels.

  I received Karamanlis,10 the Greek Prime Minister, at 11.30 downstairs, and brought him up, first for a talk à deux, then for an hour’s meeting with the Commission and then for a lunch going on until about 3 o’clock. I liked him, found he had none of Papaligouras’s neuroses and was much better to deal with. We moved just far enough in giving a political impetus to the negotiations, with a commitment to break the back of them by the end of 1978, to leave him moderately satisfied. Quite an impressive man.

  SATURDAY, 28 JANUARY. Brussels.

  A bad day. The cough and cold which had started near the Pyramids on Monday night had become acute. A meeting with Ushiba and his Japanese team between 11 and 12 o’clock, after which we adjourned for him to have more detailed talks with Haferkamp. The meeting seemed to go quite tolerably at the time, but subsequently led to a lot of rather mystifying ill-feeling. I don’t know whether he was offended that I did not give him lunch and left Haferkamp to do this. There was in fact not the slightest reason why I should have done so. I had when he came in December and it was quite appropriate that Haferkamp should on the second occasion, which indeed was exactly the routine we had followed with Bob Strauss. I thought after the meeting that maybe if anything I had pressed him rather too hard, though some of his subsequent complaints, which came out partly in the press, partly in reports back from the Japanese, and partly what he said in Paris, indicated that we hadn’t pressed him hard enough, except on points of detail. (The whole incident was very odd. Ushiba, I think, finds it difficult to understand what is the split between Community and member state competence, prefers dealing with the Americans to dealing with us, reacts somewhat, not altogether surprisingly, to being kicked around from capital to capital in Europe and complained to about the success of the Japanese economy; and also has a mind which while intelligent seems to operate in an odd and indiscreet way.)

  I left the Berlaymont feeling dissatisfied and drove with Edward and Jennifer to Ghent, where we lunched late with the Phillips’ before going to see the great Van Eyck triptych in the cathedral.

  MONDAY, 30 JANUARY. Brussels.

  Henry Plumb,11 President of the National Farmers’ Union, to lunch with Jennifer and me rue de Praetère. A nice, sensible, solid Warwickshire farmer, now with a great deal of NFU experience behind him and, as I had thought when he was one of my vice-presidents in the Britain in Europe Campaign for the 1975 Referendum, a very good person indeed. He obviously feels he is near the end of his time as President of the NFU, which he has done for eleven years, and is looking, rather interestingly, at the possibility of running for the European Parliament, where he would undoubtedly be a great asset.

  TUESDAY, 31 JANUARY. Brussels.

  11.15 meeting with the House of Lords Select Committee (on European Community matters); about eight of them, Tony Greenwood12 in the chair, but Humphrey Trevelyan13 the leading figure. A good discussion on enlargement. Then I saw Cobbold, ex-Governor of the Bank of England and a member of the Committee, on his own for quarter of an hour about EMU.

  At 1.15 I gave a lunch for the new Court of Auditors (Cour des Comptes)14 based in Luxembourg, with their nine members, one from each national state; a necessary but not exciting occasion. As it turned out also a tragic one, because Mart, the very nice Luxembourg ex-Minister of Finance who had been appointed to the Court, left before the end as he had just received a message that his wife had been seriously injured in a motor crash on an icy road and he didn’t know what he would find when he got back. Alas, he found that she was dead.

  Tried rather desperately to think of something to say for my third speech at the COREPER twice-yearly ‘change of presidency’ dinner that evening, and arrived only half-prepared. There was much better food than is usual at Val Duchesse, and this seemed to put everybody in a good temper so that the speech went slightly better than I thought it deserved. Van der Meulen didn’t speak for too long afterwards and Riberholdt,15 who had just got up from a ‘flu bed to which he quickly returned, delivered a whimsical Nordic speech, but nonetheless all reasonably satisfactory.

  WEDNESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  Commission meeting which proceeded in the normal way until just before 12 o’clock. I then went downstairs to greet the President of Mauritania, Oudh Daddah. We had an hour with him in the Commission and then went off to Val Duchesse again to give him lunch. He was much the nicest of the francophone Africans I had met: small, distinguished-looking man, talked rather well but, more than that, talked interestingly because he was happy to talk about his early life, quite unlike Mobutu. Daddah was keen to tell me how he had been born in a tent and had effectively been a nomad until the age of twelve or thirteen.

  To the Cinquantenaire for the Commission’s New Year diplomatic reception; stood up and received from 6.30 to 8.00, as did Jennifer. The last two days have been the height of the Commission winter season!

  THURSDAY, 2 FEBRUARY. Brussels and London.

