by Roy Jenkins
Back to East Hendred, where the Rodgers’ arrived unexpectedly for a drink and stayed for a scratch dinner. We had a more agreeable and relaxed talk with them than we had had for a long time, and were extremely glad that they had come.
SUNDAY, 22 JULY. East Hendred and Brussels.
To Brussels in the late afternoon, where Crispin and I had Giscard’s trois sages, Dell, Marjolin and Biesheuvel, to dinner, rue de Praetère. There has been a curious shift in the balance of power within the group since I saw them in January. Biesheuvel, the Dutchman, seems to me now the dominant figure, whereas Marjolin was so earlier. Dell has always been somewhat in the middle, a little detached, but quite sensible.
MONDAY, 23 JULY. Brussels.
Lunch at home for Michael O’Kennedy, the Irish Foreign Minister, plus two other Irish. I was rather sleepy for some reason or other, and O’Kennedy seemed to me less good, less on the ball than I had expected him to be. No doubt he was rather nervous about his first chairmanship.
Then no fewer than six ambassadors’ credentials—all done in sixty-five minutes. Then an hour with Soutou, ex-permanent head of the Quai d’Orsay, who, most surprisingly for such a senior diplomat, didn’t speak English.
Home early for my British dinner for Carrington, Ian (Gilmour), Peter Walker18 and Maitland. Just after 8.001 was sitting at my desk thinking happily that I had got another twenty-five minutes, when Peter Walker arrived, having been told rather typically by some foolish man at the Embassy that it took half an hour to get to the house, whereas it only took five minutes. After momentary irritation I was quite glad to see him, as I had originally thought of offering him dinner alone. He has not got the hang of how to deal with the Agricultural Council yet, and he certainly hasn’t appreciated Gundelach or got alongside him.
The dinner was a great success. Everybody seemed to enjoy it a lot, much of it was very funny, but also useful at the same time. I gave Peter C. a lecture after dinner, slightly along the lines I had given to Mrs Thatcher, but done in a more post-prandial tone, telling him that he really had an opportunity if he played his cards right to be the greatest Foreign Secretary since Canning, I first said, but then quickly corrected it to Bevin. I then went to the loo. Whereupon Carrington, forgetting that Crispin was there, jumped up in a great state of exhilarated excitement at my comparisons.
TUESDAY, 24 JULY. Brussels.
Nothing of interest in the Foreign Affairs Council, apart from tributes in his absence to François-Poncet’s presidency. So I thought I had better strike a slightly different note, particularly as O’Kennedy had been far too apologetic about it not having been done in June, which I said was largely my responsibility, but it was three weeks before the end of the French presidency and I always took the view that it was a mistake to tip the waiter too generously before one had finished the meal. The British thought this very funny, and so I think did most others. The French didn’t seem offended; perhaps François-Poncet would have been. I said quite a lot of nice things about him, including that he had shown great skill at untying knots. Some of his skill was of course both necessary and understandable, because he had tied up most of them himself. But apart from these few glancing remarks, there were a lot of thoroughly friendly ones, because I like François-Poncet, but believe increasingly in teasing the French which is not done enough in Europe.
WEDNESDAY, 25 JULY. Brussels and London.
After a long morning’s Commission, I gave COREPER an end-of-term lunch. They didn’t have much to say, but weren’t in any way disagreeable. Afterwards I saw Ortoli, partly to tell him that I wasn’t circulating the Cour des Comptes report as it looked as though there was a good chance it might hold without leaking until September, though one couldn’t be sure, and it seemed better not to give the press a free run in the empty newspapers of August.
Then to London for the long-awaited holidays. Sense of relief slightly diminished by having invited thirty people to dinner at Brooks’s. It’s very nice having a party the evening of return, but a great deal nicer if other people give it.
However, it turned out well. We had a great rollcall of the establishment: Carringtons, Soames’, Gilmours and Norman Stevas from the Government. Shirley, Rodgers’, Levers, Thomsons from the Labour Party. David Steel, Hartwells, Zuckermans, Bonham Carters, Peter Jenkins’, Rees-Moggs. I think that was about it. It all went agreeably well until about 12.15, when Brooks’s slammed the door on us with great relief (I do not think Fox would have approved of this puritanical attitude to late hours).
