by Roy Jenkins
MONDAY, 21 MAY. London.
A noon meeting with Mrs Thatcher, the first time I had seen her since the election, and indeed, apart from perhaps three meetings with her as leader of the Opposition, almost the only time that I had talked to her seriously.
She was anxious to be pleasant, came downstairs to meet me, arriving very faintly flustered two seconds too late to be at the door, and we then had beaming photographs taken and moved to the upstairs study, where I had spent so much time with Wilson and even a certain amount of time with Callaghan. Rather to my surprise she began by offering me a drink, which Callaghan certainly wouldn’t have done at noon, and I’m rather doubtful about Wilson too. I rather primly refused, saying it was a little early. She looked rather disappointed, so I made what I thought was a tactful recovery, saying, ‘Let us have one at 12.30. It will give us something to look forward to if the conversation goes badly.’
However, it didn’t go too badly at all. We started off with some general conversation about Chequers, her pattern of life, etc. Then she went into her rather simpliste European lecture, which I let run on for ten minutes or so when it slightly died away, and then after that she listened as well as talked and I should think I had 60 per cent of the remaining hour. She was fairly rigid on a number of things, notably fish, but was however very anxious to strike a constructive note on others: very determined to get something on the budget; willing I think to give something—I’m not quite sure what beyond general cooperative goodwill—in exchange for this; anxious to grasp points of detail and quite quick at doing so; thinking always a little too much in terms of the EEC and NATO as two bodies which ought to be amalgamated; and making one or two frankly foolish remarks about starving the Arabs to death by cutting off North American wheat supplies, or something equally silly. However, the general impression was quite good and certainly friendly.
TUESDAY, 22 MAY. London, Birmingham and Brussels.
To Birmingham for George Canning’s inauguration ceremony as Lord Mayor. Arrived early and therefore paid a visit to the Art Gallery. Warmly greeted by the curator, a number of people on the way round, and indeed by quite a lot of people in the street, both before and after the ceremony—a rather pleasant, warm, Birmingham-returning atmosphere.
George looked very smart, every inch a Lord Mayor. The speeches were good. Minnis (a Liberal) proposed and Clive Wilkinson seconded; then a very good speech from George himself. All were full of warm references to me. There was time for a drive around Stechford before the 4.30 plane to Brussels.
WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY. Brussels.
Michael O’Kennedy, the Irish Foreign Minister, arrived at noon for his acclimatization meeting and lunch. We had quite a good meeting for one and a quarter hours, nothing very dramatic, his grasp being reasonable without being exciting. Then a Commission lunch for him at which, again, he acquitted himself quite well.
THURSDAY, 24 MAY. Brussels, Aachen, Brussels and Milan.
Motored with Laura to Aachen for the Karlspreis ceremony. Colombo received the prize and Tindemans made the allocution. Genscher spoke on behalf of the Government, and the Mayor of Aachen, Malangré, who is in the course of being elected to the European Parliament, also spoke. As three of the speeches, including Tindemans’s, were in German and Colombo’s was in Italian, I did not, alas, understand a great deal, and there were no translations. However, it is a nice hall and the ceremony strikes evocative chords with me.
Then back to Brussels and to Milan with Laura by 7.30. We were met by Giro, the head of our office in Rome who was in Milan for some other occasion, and were driven in by him in an immensely expensive, huge Mercedes, which he had hired on our behalf, but privately, as it wasn’t an official visit, and which we then made the dreadful error of keeping to take us on half a mile to dinner, and which altogether cost £45 - an appalling waste of money.
FRIDAY, 25 MAY. Milan and Lucca.
Left early and drove in a hired car via Parma to the Gilmour house near Lucca in time for lunch. Jennifer, the Gilmours, Charlie and Sara Morrison,51 and Hayden had already arrived from London.
SUNDAY, 27 MAY. Lucca.
