European Diary, 1977-1981

by Roy Jenkins

  WEDNESDAY, 4 JULY. Brussels.

  I told Natali he was to get the Parliament job, which he accepted with pleasure but not ecstasy. The Commission received it at least as enthusiastically as he did, but even more so the news of our settlement with the British, which was received with almost incredulous pleasure. I telephoned Colombo (President of the Parliament) about the wretched Cour des Comptes report, finding him as agreeable as usual but extremely vague as to what ought or ought not to be done about it.

  To the Château de la Hulpe, which I had decided upon for the change of presidency dinner (essential to change the scene if you can’t change the cast). My speech about the French presidency was based upon a rather elaborate comparison with a bottle of Château Lafite 1897, given me by my Bristol wine merchant, which I had approached with a mixture of respect, apprehension and anticipation. When my son Charles, with whom I had shared it, asked me the next day what I had thought of it, I had said, ‘Very remarkable, but one wouldn’t want to drink it every day, would one.’ This was received just tolerably by the French, well by the others.

  THURSDAY, 5 JULY. Brussels.

  A visit from the President of Colombia, the impressively named Julio Cesar Turbay. I had a not very satisfactory quarter of an hour with him in my office, mainly because he was interested in trying to draft a communiqué, to which they attached particular importance; we don’t normally have them for such meetings. Then a rather more successful Commission meeting with him for one and a quarter hours, and afterwards a very successful lunch, when he proved to be a solid, interesting, agreeable man, who sat back in a most curious way from the table to eat—about two feet away from it—but this was a minor idiosyncrasy.

  SATURDAY, 7 JULY. East Hendred.

  At 10.15 we left for Reading, for an honorary degree ceremony. No speech was required, therefore a restful occasion. The large audience received me with apparent enthusiasm. (Perhaps they hoped I would provide the university with some Community money, but that is an ungrateful thought.) Roger Sherfield was the Chancellor and I enjoyed talking to him at lunch, I had previously and mistakenly thought him unforthcoming.

  MONDAY, 9 JULY. Brussels.

  A call from Lamb of the US Mission (Deane Hinton being in Washington). He, we had been warned, was coming in under instructions to ask exactly what we thought the country targets accepted at Tokyo meant, in particular in the case of Germany, and, indeed, whether it included North Sea oil, or whether it was only imports from third countries. Our view was that it was only imports from third countries, but there seemed some confusion between the French and the German positions on this, another indication of the way that Giscard had slightly cocked things up at Tokyo and Schmidt had allowed him to get away with it. However, our line with the United States was perfectly clear. We could only speak on the Community target as a whole. This applied to imports from third countries only, in other words it did not include North Sea oil (any more than their imports included Alaskan oil), but that so far as the individual country targets were concerned, queries on these points should be addressed to the individual governments. This was a perfectly tenable line and one which Lamb both expected and accepted.

  TUESDAY, 10 JULY. Brussels.

  A meeting lasting about an hour with Plaja, Nanteuil and Murphy, the second man in the Irish Permanent Representation (Dillon being away). I decided to have them in as representatives of the present, past and future presidency of COREPER, because there had been several signs of growing morosity on the part of COREPER, several reports of mutterings at meetings about things the Commission had or hadn’t done. Certainly while I had been away in Japan the Commission had made a cock-up of the agrément to a new Greek Ambassador and future Permanent Representative, and some people in the Commission—Haferkamp, Natali, Cheysson (a curious mixture)—had been in favour of refusing agrément, which we had never done before. The man concerned (Roussos)11 had apparently been in Brussels under the Colonels, but he had been serving successfully and satisfactorily as Ambassador in London for the past three or four years, and it seemed to me that if Karamanlis was satisfied with his record under the Colonels, there was no reason why we should not be.

  THURSDAY, 12 JULY. Brussels, Cardiff and East Hendred.

  To Cardiff for the UWIST degree day ceremony. A most beautiful morning, quite nice in Brussels and spectacular in England. The drive across the Downs and then on through Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire was as beautiful as anything I had seen for a long time. It was even high tide in the Severn, which seems rare.

