by Roy Jenkins
Dinner was rather pointless. Callaghan and Lynch were not there until the end as they were having a bilateral discussion about Northern Ireland outside. Nobody seemed to have much to say to their neighbours or anybody else until Giscard tried to start some general conversation, which began on this occasion not with a reference to Sir Charles Dilkie (sic), but by his suddenly asking me if I had ever read ‘un livre par une Américaine, Mademoiselle Tugwell, ou un quelconque nom, qui s’appelle, je crois, Les Canons d’Août?’ So I said, ‘Yes, I have indeed read The Guns of August54 by Barbara Tuchman,’ and this led on to a long semi-general discussion about World War I and II commanders, the different effects of the wars upon differing countries and a variety of related subjects, ending up with a discussion of why, in England, there were now no generals or commanders whose names were known to the public, which Giscard slightly implausibly claimed was not the case in France.
We reassembled upstairs at 9.45 and went on until 11.30. Schmidt, whether through boredom or for some other reason, had completely changed his mind, his plan, or his tactics. He opened the discussion, and after only a very few preliminary words proceeded to spill the whole beans. He deployed his plans for dissolving the Snake in the new arrangement, using the European unit of account far more extensively, both for transactions between the member governments, for joint interventions against the dollar and third currencies, and possibly indeed for providing a full parallel currency, which could deal in stocks of raw materials and in which OPEC money might be encouraged to invest.
It took me a little time to realize that he was in fact giving a full exposé and therefore my own notes were not as coherent as they might have been. Broadly speaking, what he said was a firm repetition of what he had said to me in Bonn five weeks previously, except that at Copenhagen he did not offer to commit all reserves, only suggesting a significant proportion of the dollar reserves of all the participating countries, although, he implied, an almost limitless quantity of their indigenous currencies. What had however moved on very significantly since the end of February was the state of the play with Giscard. It was obvious that Schmidt’s visit to Rambouillet the week before had completely lined up Giscard. Giscard in some ways went further than Schmidt, and provided a more coherent, intellectual framework to the argument than Helmut himself did on this occasion.
In the two-hour session there were no participants except for Schmidt, Giscard, Callaghan and me. The others all remained absolutely silent, including Tindemans, who probably rightly did not produce his plan, for what Schmidt had proposed went rather further than what he had in mind. Lynch, Thorn, van Agt did not speak either. Andreotti intervened only at the end to make an irrelevant point about Mediterranean agriculture. Jørgensen summed up in a not very convincing manner. Callaghan was taken aback, I think, because although he had been given a fair rehearsal of what Schmidt had in mind on his own visit to Bonn about two and a half weeks previously, I do not believe that he had then taken things in at all completely (for the reasons which I gave earlier).
Nevertheless Callaghan handled himself well, expressed interest, was polite, non-committal, but didn’t turn things down out of hand, or make any foolish statements. He concentrated on his fear that what was proposed might appear as anti-dollar and might therefore be divisive from an Atlantic point of view. Although I believe that at the fundamental level this is the reverse of the truth, the fact that he should take this point could at least be understood, because Schmidt had spoken in strongly anti-Carter terms, saying that the whole management of the dollar by the American administration was absolutely intolerable. At one point indeed he said that no American President could lead the Alliance while presiding over such degradation of the dollar as he had witnessed during his period as Federal Chancellor.
When we were breaking up Callaghan said that he was not sure that he had taken in everything completely and could I therefore go round to his hotel that night and go through it with him, to which I naturally acceded, though admitting that I was not sure that I had got every Schmidt detail myself. Accordingly, late though it was, Crispin and I saw him in a room in which John Hunt with a very bad cold, two Private Secretaries (Stowe and Cartledge) and Ken Couzens,55 the Finance Second Permanent Secretary, as his Treasury title now is, were present. I summarized what Schmidt had said for about ten minutes. Callaghan then went through his own notes which tallied almost exactly.