Ian (Gilmour) slept most of the weekend but was on good form when awake. He seemed to enjoy being a Foreign Office Minister and was full of splendid anecdotes about the early days of the Government. Sara Morrison very sharp, but quite amusingly so, about everybody, including old friends like Peter Carrington. She is still a dedicated Heath woman and therefore a dedicated anti-Thatcher one. Charlie Morrison slightly deaf (a good thing to be if married to Sara, who does talk almost without stopping) but nice and sensible and more intelligent than I had realized; an absolutely rock solid centrist-liberal on every issue one could think of -Europe, hanging, Rhodesia, race relations, indeed everything imaginable, which is surprising and impressive.
MONDAY, 28 MAY. Lucca, Athens and Rome.
Left with Laura for the 7.53 train from Pisa. Rome, after rather an uncomfortable journey without breakfast, at 11.00. First to the Hassler, then to Ciampino to join Andreotti on his plane. Athens, with a change of time, about 3.40. There was an enormous ceremonial greeting, with vast guards of honour. Mitsotakis, the Cretan deputy Prime Minister, took charge of me and drove me in to the Grande Bretagne. The ceremony52 was well organized in a modern rotunda between the Parliament and the Acropolis. We had three speeches (François-Poncet, Karamanlis and me) and then the ceremonial signing. Giscard turned up, but did not speak. He sat beaming in the seat nearest the rostrum, looking like the mother of the bride.
Then to dinner at the Presidential Palace, where I was received with immense warmth by Tsatsos, the little President, mainly on the ground that he had read and enjoyed the Asquith which I had given him last autumn; and then, apparently, at dinner he got Giscard going on Dilke (’Dilkie’ is Giscard’s favourite subject), and was regaled with the whole story.
Dinner was for about three hundred people. I sat between François-Poncet (with whom I had quite an amusing conversation) and van der Klaauw. After dinner Karamanlis spoke again as well as Tsatsos. Then Giscard spoke in Greek, which perhaps showed more gallantry than sense.
Then briefly to a spectacular reception, with tremendous lighting and illuminated alleyways in the garden of the old Royal Palace, until we left at 11.30, drove to the airport and took off at midnight for a rather sleepy return to Rome and the Hassler. It was satisfactory to have got it all done in one day. Very good hot weather, temperature about the same - 85° - in Rome and Athens, but slightly clearer in Rome.
TUESDAY, 29 MAY. Rome and Lucca.
9 o’clock plane to Pisa and back to La Pianella at noon, swam before lunch, and lunched in the garden on a perfect day.
FRIDAY, 1 JUNE. Lucca and East Hendred.
To England after a very successful holiday, spectacular from the weather point of view, in spite of the Athens interruption. We were immensely well treated at Pisa Airport and for once by British Airways.
SATURDAY, 2 JUNE. East Hendred.
The Rodgers’ to lunch with Ann Fleming. They went rather better together than I expected. Bill was very funny and indiscreet about all Labour Party affairs, Callaghan, etc. After Ann went, the Rodgers’, in improving weather, sat with us in the garden for another two hours. Bill was not too depressed by the election, very committed to politics, rather complacent I thought about shadow Cabinet elections: the Manifesto Group were only putting up nine candidates, they didn’t wish to score too crushing a victory, etc. He was quite realistic about his own position, thought he would get on, but in eighth, ninth, tenth position—something like that.
MONDAY, 4 JUNE. London and Brussels.
Lunch with Victor Rothschild. I found him on only tolerably good form. Only the subject of the Dimbleby Lecture, which he did last year and about which he had a great row, and I have agreed to do this year, really animated him.
Back in Brussels in the early evening I did a long British sound radio phone-in programme in the Brussels studio, which lasted no less than one and a ha
lf hours. There were surprisingly good questions, intelligent, friendly and rational. Apart from those who were listed to appear, Judith Hart,53 about to be a Dame, insisted on coming in and asked a long-winded question, to which it was not difficult to reply.
TUESDAY, 5 JUNE. Brussels.
I saw Gundelach, followed by Hinton the US Ambassador, followed by the Pakistani Ambassador, who wanted me to go and visit his country, which I have no intention of doing in view of their general behaviour and treatment of Bhutto in particular; and then lunched with Crispin, with whom I hadn’t had a talk for some time.