  Two one-and-a-half-hour degree-giving sessions, interspersed with Principal Trotman-Dickenson’s lunch party. Then to the Angel Hotel, where, after a certain amount of sweaty preparation, I did a thirty-minute interview for BBC Wales with Vincent Kane, with whom I had done things in Luxembourg and Strasbourg and think rather good.

  To the City Hall for the Welsh Development Corporation dinner, a huge gathering of nearly five hundred. Thirty-five minutes from me (broadcast live by Radio Wales) and then the new Secretary of State for Wales (Nicholas Edwards) made a surprisingly partisan speech, although in quite a good voice.

  SATURDAY, 14 JULY. East Hendred.

  Lunch at Buscot Parsonage with Diana Phipps, who had George Weidenfeld and the Charlie Douglas-Homes.

  Drove myself to Chequers (where I hadn’t been for several years) for the Thatcher dinner engagement mentioned by her on the telephone and surprisingly vigorously followed up. I was greeted by Denis Thatcher and led into the medium-sized sitting room on the ground floor, where the Prime Minister and Woodrow (Wyatt) were already deep in conversation. I had no idea who was going to be there, but apparently she had settled for this odd quartet.

  Perfectly agreeable general conversation before an early dinner at a small table in the window of the big dining room. Quite a good meal, and interesting enough political conversation. Towards the end of dinner we began to get into the middle of things. Hitherto we had been talking principally about what she thought of Strasbourg and Tokyo, to which the answer was not much: she had thought a lot of Schmidt on both occasions and very little of Giscard, whom she thought petulant, vain and rather ill-mannered. I told her that she had seen him at his worst, certainly at Tokyo, and when all was said and done, although she was right in a lot of her complaints, the good side was substantially greater than she allowed for, for he was highly intelligent, on the whole his policies went in the right direction and on the whole they did so effectively; and that, therefore, one ought (although my instincts were often very much like hers for he could be absolutely maddening) to try to suppress these feelings, and realize there was a good deal to put in the credit balance. It was a pity, though, that he spoilt such a large credit balance by these rather silly—but nonetheless deep—fissures of character. She seemed willing to agree with this.

  At any rate, somebody—Woodrow or her—said, towards the end of dinner, arising out of something I had said, ‘How do you think the British hand should be played vis-à-vis Giscard, Schmidt and the others?’ I replied, ‘Well, that is rather a big question which I would prefer to open up on, not just as we are leaving the table, but when we settle down afterwards.’ Whether or not she took this as a suggestion that I wanted to talk to her alone, I don’t know, but she then said, ‘Ah, well, let Roy and me go off and have twenty minutes alone, while you, Woodrow, have coffee with Denis.’ And so we separated.

  The twenty minutes almost inevitably multiplied itself by four, during which I expounded to her my view that, without in any way wishing to encourage bad Franco/German relations (good Franco/German relations being essential for Europe) we should nonetheless endeavour to break up the endless exhibition waltz between Schmidt and Giscard which had been going on for too long, and which left the Little Five, and indeed Italy as well, as rather bored wallflowers sitting at the edge of the room. The conversation obviously wasn’t only this, but this was a central part of it.

  She then collected the other two from the terrace and we all
four talked for another hour. This last part of the conversation was largely politico-industrial gossip, whom she might get to run various things, etc., all fairly indiscreetly done. Some of her ideas were pretty silly (some of the silly ones encouraged by Woodrow) though not all of them. She wanted to get rid of Villiers from the British Steel Corporation, which may well be right; but she also wanted to get rid of Ezra from the Coal Board, which would be a great mistake. She was also rather keen to get a job for George Brown (she thought he was much younger than he is, for some reason) but, of all things, suggested making him chairman of the BBC, where she wanted somebody who would take a tougher line. Anything less suited to George, at this or indeed any stage of his career, I can hardly imagine. I felt in a slightly embarrassed position, because I did not want to do George down but I knew this would be hopeless for him, as the qualities it requires are steadiness and calm day-to-day judgement, which are exactly the qualities he does not possess. This is not incompatible with the fact that he has very good longer-term judgement. I tried to steer away by saying that he might be better at a more executive job.