He next asked other people what they thought. I said I had probably better leave for that discussion. He said, ‘No, no, do stay.’ But nobody had much to say, certainly not Hunt. Couzens looked rather pole-axed and kept on repeating, ‘But it is very bold. Prime Minister. Did the Chancellor really go as far as that? It is very bold. It leaves the dollar on one side. I don’t know what the Americans will say about it. It’s very bold. Prime Minister.’ After about twenty-five minutes of this, we went back to the Royal Hotel where I talked to Crispin before going to bed, in a state of some excitement, for it had been a remarkable day, at 2 o’clock.
SATURDAY, 8 APRIL. Copenhagen and Brussels.
Ortoli came to see me at 8.45, and I gave him an account of what had taken place. It had been agreed in the meeting that very little, if anything, would be said outside, and it was suggested indeed that in the follow-up arrangements each of the heads of government should consult only one collaborator, though this was a prescript which had hardly been followed by Callaghan, who had immediately debriefed five, and I do not suppose was followed by any others either.
The full European Council reassembled in the Christiansborg at 10.10 and went on until 12.40. Not a great deal of useful business was transacted. Jørgensen was an uncertain chairman. An interesting vignette was that towards the end of the morning, when Giscard was holding forth about French dissatisfaction with the degree of progress which we had been able to make with the Japanese, and was addressing some courteous but slightly critical remarks about the Commission (rather for the record, I thought) specifically to me, Schmidt came round the table and said, ‘Could you quickly come and have a word with me?’ I paused, being hesitant as to what to do, but then decided that a talk with Schmidt about monetary advance was more important than listening to Giscard on Japan, and therefore got up and talked with Schmidt in a window with both our backs to the Council and indeed to the continuing Giscard. Giscard allowed this to go by without comment or sign of umbrage. If one is so foolish as to believe in the equality of the European Council, one has only to think how differently he would have reacted if it had been, say, Lynch or Thorn who had come round the table and taken me away.
What Schmidt had to say to me, however, was of considerable importance. He wanted to tell me about that morning’s breakfast, which had not advanced things a great deal, except that Giscard had made it absolutely clear that if Callaghan did not come in, he (Giscard) would go along with Schmidt, and that France would be prepared to re-enter the Snake and stay there as from July. He, Schmidt, wanted me to know this, and to realize that Giscard was absolutely serious about it and he hoped that the British would realize the same. I was able to use the opportunity to tell him what I was proposing to say at the press conference afterwards, to which he said that he had no objection provided that it did not upset Callaghan, whom he wished to propitiate until he had had a private go at bringing him along. So I took the opportunity subsequently of telling Callaghan too what I intended to say, which he in turn took perfectly friendlily. Schmidt told me that his next step would be to talk to Callaghan, indicating that he would prepare a paper before this (though in fact he did not do so), and would keep in touch with me after that, as of course he would with Giscard.
After the session we had a hurried lunch with the three or four small-country Prime Ministers who had stayed (it was again typical that the big ones had gone), and I then gave an hour-long press conference (for about six hundred journalists) with Jørgensen, who did much better here than he had done as chairman. I apparently gave the impression of being extremely pleased with the
outcome without saying too much. Left just after 4 o’clock by avion taxi for Brussels. An agreeable flight embellished by an hour’s cultural conversation with Ortoli in French, which he, being in as ebullient a mood as I (but more surprisingly), seemed determined to have.
SUNDAY, 9 APRIL. Brussels.
A perfect day, one of the very few this spring. Jennifer and I picked up Helena Tiné and drove down the Namur autoroute to picnic in the same field near Maillen, with a good open view across the lower Ardennes, in which we had picnicked on the last warm Sunday of the autumn in mid-October after my return from Japan.
MONDAY, 10 APRIL. Brussels.
Dinner in the Economist flat on a top floor in the rue Ducale, with their correspondents Stephen Milligan and Christopher Huhne, plus the Simonets. Milligan was obviously anxious to find out about Copenhagen. I decided to be too clever. I gave him a lot of circumstantial detail about who sat where, who talked a lot, who didn’t, etc., but nothing of substance. However, as he subsequently published all the circumstantial detail, as well as a good deal of substance which he had picked up from elsewhere, it looked, not unnaturally, to Schmidt and others, as though I had told him the main story. Home at about 11.30, Solly Zuckerman having arrived to stay for three days.