Dined with Léon Lambert, with his splendid pictures, statuary and wine, for Ken Galbraith. I was very pleased to see Ken, after a long interval, and who now, though aged seventy-one or -two, was looking much better than I had seen him for quite some time past, and talking rather well without trying to hog the conversation. I am very fond of the old thing.
THURSDAY, 7 JUNE. Brussels.
Lunch with the new Belgian Prime Minister, Martens,54 in his hôtel particulier. He is a nice, agreeable young man—about forty-two -not well-informed about European questions, though generally favourable like all Belgians. He is essentially an expert on the communal (i.e. Walloon/Flemish) question, which is I suppose what counts in Belgium at the present time. He is a Flemish Christian Democrat from Ghent. He listened while I talked most of the time, and alas I found myself addressing more and more remarks to Van Ypersele (the great Belgian monetary expert who is his Chef de Cabinet) because he understood so much more what I was saying.
At 3.15 I saw Ortoli for a rather difficult meeting. All difficulties with Ortoli arise about drafts, and we were arguing about whether a paper on the 1990s for the European Council should be on the basis of his draft (which he claimed was his cabinet draft, but which in fact he had done himself) or the draft which Michael Jenkins had done for me. I thought ours was better (it was really a clash between English and French stylistic and schematic approaches) but he was stubborn about his. I was inclined to be stubborn too.
However, by the time I got back from a one-and-a-half-hour visit of inspection to DG10 I had decided that it wasn’t worth having a great row with Ortoli about the drafts. Both were tolerably good, neither was brilliant, and these papers are not read with sufficient attention that it is worth treating them as works of art. I therefore gave in to him, subject to our being able to make amendments to his version. I did a half-hour pre-Summit Japanese television interview, which is supposed to balance with one from Carter and is therefore quite important, and then had an hour with an Australian parliamentary delegation, led by Billy Snedden,55 who was pushed out by Fraser as leader of the Liberal Party and is now Speaker. Snedden was appropriately anti-Fraser. We then dined with the Tugendhats, a large party of about thirty, obviously their great summer fête.
FRIDAY, 8 JUNE. Brussels, Paris and Brussels.
7.30 train to Paris. The TEE was, as usual, about twenty minutes late. A meeting with Giscard from 11.00 until 12.15.
He had not only Wahl, François-Poncet’s replacement as Secretary-General of the Elysée, present as a note-taker, but also François-Poncet himself, which seemed to me slightly over-egging the custard. I had Crispin. It was a perfectly tolerable meeting in form, though not a particularly good one in substance. And, indeed, even on the form, as Crispin remarked afterwards, while Giscard is mostly polite, he is never warm. He made it clear early on that he wished to discuss the European Council at Strasbourg, rather than that and Tokyo together, this no doubt being an expression of his reluctance to admit my locus in relation to Tokyo. However, he managed to link it to the reasonably persuasive argument, which indeed I had used the previous year, that Bremen (the European Council) should in no way be subordinated to Bonn (the Western Summit).
In practice this did not make much difference to what we discussed. We had a reasonably constructive discussion on energy, though it emerged curiously that Giscard’s position on a number of issues was closer for once to the American than it was to the German. Then we had a discussion about the British budgetary problem arising out of his meeting with Mrs Thatcher two or three days before. He expressed himself, but again without warmth, as reasonably impressed by her, and indicated his willingness to give a remit to the Commission at the Strasbourg European Council to study this matter and bring forward proposals. But he then indicated, almost as an afterthought, though it certainly was not that, that this would be conditional on the British agreeing in Strasbourg (had it not been done previously) to an agricultural price settlement, involving a light increase - 1½ to 2 per cent, he implied—for agricultural products, possibly exempting milk, but certainly nothing else. I said bluntly that this was not acceptable to us as a Commission, but if he could get the rest of the Nine to agree I suppose he didn’t need us.56 He let this pass without challenging our Commission determination to stick to the overall freeze. He also added that a British willingness to settle on fish would be a condition for the Dublin European Council (in December) agreeing to any recommendations which we might bring forward.
