European Diary, 1977-1981 (14 page)

Lunch with
Newsweek
at the Century Club, typical of all these American editorial luncheons, in that six or seven people do nothing but ask questions and therefore do not, I think, get nearly as much out of one as they might do if they contributed rather more to the conversation themselves. Afterwards to the office of the Communities' Mission to the UN for a debriefing of the ambassadors of the Nine to the UN. Then our dinner which Arthur Schlesinger had organized in the new Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the equally new Trade Building. The Mac Bundys
¹⁰³
and Betty (Lauren) Bacall epitomized the guests.

FRIDAY, 22 APRIL.
New York and East Hendred.

Day plane to London, and East Hendred by 11 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, 27 APRIL.
Brussels.

Commission for five and a quarter hours. Quite long, a lot of business transacted but all rather easy, a gentle stream meandering in an agreeable way through a rather flat landscape. Lunch in the middle for Mountbatten,
¹⁰⁴
with Tindemans and Simonet as Belgian guests, Plaja,
¹⁰⁵
the Italian Permanent Representative, and Michael Jenkins. Mountbatten talked well in set pieces. He had to leave at half past two and I then stayed another half hour or so listening to Tindemans and Simonet warily purring at each other. It was a
crucial day for the formation of the new Belgian Government. Tindemans very much wanted the Socialists, and particularly Simonet, in the Government, and Simonet himself very much wanted to be in the Government. The points at issue were that Tindemans wanted Simonet to be Minister of Finance, while Simonet wanted to be Foreign Minister, and that Tindemans wanted the Socialists and the Liberals to come into a grand coalition and the Socialists wanted to keep the Liberals out and have the Communal parties in their place.

THURSDAY, 28 APRIL.
Brussels.

At 12.45 to the COREPER meeting in the Charlemagne building where we marched in and sat down facing the chairman, flanked by the other ambassadors, as is the routine, and Donald Maitland read out their report on the agenda for the next meeting of the Council. I deliberately made practically no comment on this and then said to him afterwards that, while I valued the luncheons and his calls upon me, I thought that these meetings were absolutely useless and I proposed not to go to them in future. He said he quite agreed, although he hoped very much that the luncheons would go on. This one was enjoyable, as I gave them at their request a Washington briefing and was able to have quite a good tease of both Maitland and Nanteuil about the ploys of their respective governments in trying to keep us out of the Summit preparatory meetings and trying to keep away from us documents which the Americans had been only too pleased to show us.

FRIDAY, 29 APRIL.
Brussels.

I received the King of the Belgians for his somewhat postponed visit to the Commission at 11.30. We had a Commission meeting with him for about one and a quarter hours, in which I introduced all the Commissioners to him, described what they each did and said a few words of welcome. I then asked first Haferkamp and then Cheysson to introduce a slightly but not excessively artificial discussion about North/South relations, followed by Davignon on the problems of the steel industry. After Davignon, Vouël, Tugendhat and Giolitti spoke. Everybody did rather well; perhaps particularly the King who asked some very sensible questions in his diffident way and
seemed thoroughly interested. Then a lunch, at which I talked half to him bilaterally and then widened the discussion for a further talk about a whole range of Community issues. We broke up at about 3.00 after a surprisingly successful and worthwhile occasion.

At 4.30, Hallstein,
¹⁰⁶
the
doyen
of ex-Presidents, came in for an hour. I went down to meet him at the front door. He was physically feeble, so that it took about five minutes to walk from the top of the lift to my room, and even longer for me to walk with him at the end from my room to Emile Noël's room. But he seemed thoroughly bright and alive in mind and was friendly and informative to talk to. I tried to discover how different things were in his day and got some impression. The Commission was a smaller, more intimate, tauter body. He was in the habit, he said, of addressing all the staff from the level of A2 (Director) and above after each important event, which might be two or three times a year. The Council obviously worked somewhat better and more intimately. The Parliament, he claimed, played almost as great a part in the life of the Commission as is the case now, although I remain sceptical about this. He never worked in the Berlaymont and clearly and rightly hated it as a building.