TUESDAY, 11 APRIL. Brussels and Luxembourg.
9.20 train to Luxembourg with Hayden, I suffering a post-Copenhagen exhaustion. To the Court of Justice where we thought we were lunching with Kutscher, the President. We discovered the building almost completely empty, certainly exuding an appropriate atmosphere of judicial calm. Everybody, secretaries, justices certainly, clerks, most of the huissiers, everybody in fact except one doorman and the Italian Advocate-General had gone to lunch. No sign of any lunch there or anywhere else. Hayden telephoned increasingly frantically and eventually discovered that the lunch was at Kutscher’s flat about three miles away. No car by that time. We stood outside on a bright but extremely cold day waiting for the car for a long time, and eventually got to Kutscher’s flat fifty minutes late. My temper uncertain by then. However, Kutscher and his wife were as always extremely nice and perfectly understanding, though rather a brief lunch with them and others from the Court because I had to answer questions in the Parliament at 3.00. Later, after a series of interviews, I gave a pointless dinner at the Golf Club for some parliamentarians allegedly interested in External Affairs.
WEDNESDAY, 12 APRIL. Luxembourg and Brussels.
Commission from 8.30 to 9.30. Then into the Parliament, first to listen to K. B. Andersen’s report on the European Council and then to give my own report. Lunched with Colombo in the Parliament building and received the President of the Spanish Cortes in the afternoon. Listened to and replied briefly to the debate from 4.00 until 6.00. A particularly bumpy avion taxi ride to Brussels, where I arrived too late to listen to Michael Palliser’s lecture at the Institut Royal but went to the reception for it briefly and then took Solly Zuckerman out to dinner.
THURSDAY, 13 APRIL. Brussels and Berlin.
Flew to Berlin, with a change of plane at Frankfurt, over lunch time. To the Kempinski Hotel, where the City government had installed me in a magnificent suite at the top. Then to the Schöneberg Rathaus for a call on the Governing Mayor, Dietrich Stobbe, from 3.30 to 4.45. Mainly political talk with him about the Russians. I liked him very much.
Next to the Senate Guest House for a meeting with Mrs Juanita Kreps, the American Secretary of Commerce, whom I had not met before. She had asked for the meeting, and proceeded to behave in the most extraordinary way. Her object was to discover exactly what had happened at Copenhagen. Her method was to come into the meeting accompanied by seven or eight officials, of whom four were engaged in taking a verbatim note, and immediately, without establishing any sort of relations, to ask me what had there taken place. When I pushed the question away, she seemed rather miffed. But it was a most bizarre idea that I would suddenly spill the Copenhagen beans to somebody I had never met before who (i) showed no understanding of the subject, and (ii) sat around with a whole series of hard-faced note-takers.
On from there to the Chamber of Commerce, where I gave quite a good lecture for about forty-five minutes, attended a reception, and returned to the Senate Guest House for a fairly hard-working dinner with thirty guests for two hours or so.
Then back to the Kempinski for a talk with Lambsdorff, the German Economics Minister, from 10.30 to midnight. I had not known him well before and found him easy and agreeable, much more so than one might at first think. Physically, and even mentally, he is like a curious mixture of Iain Macleod and Donald Tyerman, the ex-editor of the Economist whom I nearly succeeded.
FRIDAY, 14 APRIL. Berlin and East Hendred.
A splendid morning panoramic view from the top of the Kempinski, with the Berlin weather as splendid as usual. Further talks at the Schöneberg Rathaus, made memorable by the deputy Mayor, who spoke the most excellent English, suddenly announcing that one of the major social problems in Berlin was the presence of two or three hundred thousand immigrant ‘turkeys’, who apart from anything else made a great deal of noise in the streets. I said ‘What, after Christmas, as well as before,’ and then, such is the English juvenile sense of humour, and our capacity for expecting linguistic perfection from others while not even attempting it ourselves, we all found it very difficult not to giggle for the rest of the meeting. Then a press conference and afterwards the signing of the Golden Book in the Schloss Charlottenburg with a nice gracious speech from Stobbe and a reply from me which was one third in German. An official lunch there, and then the 3 o’clock plane from Tegel. East Hendred via Frankfurt by 7.45.