  I was struck throughout this conversation by three things: first, Woodrow is on very close terms with her, talks freely, easily, without self-consciousness, says anything he wants to; secondly, Denis Thatcher, while a caricature of himself in some ways, is not in the least afraid of her and talks a good deal. But he doesn’t always talk foolishly, quite shrewd comments on the lines of ‘Old JD of BP told me…’ The self-caricature aspect came out even more strongly when he said goodbye to me on the steps and I noticed his somewhat notorious Rolls standing at the side of the courtyard and said, ‘Ah, I see you’ve got your Rolls-Royce here.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to give the old bus a spin from time to time. I know she doesn’t like it very much, but the old cylinders you know get choked up if you don’t give her a spin. Lovely bus, lovely bus. Mind you, that’s a beautiful little Boche job you’ve got over there. I’d really rather have that; that’s a real modern car.’ Funny man. Whether he is exactly out of his depth I don’t know. He is his own man, I think. He remains a moderately prosperous suburban businessman, who is perfectly self-assured with her. Not an unfavourable impression at all.

  The third thing that I retained from the conversation was that she talked extraordinarily freely, although she was only critical by implication of my particular Cabinet friends, Gilmour, Carrington, Whitelaw, because she pointedly left them out of a list of the sound men—Howe, Biffen, Joseph, Nott, and could there have been one other? - who were fighting tooth and nail on her side for public expenditure cuts. I left just before 11.00.

  MONDAY, 16 JULY. East Hendred, Brussels and Strasbourg.

  To Brussels in the morning and to Strasbourg in the evening with the prospect of meeting the new Parliament looming heavily.

  Gave Willy Brandt a long enjoyable dinner alone. He was looking thin, almost young, slightly febrilely bright-eyed. I would be sceptical about his future health, but he is for the moment tremendously agreeable and easy to talk to, a good deal more so than he used to be when Chancellor. Not critical of Schmidt, except occasionally by implication, but not tremendously optimistic about the future of German politics. He didn’t quite see where the leadership in the SPD was going and thought there was a slight tug to the right. He thought Apel probably the most likely successor. Schmidt thought Matthöfer possible, but he (Brandt) didn’t think this remotely possible. Apel was not great but better than I thought he was. Dohnanyi was emerging as a faint possibility for the leadership, about which I expressed enthusiasm. He was encouraging about the work of the Commission. He agreed, under a little pressure from me, that he would stay and make a speech on Thursday.

  TUESDAY, 17 JULY. Strasbourg.

  A most gloomy, hot, sticky, dark day for the opening of the new Parliament. The doyenne d’âge, Mme Louise Weiss, aged eighty-six, Gaullist but before that a politician of the Third and Fourth Republics, delivered an extraordinary Gallic address of bidding, lasting a full hour, which was redolent of the spirit of Geneva in the thirties. The only appropriate person to have replied would have been Philip Noel-Baker, with whom no doubt she used to dance tangos on the terrace of the Beau Rivage c. 1932.12 In a slightly ludicrous way, it was not a bad performance. The Parliament then adjourned in order to begin its various manoeuvres for the election of its President.

  Just before 10 p.m. we heard that Mme Veil13 had been elected on the second ballot, with only three votes to spare, and went back to the Parliament to hear her brief acceptance speech.

  WEDNESDAY, 18 JULY. Strasbourg.

  I made my formal speech to the new Parliament at 11.00. It lasted only fifteen minutes, had some rather good phrases, and particularly as it followed an extremely long and boring speech by Lynch, the Irish President-in-office of the European Council, went all right. Lunch at Valentin Sorg which Donald Maitland was giving for Soames, who had turned up in a silent but representational role for the British Government.

  At 4.151 paid a long formal call of congratulation upon Mme Veil. She was pleased to be elected, ill-informed about parliamentary and European affairs, agreeable, totally francophone. Afterwards I saw Russell Johnston,14 who had come on a protest mission from the British Liberals about their non-representation in the Parliament owing to the absence of proportional representation. I received him sympathetically.

  THURSDAY, 19 JULY. Strasbourg.

