by Roy Jenkins
WEDNESDAY, 24 OCTOBER. Strasbourg and Brussels.
A longish Commission from 9.00 until 12.45, then an urgent telephone call from Nanteuil to deliver some not very urgent protests about something Cheysson had said. Afterwards a lunch for six or seven chairmen of parliamentary committees. Back in the afternoon to do a little lobbying. A great part of the Commission in the morning had been taken by the Commission discovering that the Control Committee was intending to freeze half the allowances (both frais de représentation and frais de mission) in the coming year until they had a report, about May, as to how the year was going. This obviously was extremely tiresome, not so much from a practical as from a dignity point of view, and it galvanized and united the Commission, which was perhaps not very elevating, in a way that I had hardly seen anything do before.
We all agreed that we would try to get a substantial amendment put in, which would be moved by the Liberal Group, and that we would all corner various people. Several had been done in the morning but I in the afternoon did three or four, which was almost overkill because it was quite obvious that they were perfectly willing to be persuaded and that there was no difficulty in getting the offending passage removed. Indeed by the end I began to think that we might have added an addendum to our amendment saying that Herr Aigner should be expelled from the European Parliament.
THURSDAY, 25 OCTOBER. Brussels and Cairo.
Motored to Amsterdam and took a KLM plane to Cairo. Drove in on a beautiful evening to the Meridian Hotel on the island in the river. A briefing meeting with our delegate (recently arrived), a serious German called Billerbeck, who on the whole impressed me. He certainly took the briefing meeting very seriously, so much so that he wouldn’t do it in the room, but insisted on going out on to the terrace (which was nice except for a slight mosquito threat) on a moonlit, reasonably cool, clear evening. Dinner with him and our party in the Palme d’Or restaurant in the hotel, done up in Death on the Nile style.
FRIDAY, 26 OCTOBER. Cairo.
A visit to the main museum, which I had not been to before, an extraordinary jumble, all laid out like Maples furniture basement, but with some remarkable things in it. We saw mainly the Tutan-khamun tomb contents. Then to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for one and a half hours with Boutros-Ghali, interspersed with the ceremonial signing of the accord setting up our delegation. Boutros-Ghali is nominally the deputy Foreign Minister, but he would be the Minister if he were not a Copt. He is a very bright man and I had a good talk with him, during which he more or less told us that the school of thought represented by him in the Egyptian Government would not greatly mind if we recognized the Tunis/Arab League, though they would prefer that we did not do it too quickly; and he also floated an idea for some Community help (mainly for symbolic rather than practical reasons I think) on the West Bank and in the other occupied territories.
Then a very good river boat trip over lunch with the whole of our party and a few accompanying Egyptians. We went up the Nile for about twelve miles to the older pyramids, the ones without the sphinx but with the steps. An official dinner given by Hamil el Said, the Minister of the Economy, who was our constant host and companion, and a party of about forty.
SATURDAY, 27 OCTOBER. Cairo.
At 11.00 we set off for the drive to the Barrage, where we had an hour’s meeting with Sadat.36 He is an optimist beyond the bounds of reason, and I suppose slightly dotty, but quite attractively so. He wore a sparkling blue suit, with knife-edge creases, and a sparkling white shirt. He announced that most successful meetings had been held between his Prime Minister and the Israelis in London, which had effectively overcome all outstanding problems. This proved to be quite untrue. He also suddenly announced, to the surprise and dismay of Hamil el Said, that he had agreed to supply a limited quantity of oil at guaranteed prices to the Israelis (which the British won’t do to the other Europeans). Hamil said, ‘Oh, dear,’ or words to that effect, ‘I hope you got something worthwhile in return.’ ‘My dear Hamil,’ he said, ‘I have got things beyond the confines of your narrow imagination.’ He later launched into a great denunciation of the other Arab governments, saying that when he had finally sewn things up with the Israelis—which he expected to do well before May, probably in the early spring—he would return to this theme and launch denunciatory attacks on those who lived in vast luxury by exploiting their own people and everybody else.