MONDAY, 17 APRIL. East Hendred and London.
Motored to lunch with about forty American correspondents at the Waldorf Hotel. Made them an unprepared speech for about fifteen minutes and answered questions. I stressed that we were not pursuing an anti-American course by wanting somewhat to reduce the role of the dollar in world monetary affairs and to do something of our own in Europe, rather than merely complaining about what the Americans did or did not do. At 6.45 I went to Eaton Square for a forty-minute worthwhile monetary talk with Harold Lever,56 whom I had not seen for some time. He wanted a little reassurance on the American point, but was sensible, sympathetic and generally helpful.
Then to address a grand European League for Economic Cooperation dinner of about two hundred people, a very powerfully representative gathering, marred typically by the twelve or fourteen MPs present having to go off in the middle of the speeches to cancel each other out in a vote in the House of Commons: the speech was both well received and well reported.
THURSDAY, 20 APRIL. Brussels.
A meeting with Doko, the very old President of the Japanese employers’ organization, and the delegation he had brought. I am not sure how much progress we made, but I suppose it was worthwhile. Then a luncheon for the chairmen or the managing directors of about twenty-five European television chains. They all seemed keen on monetary union, but not as much so as my 3.30 deputation from the European Cooperative Savings Institute who came specifically to express their strong support.
FRIDAY, 21 APRIL. Brussels and East Hendred.
12.35 plane to London (late), and to East Hendred. Worked quite hard on my speech for that evening at the Vale of the White Horse Council’s annual dinner in Abingdon. They had assembled a great European turn-up from Lucca, Montreuil, and the other twinned towns. I had assembled what I hoped was a number of apposite quotations, two from Chesterton and one from Matthew Arnold, but I suspect I would have done better if I had devoted the time to putting on a tail coat with decorations, which all the top table except me were wearing, rather than the dinner jacket which I thought was enough.
SATURDAY, 22 APRIL. East Hendred and Birmingham.
Motored to Birmingham in the early evening for a Stechford farewell party to Ruby and Oliver Rhydderch (two former councillors). It was quite unlike last summer, no great sense of regret at going back to Birmingham, no sense of ho
w awful it was that I was no longer MP there. They were extremely pleased to see me, though equally all extremely pro-Terry Davis (my successor), who was there, and who obviously turned up at everything; not that they criticized me for not doing that.
MONDAY, 24 APRIL. East Hendred and Brussels.
Stayed at East Hendred for the morning, not rushing back to Brussels, as I am increasingly of the view that I don’t get much real work done in the Berlaymont. 3.30 plane, and to an International Medical Services dinner in the Amigo Hotel, to which David Ginsburg57 persuaded me to go. I made them rather a dull speech after the first course. Belgian service excelled itself and was so incredibly slow that when I left at 11 o’clock the last course was still unserved.
TUESDAY, 25 APRIL. Brussels.
A noon meeting with the Portuguese Foreign Minister (Victor Sá Machado), who came into the Government following its widening to a coalition, and is not a socialist. He speaks very good English, unlike most Portuguese, mainly I suppose because he was Secretary-General of the Gulbenkian Foundation—or perhaps the other way round. The good news was that the long-drawn-out negotiations with the IMF were at last settled and that the Portuguese expect to sign in the near future.
Bob Maclennan,58 Professor Maurice Peston,59 David Marquand and Michel Vanden Abeele to lunch rue de Praetère. Peston I found an impressive man: I liked him very much indeed. He used to work for Reg Prentice and was rather fed up with what Reg had done, though still speaking of him with sad affection. We had a useful discussion about various points around the monetary union issue.