THURSDAY, 26 JULY. London.
Dinner at the Other Club. Callaghan was there rather surprisingly, looking at bit inspissated, but I didn’t have a chance to talk to him. I sat between Robert Armstrong, who was very nice about Hayden, and Prof. Trevor-Roper,19 who has become a peer for some not very clear reason and for some still more obscure reason wishes to call himself Lord Dacre of something or other, which is running him into trouble, not surprisingly, with Rachel Home.20 There were one or two others whom I would like to have talked to, notably Jeremy Hutchinson21 and Garrett Drogheda.
MONDAY, 30 JULY. East Hendred.
Annual cabinet day at East Hendred. It began with Manuel Santarelli (Perlot’s deputy) ringing from Brussels in a great state because of some story in Le Monde. I didn’t take it terribly seriously, but nonetheless it was mildly disturbing as he was so agitated. There was apparently a headline saying ‘Drôle de Jeu de M. Jenkins’. It was all totally without foundation, a bit of French fantasy about the Euratom affair. Crispin dealt with it rather well when he arrived.
The six hours’ discussion including lunch was in three parts: first, a whole range of immediate questions facing us; second, institutional questions, relations with Parliament, Spierenburg, Three Wise Men, problems of this sort; third, slightly longer range policy issues. We covered the first two almost inevitably better than the third which we slightly galloped through at the end, but it was long enough, as this part of the discussion was unfocused by me.
WEDNESDAY, 1 AUGUST. East Hendred and Palafragal.
Left for Barcelona before lunch accompanied by Jennifer, Caroline Gilmour and her son Andrew. Did not get to the Griggs’22 house near Palafragal until 7.30, rather hot and sweaty as the car (hired from Barcelona airport) was very small and very full of luggage and us. However, the house was splendid. A great 1928 villa, built by John’s maternal grandfather, Lord Islington, with all the scale and lavishness of a villa of fifty years ago, perched high above the sea, commanding an unspoilt peninsula. We dined in with the Griggs,* and John Bayleys23 who were also staying.
SATURDAY, 4 AUGUST. Palafragal.
Gerona at about 7 o’clock. A very spectacular cathedral, semi-fortified, at the top of an enormous flight of steps as approached from the west front. The broadest nave in Europe apparently.
TUESDAY, 7 AUGUST. Palafragal.
Left for Barcelona just after 11 o’clock, partly to look at it and partly to assist in the changeover of guests at the airport. Lunch was slow so that we only just got the two Gilmours on the plane to Milan and thence to Pisa. I then proceeded to try to re-find Patsy (our two cars had been left ill-parked together) but she was so agitated by the impending arrival of her mother-in-law and others that she seemed completely to have disappeared. After various brushes with the police, and having to put my car in the car park, I eventually found that her car was being hoisted on to a lorry and managed with some difficulty to get it de-hoisted for a relatively small payment of about £5. Eventually old Lady Altrincham, the daughter of the said Lord Islington, arrived in a pretty bad temper saying she had had the most filthy journey (she is a formidable old gorgon) plus Christian Smith, wife of John Smith, ex-MP for Westminster, with various children. Patsy, with great self-sacrifice, took her mother-in-law and left me to take the Smiths. We had a short look round Barcelona, visited the cathedral, which was quite good, and had a short drive round one or two good squares near it and a drink at the Colon Hotel.
FRIDAY, 10 AUGUST.
Palafragal and East Hendred.
East Hendred for lunch. The weather coolish, but not bad, although it had clearly been very unsatisfactory while we were away. Our Spanish visit, however, had gone very well, with almost unbroken good weather, a little too hot if anything, the first time I had known it so in the Mediterranean for years: a splendid house and generally very satisfactory.
TUESDAY, 14 AUGUST. East Hendred.
Spent the morning trying unsuccessfully to start my Dimbleby Lecture.
WEDNESDAY, 15 AUGUST. East Hendred.