Then, in a slightly embarrassed way to be fair to him, he said: ‘There is just one issue to which I must refer, and that is the question of the Strasbourg press conference. I was very surprised when in Paris in March you made a statement slightly different from mine, and then in your answers to questions took a quite different view. I am sure you will understand, as an homme de politique, that it is not possible for the President of the Republic to share a press conference with anyone else.’
I looked surprised at this, and said, ‘It is absolutely habitual that, under all other presidencies, we share the press conference, and at the two European Councils under Schmidt I did exactly as I had done in Paris in March. Indeed, at the press conference at the end of the Brussels Summit, when he was rather exhausted, I answered nearly all the questions at his request.’
Giscard then said, ‘I see two possibilities: either that you can, if you wish, give a totally separate press conference on your own, or that you may come to mine and I will make my statement and answer questions, then I will leave, and you can make your statement and answer any questions there may be to you.’
I said I would reflect upon which I considered was the better of these two not very attractive proposals. I thought either of them would give rise to adverse comment. However, I knew already that I would not be anxious to have a great row with him about this immediately before Tokyo, where we were supposed to be jointly representing the Community. We then parted on reasonably polite terms.
Lunch with François-Poncet at the Quai d’Orsay. A third of the way through, we got down to the difficult Euratom issue. Not a bad discussion on this, a statement of position on both sides, no complete agreement, but no ill-temper either. He, to my surprise, showed himself ill-briefed on one particular question, but otherwise was as competent as usual. I said that an early French approval of the Australia/Euratom agreement would lead to a great improvement of atmosphere. He clearly didn’t totally exclude this. I said that I had divined since our last meeting that the approach of Niger to the Commission for a general agreement had been somewhat difficult for France and we had no intention of interfering with the France/Niger agreement.
Train, even later than the morning TEE, back to Brussels, where the Harlechs had arrived to stay.
SUNDAY, 10 JUNE. Brussels.
Took the Harlechs to Waterloo, where, for the first time since my childhood, I climbed up the mound to the lion and wondered why on earth I hadn’t done it during my previous two and a half years in Brussels. It may have obliterated the sunken road, but it gives a very good impression of the battlefield. Then to the farm at Hougoumont, which is always rather moving to see. Then on to a picnic place at Villers-la-Ville where we had arranged to meet the Tickells and the Andrew Knights (editor of the Economist and considerable friends of the Harlechs). We climbed up above the abbey and picnicked in sunny but slightly heavy weather, on a very good site.
The Harlech
s left to catch their plane at 5.20. They had been very good guests, easy and enthusiastic—David always easy, Pamela always enthusiastic, and both of them a bit of the other. David, however, has the advantage of extremely wide interests and is determinedly pleasure-seeking, but in the best sense, and never gives the impression of being bored. He was remarkably calm in view of the fact that his much-publicized mission to the African states to try and soften up their position on Zimbabwe/Rhodesia was due to begin the following evening.
I had to go into the Berlaymont shortly before midnight to receive the results of the European elections and make some comments on radio and television. The results were extraordinarily badly presented by the elaborate organization we had set up there, and clearly the British poll, 31 per cent, was a deep disappointment, much worse than I had expected. However, the polls from other countries, most notably Italy, were much better. In Britain the Labour Party did slightly better than expected, winning seventeen seats, whereas I thought they might win only eight.
MONDAY, 11 JUNE. Brussels.
A meeting with Gundelach so that he should know of the salient points Giscard had made to me before his (Gundelach’s) meeting with the French Minister of Agriculture that afternoon. (Gundelach then lunched with Andrew Knight and leaked it all to him, which however did not come out in a too damaging form, but which I had carefully refrained from doing with Knight the day before.)
Then to lunch with the Australian Ambassador—a long way out -for Peacock, their External Affairs Minister: an agreeable man, as I have always thought him, and very keen to get on with us. Gundelach had improved the atmosphere a good deal in his talks with the Australian Government, but Peacock was at no pains to conceal his differences with Fraser, or indeed his pleasure that he had come out better than Fraser in a recent public opinion poll.