The impression he made was more agreeable than this sounds. He is a considerable figure with remarkable qualities. Whether one would like to be his enemy in Egypt I doubt, or how much liberty of expression there is. At one stage earlier Boutros-Ghali had said to me, ‘The trouble with dealing with Israel is that it is a real democracy,’ and this I suppose says something about Egypt. However, Sadat is certainly one of the better people in the world at the present time and like all Egyptians has a degree of agreeable sophistication which helps to make Cairo for me an extraordinarily attractive city, in spite of the terrible messes which are associated with it—the squalor, and the fact that things don’t work. (Nearly all the telephones are out of order: it is impossible to telephone the airport from the centre of the city, and purely a matter of chance whether one can telephone one part of the city from another.)
On this visit we are extremely lucky to have almost perfect weather. The humidity and the great heat have just gone and we had clear atmosphere with a maximum temperature of 80° and a minimum of 60°, which is about as nice as it can be.
Press conference at 6 o’clock, and then a debriefing of the ambassadors of the Nine at the Irish Embassy. This is in the so-called Garden City, the old, fashionable pre-1939 (perhaps even pre-1914) part of Cairo, but now very rundown. The Irish have a large flat in a turn-of-the-century block where all the other residents are French-speaking Egyptians (which means they speak French the whole time), the block slightly dilapidated and the Irish apparently unable to afford to mend a window pane, unless it is impossible to get somebody to do it, which I find difficult to believe.
From there to the British Embassy, where Crispin and I dined alone with Michael Weir,37 plus newish second wife, she previously in the Foreign Office herself and a slightly assertive career girl, a bit like a woman in a Charles Addams cartoon, who greatly grew on me as the evening went on. Michael Weir, whom I had not met before, I thought effective and agreeable. I had never been to the Cairo Embassy before either, and was interested to see Cromer’s house, which was built for £39,000 c. 1890. It was not cheap. £39,000 was a vast amount of money in those days—but what was remarkable was that it came out within £16 of the estimate.
TUESDAY, 30 OCTOBER. Luxembourg and Brussels.
Dohnanyi to lunch in Luxembourg. He was, for once, very shocked by the behaviour of the French—Bernard-Reymond38 not FrançoisPoncet, whom I think he likes more, at some restricted session yesterday. Also he had I thought a rather foolish idea about trying to upgrade not the presidency of the Council as such, but the Secretary-General, and floated the idea of putting Thorn into that job when the useless Hommel retires in the summer. Certainly a change for the better would be desirable, but I doubt whether a political figure would be sensible. It certainly would not suit me from the point of view of the future of the Commission, but Thorn would not of course be there until nearly the end of my time.
Dohnanyi then left rather gloomily to take the charter plane to Lomé to which a number of them were setting off for the signature of the Convention there. I had firmly decided that enough was enough so far as travel was concerned and that it was unnecessary for me to go. Motored to Brussels and worked hard all evening with Michael Jenkins on the paper for tomorrow’s Commission—the so-called reference paper—keeping open the various options for dealing with the British problem. I was nervous after our September experience as to whether it might come apart at the last moment. Ortoli, in particular, might well be dangerous, and you can never tell with Gundelach, but I was rather encouraged by the fact that Ortoli pressed me to have a lunch for the ‘Four Hors
emen’ at rue de Praetère after the Commission, and I judged it extremely unlikely that he, who doesn’t like rows, would want to lunch with me if he was going to be awkward in the morning; and this indeed proved correct.
WEDNESDAY, 31 OCTOBER. Brussels and East Hendred.
Saw Donald Maitland for a final farewell call. I am sorry to see him go; my opinion of him has gone steadily up during the past two years.
Commission from 10.10 to 1.30. Fairly early on in the discussion on the paper it became clear that things were not going to be too awkward. I introduced it myself, fairly firmly indicating where there were possible areas of compromise and where there were not. Ortoli, Gundelach and, indeed, Davignon responded by saying that the areas of compromise were desirable but that they weren’t going to press for going beyond that. So without too much difficulty we turned this dangerous corner. As a result we had a fairly relaxed subsequent luncheon; but, apart from the fact that Ortoli always manages to get the conversation into French, he played no national hand.