SATURDAY, 30 APRIL.
Brussels.

Perhaps the first real spring day. Drove via Ghent to Breskens where we took the ferry across to Vlissingen and through Middelburg to Veere, where we lunched sitting at the window in an old tower looking at an inlet of the sea speckled with sailing boats on very sparkling water. Then another walk along the dikes after lunch and then back by a different, further inland ferry and through St Niklaas and into Brussels by 6.30.

MONDAY, 2 MAY.
Brussels.

A Mitterrand
¹⁰⁷
visit at 11.30. Cheysson had approached me four or five weeks earlier and said that Mitterrand would like to visit the
Commission with one or two of his Socialist collaborators; would this be agreeable to me, and would I give him lunch? I said, ‘Yes, certainly, I would be thoroughly glad to see him, just as I would be to see Mrs Thatcher or Kohl.' Cheysson then asked me to keep the matter confidential until he had taken further soundings with Mitterrand, and I did not therefore speak to Ortoli or anyone else. But while I was away over Easter and in the United States, the Cheysson
cabinet,
merely discovering from my office that I would be in Brussels and free, and without consulting me, arranged the date of 2 May.

When we were informed of this in the United States I immediately sent Michael Jenkins to inform Ortoli, whose reaction was not enthusiastic but not violently hostile either. I then saw Ortoli when I got back and explained the position to him. He was still rather reserved about it but said it was much too late to put it off; he did not think it would do great damage (in Paris); we should try to play it in as low a key as possible. This indeed was what I endeavoured to do without erring on the side of discourtesy. I did not give Mitterrand anything like head of government treatment. I did not go down and meet him. I received him in what is normally my dining room, and did not invite photographs, although he came accompanied by a great barrage of press and television cameras. I then had an hour and a quarter's meeting with him at which Natali, Haferkamp and Cheysson were present throughout, with Davignon and Gundelach joining us in the course of the meeting. I had been particularly anxious that there should be a political balance of Commissioners and had therefore swollen the numbers by inviting Natali and Davignon as Christian Democrats. Gundelach was not on the original list, but Cheysson had particularly asked for him to come.

The meeting started slightly stickily–Mitterrand is not the easiest man to deal with–but improved as it went along. He made a good, clear statement about the French Socialists' commitment to direct elections and their opposition to the Gaullist/Communist view that these should be accompanied by a commitment to no further extension of the powers of the Parliament. On other matters, however, he appeared fairly unsatisfactory. He was very reserved about enlargement, accepting without enthusiasm the Portuguese application, was firmly opposed to Spain, and disinclined to accept that we were irreversibly down the road with Greece. He made a lot
of anti-American and protectionist remarks, and generally gave the impression of a complete Gaullist of the Left. He did, however, express himself firmly in favour, no doubt partly on anti-Giscard grounds, of the Community's presence at all parts of the Summit.

At lunch afterwards nearly all the other Commissioners turned up–I couldn't easily prevent their doing so as they all wished to meet Mitterrand. Ortoli, who had hovered and havered, eventually decided to turn up, and behaved thoroughly graciously. At the meal there was partly bilateral conversation between Mitterrand and me, during which I found him more easy and agreeable than during any previous encounter. He talked frankly and sensibly about his own position, saying two things in particular. (1) He thought that short of some international upheaval, i.e. some uprising in Eastern Europe or some great Yugoslav crisis, it was as certain as could be that the Left would win in France next spring and that he would then have to be asked to and would form a government under Giscard. (2) So far as 1981 was concerned, he expressed the view, rather to my surprise, that he might well be too old and it would therefore be a mistake to assume that the 1981 presidential election would take the form of a contest between him and Chirac
¹⁰⁸
At the end of lunch I avoided speeches by turning the conversation into a general discussion. He left soon after 3.00 and I said goodbye to him at the top of the lift shaft.
¹⁰⁹

TUESDAY, 3 MAY.
Brussels.