Lunched at home in the garden with Jennifer and apart from being stung, twice as it turned out, by a wasp, I was feeling rather relaxed and cheerful. Slept afterwards in the sun and awoke to discover that the Cour des Comptes report had leaked into Der Stern, a semi-scandalous German magazine: therefore the end of the period of relaxation. I had a fairly hectic evening on the telephone, trying to contact various members of my staff in their scattered holiday locations.
THURSDAY, 16 AUGUST. East Hendred.
A morning on the telephone, leading to the issuing of a statement both in Brussels and London. There had been some stories in the British papers that morning but on the whole they didn’t show great signs of escalating. There was nothing on the World at One, for example. George Scott24 in London was a great pillar of sense and stability.
Sat up late talking with Bill Rodgers (who was staying) about the future. He wanted me to come back into the House for a Labour seat, which curiously I possibly could get—several feelers have been put out from Northfield, although I don’t think a different Birmingham seat would attract me, even if a Labour seat did at all.
FRIDAY, 17 AUGUST. East Hendred and Anglesey.
By Hereford, Newtown, Dolgellau and Caernarvon to Anglesey, where we arrived at 7.30. It was a good evening after an indifferent day, Plas Newydd looking splendid and the Angleseys’ flat, which I had seen only briefly last year, turned out to be substantial with fine rooms and views. Amongst the three or four others staying was Laurence Whistler, younger brother of Rex, who is writing a biography of his brother and is particularly interested in Plas Newydd because of the great dining-room mural.
SATURDAY, 18 AUGUST. Anglesey.
The Cledwyns, as they should now be called, came to lunch. Cledwyn on tremendous anecdotal form.
SUNDAY, 19 AUGUST. Anglesey and Harlech.
Amabel Williams-Ellis, Clough’s widow, John Strachey’s sister, came to lunch, rather splendid at eighty-seven. The Harlechs came to dine at 8 o’clock and then we left with them at 11.30 for the hour’s drive to Glyn and a two-day stay.
MONDAY, 27 AUGUST. East Hendred.
Bess (Church) gave me the shattering news of Mountbatten’s assassination in Ireland. I had last seen him at the Euro Gala at Drury Lane in May, after fifteen years of quite close official association with him, not only over the prison inquiry in 1966, but also over various aviation matters before that; and indeed there had been a certain continuing relationship with him in Brussels. Dreadful though it is, I suppose that from his point of view it is not too bad as he had begun to give the impression of not knowing what to do with the rest of his life and might even have welcomed a dramatic death, although not one with these side-effects. He was a pretty remarkable man on the whole, not a great intellect but with exceptional drive and power to pull or push people along with him. He was also good at grandeur without pompousness. We watched this evening television tribute to him which was very well done by Ludo Kennedy.
TUESDAY, 28 AUGUST. East Hendred.
Christopher Tugendhat to lunch. Brilliant sunshine, basic temperature still low, but a remarkable swing—the thermometer having been 41° when I got up in the morning had become 91° in the sun by 4 p.m.
I had quite a useful talk with Christopher about the budget paper and other matters. He is agreeable, sensible, very well read and well-informed, occasionally slow-firing. On the whole he has been a very good Commissioner.
WEDNESDAY, 29 AUGUST. East Hendred.
The Owens to lunch. They had not been to East Hendred for eighteen months and we hadn’t seen them since the election. David was out to be pleasant and talked quite good sense about personalities and balance of power in the Shadow Cabinet, yet there is undoubtedly a reserve over our relationship, even though this occasion went quite well. I think I would find it very difficult ever to be really close to him again, and indeed although pleasant and reasonably sensible he does not appear to have in any way the stature of an ex-Foreign Secretary. The only remark he made at all critical about his own tenure of office was that perhaps he had got there too young; on the other hand he referred to it complacently as a period of very good relations when he and Britain were on such good terms with everybody.
THURSDAY, 30 AUGUST. East Hendred, London and East Hendred.
To London by train for lunch with Geoffrey Howe in 11 Downing Street. We lunched downstairs, and I had an agreeable general talk with him in the course of which we had perhaps thirty or forty minutes about the handling of the budget paper, on which he seemed to me sensible but not enormously well-informed on detail. I tried to make some points on how I thought the Government should play it and the need not to put all the eggs in the basket of the Dublin Summit.