6.45 plane from Zaventem for my truncated East Hendred Toussaints holiday.39 Jennifer and I had decided that it was too difficult to get to Sare where we had intended to stay with the Beaumarchais’, not having gone in the summer. We feared that they might be offended by this, but discovered that it did not suit them badly because Jacques had severe ‘flu and they were not sure when they could get there themselves.
THURSDAY, 1 NOVEMBER. East Hendred.
Up early, with an awareness that this November—the latter part of it in particular—was going to be a very testing month, what with my Dimbleby Lecture on the 22nd and then the Dublin Summit, and could turn out to be a fairly disastrous or at the very least a deeply disappointing month.
I then got down to a great day’s work on Dimbleby. I clearly had to get the back of it broken on this holiday and as early as possible. I had already written nearly enough to fill the whole fifty minutes, but I was still lacking hard proposals, let alone peroration and conclusion, had a lot of otiose stuff at the beginning, and knew that I could not get down to an effective job of getting it into proper shape until I had a draft of the whole. Therefore I worked hard from 9.15 until 1.00, went out to a pub lunch at Clifton Hampden with Jennifer, and then proceeded to work equally solidly from 3.15 until 8.15, in other words eight and three-quarter hours solid writing during the day. It is difficult to tell how good it is, but I was very pleased to discover that I could still concentrate as hard as this on writing something without a draft and produce nearly three thousand words in a single day.
I was exhausted but satisfied at the end of it, when the Rodgers’ arrived to dine. After dinner I read Bill bits of the more controversial part at the end. I think he was sufficiently post-prandial not to be taking it in too meticulously, but at least he was fully warned of what was coming and certainly showed no sign of reacting with deep shock or hostility. He had moved quite a bit since the talk we had had in the summer, when he was staying at East Hendred, and had tried to persuade me to come back into politics in the conventional way.
SATURDAY, 3 NOVEMBER. East Hendred.
Gilmours to lunch alone. I got Ian to read Dimbleby. He thought parts of the political stuff at the end were too right-wing, and in particular objected to my using the phrase ‘the social market economy’! So I adjusted it for this and other helpful criticism. He was also against having the Yeats quotation in at the end (too hackneyed). On this opinion is divided.
SUNDAY, 4 NOVEMBER. East Hendred.
To Sevenhampton with Jennifer and lunched with Ann and the Donaldsons. The Donaldsons are very keen to come to the Dimbleby Lecture which I shall arrange.
MONDAY, 5 NOVEMBER. East Hendred and Strasbourg.
11.30 plane to Paris for Strasbourg. Held up all the afternoon at Charles de Gaulle by the French air traffic controllers’ strike. Strasbourg only at 6.45. Yet another dinner for Ortoli, Gundelach and Davignon.
TUESDAY, 6 NOVEMBER. Strasbourg and Brussels.
Intensive telephoning between 10.45 and 11.45, partly to fix up with Robert Armstrong for Davignon to pay exploratory visits to him and to Wahl in the Elysée to see how much room there was for give on both sides,40 which visits had been suggested at dinner the night before.
Late afternoon plane to Brussels (late in both senses, the French air traffic controllers’ strike again), but much worse than that, it was really intolerably bumpy and disagreeable for the whole of the fifty minutes, so much so that they wouldn’t serve any drinks. Just when one needed them most. I would have thought that some heroic girl might have crawled along the aisle handing out much-needed sustenance. Arrived in the Berlaymont feeling rather shaken but recovered and went to dinner with the Michael Jenkins’.
WEDNESDAY, 7 NOVEMBER. Brussels.
A highly unsatisfactory lunch with COREPER in the Berlaymont, at which they nearly all, with the exception of Noterdaeme, the new Belgian, and I think also Michael Butler,41 the new British Permanent Representative, complained hard about the reference paper containing options rather than a single precise recommendation with a figure: Nanteuil, but also the little ones, Dillon (Ireland) in particular, Dondelinger (Luxembourg), Riberholdt (Denmark), Plaja (Italy) a bit but not excessively, Lubbers (Netherlands) I think keeping quiet. It was rather disagreeable to have them yapping away quite so much, though I replied very robustly partly because I am so convinced we are right. Riberholdt and Nanteuil would like to have had a single proposition which they could have shot down, and thus improve their tactical position: the others, particularly Dillon, but to some extent Dondelinger, etc., were fighting a battle for COREPER’s dignity and for them to have a specific role, which is not a primary interest of ours. So I was not unduly shaken by them.