  I spent the morning in the Parliament supposedly for my speech of substance, but in fact the three hours were taken up with a procedural wrangle raised by Pannella15 and his sidekick Signora Bonino about the non-recognition of the ragbag of Italian Radicals, Franco-Bruxellois, and God knows who else he had put together. This was thought to be Parliament at its worst, but I didn’t wholly think so. It was minorities asserting themselves (presenting Mme Veil with an initial taste of the problems of the presidency, which she did not handle particularly well), but was also Parliament behaving like a Parliament and therefore I wasn’t wholly impatient that my speech and the others were held up until after lunch.

  I eventually spoke from 4.25 until 4.50.1 had to make a decision as to where to speak from. There was no rostrum on the first day. It had been installed on the second day and O’Kennedy (Irish Foreign Minister) automatically used it. I used to do so in the old Parliament when I was making a speech of importance. But I suddenly decided that it was better to be more part of the Parliament than the President of the Council of Ministers, and slightly to differentiate myself from this long drone from the rostrum, and therefore spoke from my place at the end of the first bench, which I think I shall stick to unless something very exceptional happens.

  Brandt spoke immediately after me, a considerable oratorical performance, and one immediately had a real feeling of the value of the new Parliament. A speech could get a response from somebody of real significance in his own country and indeed in Europe as a whole. It was not like the previous Parliament where I felt that I was throwing words into a Chamber without an echo and where the most likely response was for little Fellermaier to get up and complain that the translation of my speech in Danish had not been circulated seventy-two hours beforehand.

  FRIDAY, 20 JULY. Strasbourg and Cardiff.

  I listened to Tugendhat’s good opening of the budget debate, gave a radio interview for IRN, had a brief word with Barbara Castle,16 and a talk with Ann Clwyd, a new Labour member. (The few Labour members seem much more agreeable than I expected.) I took an avion taxi back to Brussels and on by commercial flight to London for Cardiff, where I was due to speak at a University of Wales dinner before my honorary degree the following morning.

  We drove the same route as eight days before, but in less good weather. I struggled into my dinner jacket in the back of the car and tried frantically to put a speech together. I was intimidated by the thought of speaking, unprepared and noteless, with my mind on other things, immediately before the Prince of Wales, who I had been surprised to be told was a spectacularly good after
-dinner speaker. He had apparently done very well at a Royal Opera House dinner at the Guildhall.

  A dinner of about sixty, after which Goronwy Daniel, the Principal of Aberystwyth and the current Vice-Chancellor of the university, made the first speech, and spoke extremely well, with a sense of timing worthy of a considerable actor. I then rose and said I was aware that I would have to speak before the Prince of Wales, who was one of the most accomplished after-dinner speakers, I was told, in England, but I did not realize that I would be sandwiched between him and a Vice-Chancellor who was undoubtedly the most accomplished after-dinner speaker in Wales. Then, for some reason or other, my speech rather took off, I got on to a vein of impromptu semi-jokes which couldn’t go wrong, and bumbled on for about fifteen minutes with curious success.

  This left the poor Prince with two difficult speeches to follow as well as my excessive and embarrassing tribute to him. He had a pedestrian little speech prepared for him, on which he improvised rather well. He is a nice young man and almost certainly the most intelligent male member of his family since Prince Albert.

  SATURDAY, 21 JULY. Cardiff and East Hendred.

  Three-mile walk before breakfast to visit Llandaff Cathedral. Then to the National Museum of Wales, where we saw the Rubens cartoons which they have just bought, and also the spectacular collection of Impressionists which the two Misses Davies of Gregynog left to them at varying stages in the forties and fifties. I suppose it was the first museum I ever visited, and I doubt if I had been in it since the thirties, so it was a nostalgic expedition.

  Then a good ceremony with twelve honorands, Graham Sutherland the other principal non-local one. I talked to him a lot, and developed an ambitious if rash hope that he might be prepared to paint a portrait of me.17 This Welsh expedition, though it fell too quickly after the previous one, was exceptionally enjoyable both for Jennifer and for me. I don’t know quite why, but it was.