Foreign Affairs Council with a special restricted session on the Summit. David Owen told me privately beforehand that the final proposition from London was that I should be excluded from all the Saturday sessions which would deal with the general economic matters in the morning and then with non-proliferation in the afternoon. This was not satisfactory, but not a great surprise. When it was announced, all the Little Five expressed themselves very strongly against the arrangement. The Italians and the Germans said nothing and Guiringaud kept his head down. I argued the complete illogicality of the division. This part of the meeting was fairly but not very bad-tempered. David summed up in an embarrassed way saying that while it was a compromise it was bound, like all compromises, to be slightly untidy, and somewhat self-pityingly complained that others did not show sufficient sympathy for the extremely difficult position in which the British presidency had been placed.

I was besieged by British pressmen on the way out, who regarded this as a setback from the Rome position. But it was not really much worse than I had expected and I therefore tried to play it fairly cool. Then to a state dinner given by the King of the Belgians in the Palais de Bruxelles for Houphouët-Boigny (President of Côte d'Ivoire). The dinner itself, for about two hundred people, was very grand, in a splendid room, with all the style of Buckingham Palace. I sat between Tindemans, with whom I had an extremely interesting and agreeable general conversation, and Madame De Clercq, the wife of the Finance Minister, herself a fairly leading lawyer in Ghent.

WEDNESDAY, 4 MAY.
Brussels and Luxembourg.

Lunch at home for Emanuele Gazzo, the remarkable and wise editor of
Agence Europe,
a cyclostyled sheet which comes out every day in four languages and contains a great deal of detail about what goes on in the Commission, as well as some very sensible leading articles, and has considerable influence in Brussels.

Then by train to Luxembourg for the fourth of my inaugural visits. An hour with Thorn in his office before dinner. He had expressed himself very strongly at the Council the day before and
repeated this to the press, coining a good phrase on my Saturday exclusion. The Community isn't only a Community for Sundays,' he announced. Privately, however, his view was that we had not done too badly even though he held the position of the French and the British to be fairly intolerable.

I asked him about the British presidency and Britain's general standing in Europe. He said the presidency was going fairly badly and that the sense of disillusion was considerable. Perhaps unfairly, they put up with things from the French they wouldn't put up with from the British because they were used to the French and they were used to playing a tiresome game with them, and they could have one country doing this but they could not have two. Furthermore they had thought that when the British came in, while we would not bring great economic strength or wealth—but this they did not mind; indeed to some extent, in comparison with the past when we were much the richest country in Europe, they rather liked it—they had thought that we would bring a democratic infusion, and therefore our hesitancy over direct elections was a mystifying disappointment. And they had also thought that we would bring not so much a sense of efficiency, but a sense of fair play to our chairing of the various Councils, and therefore our handling of the Agricultural Council and of the Research Council had also been damaging.

THURSDAY, 5 MAY.
Luxembourg and Brussels.

I awoke with some sort of allergy, producing monstrous weals. There was no particular evidence that I felt unwell, although obviously rather apprehensive (what a farce if I could not go to the Summit after all!). I rang (Dr) Ann Phillips in Brussels and consulted her, she taking a reasonably reassuring view, and also made tentative soundings with Antony and Anne Acland,
¹¹⁰
with whom we were due to have a drink at 12.30, about the possibility of getting a doctor. One and a half hours' meeting with about half the Luxembourg Government, and then to the Grand Ducal Palace for an audience with the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess.

They were thoroughly agreeable—he charming, she sharper, sister of the King of the Belgians, but very unlike Baudouin -despite the fact that I had refused their invitation to dinner that evening on the thoroughly good grounds, which they appeared completely to understand, that I had to get back to Brussels and prepare for the Summit. The conversation essentially took the form of their asking me what I had thought of Carter and my describing this rather anecdotally, and then going on to the same thing at their prompting about Mitterrand, and to some sort of general discussion about Euro-Communism and the difference between the position and attitude of the Communist Party in France and Italy. The atmosphere of the Court was, curiously, slightly more formal and more like our own than the monarchies of Belgium and Holland.