After a long afternoon Commission, I had a three-quarters-of-an-hour arranged telephone call with Schmidt. He very much likes these long conversations, which I don’t. He is rather good at them and we had a thoroughly productive discussion about what might or might not be done vis-à-vis the British. His general line was that Mrs Thatcher had some pretty unrealistic ideas, but nonetheless he was anxious to help her to what extent was possible, but she really had to compromise and think about things much more sensibly and seriously or she would be in great trouble. Then at the end he made some odd remarks asking how much of a crisis I thought there was in France as a result of the Bokassa diamonds affair,42 speaking in a rather more detached way about Giscard than he had done before: not exactly unfriendlily, but as though he was genuinely seeking information. It is very much his habit suddenly to ask questions at the end of a discussion about any range of issues which are in his mind.
A late dinner party, rue de Praetère, for the Michael Butlers. Ann Butler is a bonus, but whether Michael is an improvement on Donald Maitland is more doubtful. He does rather bang away at issues without great sensitivity or feeling, as he showed in the COREPER lunch today, but he is a highly intelligent man and perhaps in some ways has a wider range of interests than Maitland, including—not that that much excites me—a great collection of Chinese porcelain.
SATURDAY, 10 NOVEMBER. East Hendred.
At 7 o’clock David Marquand came for a general political discussion but also usefully to read Dimbleby. He is very anxious for us to make a move in politics. Dimbleby he was constructive about, though fairly critical, and in a way not very enthusiastic, but perhaps this was rather good for me, particularly as he made, not on that occasion but subsequently by telephone, what turned out to be an essential point, that I should talk about the radical centre and not just the centre as such.
SUNDAY, 11 NOVEMBER. East Hendred.
My fifty-ninth birthday. Hayden and Laura, Leslie Bonham Carter, Griggs, Thea Elliott and Charles and Ivana to lunch. Just as we were going in we were telephoned from Paris to be told that Jacques de Beaumarchais had died that morning in the Salpêtrière Hospital. It was an enormous shock, although we had had an underlying worry about his health for the last fifteen months, partly because everything had gone
so wrong since he returned from his previously brilliant career and highly successful embassy in London.
They were both of them immensely close friends of ours. There were hardly any of the barriers which there almost inevitably are between the British and the French. They had been here a great deal during their embassy, we had done four two- or three-day trips in England with them, we had stayed at Sare so often, and they had stayed in Brussels I think no fewer than four times during the previous year. We last saw him at Barbizon, where he seemed quite well when he came to lunch at the end of September. And we had intended to go to Sare the previous week.
TUESDAY, 13 NOVEMBER. Brussels and Strasbourg.
Early train to Strasbourg. Crispin and I gave lunch to Stevy Davignon. He was back from his mission to the French and the British, and I thought him rather overoptimistic.
Christopher Tugendhat kindly gave me dinner. I found him quite interesting on budgetary questions, both British and the wider Community ones, but gloomy and worried—as we all are a bit -about the Parliament prospect.
WEDNESDAY, 14 NOVEMBER. Strasbourg.
Up at 7.50 on a dark, wet morning with the rain driving across the Place de la Gare, so that it looked like an ‘umbrella’ picture by Boudin or Corot. A debate on the British budgetary problems and convergence generally, which I opened for twenty-five minutes and which was reasonably satisfactory, with certainly no significant criticism along the COREPER lines that we had not been more specific. I did another twenty minutes near to the end at about 9 p.m. Then yet another dinner for the ‘Four Horsemen’, Ortoli, Davignon, Gundelach, plus, on this occasion, Emile Noël and Crispin. Too late, moderately satisfactory, too expensive.