  Coffee with Reg Underhill and Joyce Gould of Transport House at 11 o’clock (direct elections). The Egyptian Ambassador at 11.45 - a foolish man, alas.

  I then saw the Israeli Ambassador from 4.00 to 5.00, partly complaints about citrus fruit, but also no doubt a deliberate visit, arranged with great empressement on his part to counteract any harmful effects of my visit to Egypt and indeed the Egyptian Ambassador’s call that morning. He gave me the Israeli position, which needless to say was fairly hard, but not absolutely rigid; an intelligent and reasonable presentation.

  6.25 plane to London. Encountered Willie Whitelaw16 at dinner. He came in rather late and then started to tell me how absolutely ghastly life was with that awful woman, how he was thinking of resigning (from the Shadow Cabinet), what was my advice, etc. So I said, ‘On the whole, don’t resign, Willie.’ ‘Oh, good,’ he said. ‘No, don’t resign,’ I said, ‘but distance yourself.’ ‘Quite right, quite right,’ he said, ‘quite right. It’s better not to resign, but distance myself. That’s right.’ A long and typical conversation with him, not to be taken too seriously.

  SUNDAY, 5 FEBRUARY. East Hendred.

  Owens to lunch, for the first time for just over a year. They were both extremely agreeable—Debbie as always but David more so than he can be. He was a little bruised by some of his recent experiences and perhaps slightly nicer as a result. There were obviously a few subjects on which we did not agree, but no tension or any difficulty and perfectly agreeable conversation. Then a good game of tennis with them.

  MONDAY, 6 FEBRUARY. London.

  Called on Shirley Williams17 at 12.15 at the Department of Education and Science near Waterloo Station, where I had not been since once going to have a drink with Reg Prentice three or four years ago. Shirley was very friendly and it was a great pleasure to see her, and we then drove together to the Charing Cross Hotel where I gave a lunch for twelve or fourteen members of the Labour Committee for Europe and had some informal exposition and discussion afterwards.

  In the evening the annual Guildhall dinner of the Overseas Bankers’ Club, at which I last spoke almost exactly ten years ago in my first year as Chancellor. In the meantime they have desirably cut down both the number of courses and the number of speakers, but not the size of the audience, which is still quite remarkable, at about seven hundred. John Baring18 was in the chair, the Lord Mayor spoke briefly, I spoke for twenty-five minutes, and Gordon Richardson spoke for about fifteen. A very grand occasion, with a sung grace, loving cups, etc., particularly impressing Michel Vanden Abeele, the new Belgian member of my cabinet, who came with me.

&n
bsp; TUESDAY, 7 FEBRUARY. London and Brussels.

  8 o’clock British Airways plane from London Airport for the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels. We had a mad pilot who would not take off for about twenty-five minutes because the plane was not clean. I had a conversation with him in which I felt rather torn, for he kept saying, ‘We’ve got to keep up standards; this airline is going to pieces,’ a proposition with which in general I rather agree, but not to the extent of making everyone twenty-five minutes late in order to have bits of the carpet re-Hoovered. However, I eventually got into the Council soon after it had begun. There until 1.15; not particularly exciting or demanding. I made several interventions during the morning, lunched with them, and then went back to the Council for another two hours. I then saw the Jamaican Foreign Minister, a rather dynamic figure called Patterson, and went to a male dinner party with the Canadian Ambassador, preparatory to my visit to Canada.

  THURSDAY, 9 FEBRUARY. Brussels.

  10.00 meeting with the Socialist Group of the Parliament on economic and monetary union. Only British and Germans spoke and they in their differing ways were both pretty sceptical. Then on to a meeting with the executive committee of the ETUC. About twenty-five people present, Vetter in the chair, Len Murray19 arriving rather late: a rather better meeting with them.

  SATURDAY, 11 FEBRUARY. Brussels and Northern France.

  A new pattern of weather now; quite different from anything we have had since the early winter before Christmas. Cold and freezing hard and on the whole sunny, with occasional cloud and slight snow. Left at 12 o’clock to drive via the Namur citadel to lunch at Les Ramiers in the valley at Crupet. Then on and over the French frontier near Sivet to dine and stay at Auvillers-les-Forges.

  SUNDAY, 12 FEBRUARY. Northern France and Brussels.

  Drove to Laôn, very cold on the hill, though with a little cloud coming up; spent an hour there looking round the cathedral and the town, which was better than I had remembered. Then on to Reims where (in spite of heavy restoration) the cathedral is magnificent, particularly the glass. It came on to snow during lunch and we drove back in rather mixed weather to Brussels, arriving about 6 o’clock.