Afterwards I went upstairs at 11 Downing Street for the first time since we had left that house on the early evening of Friday, 19 June 1970 - quite extraordinary that I had never previously been back. The cartoons we put on the stairs are still there and the Howes, unlike the intervening tenants, seem to like them and would be glad to fill in the few gaps which remain.25
MONDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER. East Hendred and Brussels.
Left rather gloomily for the 9.45 plane to Brussels. The length of the holiday does not increase the enthusiasm for return. I telephoned Jack Lynch in Dublin to sympathize with him over his stinkingly unfair English press following the Mountbatten murder, and to say that I and a lot of people in England had considerable respect for him, etc. I thought that (i) he deserved some support because he is a nice man, and (ii) it was highly desirable not to get him into a bitter anti-British frame of mind. He sounded very friendly and I think was genuinely pleased to have been telephoned.
Went to a men’s dinner at Luns’s house for Henry Kissinger, with General Haig as well. I was between Luns and Haig, but was struck in the general conversation towards the end by the extent to which Haig cannot hold a candle to Kissinger when he (K) is in the room. He is still in a curious sense very much his old assistant of the White House days and has none of Henry’s rather glottal sparkle. Henry on good form, I thought, though looking rather fat again. I had a good hour’s talk with him alone after dinner. He is sniffing the political air, but it is not easy to see what he can do. He is playing with the idea of being Senator from New York, but he says he won’t run against Jack Javits, although he thinks that Jack is quite old enough to give up. No doubt he thinks that he could be President at the drop of a hat had he been born a citizen. Haig is also sniffing his presidency prospects and clearly thinks they have improved a bit since last June, though in my view they were pretty non-existent then and are not much better now.
Kissinger, despite his supreme self-confidence, is enjoyable to talk to, although he has a lot of views with which I don’t agree (not all of them very seriously worked out). He listens quite well—his vanity is not insensitive or indestructible—and we had a good conversation about writing memoirs.
TUESDAY, 4 SEPTEMBER. East Hendred.
During the morning I saw Gundelach and Ortoli to try and warm them up for the Commission’s consideration of the reference paper on budgetary convergence26 in the afternoon and thought that both of them seemed more or less all right.
A long and rather wearisome special Commission meeting for four and a half hours after lunch. Not only was it wearisome, but also extremely difficult, with grave doubts at the end of the day as to whether we were going to get a sensible paper at all. Natali made the tactical mistake, because he wasn’t wholl
y satisfied with its strength, of coming out against the paper as a whole, and therefore played into the hands of Gundelach and Ortoli who wanted greatly to weaken it. Davignon talked in rather the same terms, and all round the table, apart perhaps from Giolitti, who for once was more sensible than Natali, and Tugendhat, there was remarkably little support for what we had worked on so carefully. However, I thought it could probably be put together again and that indeed proved to some extent to be the case. That evening I had a rue de Praetère dinner with Ortoli, Gundelach and Davignon, into which I staggered rather exhausted. After another three and a half hours it was fairly clear that they, having blown off, would the next time round be prepared to accept something at least tolerable, provided greater obeisances were made to Community mythology.
WEDNESDAY, 5 SEPTEMBER. Brussels, London and Rome.
To London early to attend the Mountbatten funeral. I was seated between Luns, who talked in a loud voice the whole time (two goes a week of Luns is more than enough), and Ducci,27 who was representing the Italian Government and who talked in a soft voice some of the time.
The service, curiously, I did not find particularly moving, or even enormously impressive, though I suppose it was. The Prince of Wales read the lesson well and there were great, familiar, and moving hymns, but as nobody around me (being mostly foreigners) could sing them, the sound somehow did not swell up and rather got lost in the high roof of the Abbey. But it was an occasion. It was perhaps the last great funeral of its sort. Of those that I have attended, only Churchill’s has been comparable, and I suppose Dickie would have been pleased with it. There was no great sense of loss about him, for his life had manifestly run its course, and therefore there was no special quality of poignancy, as, say, with Tony’s service in the same place two and a half years before.