European Diary, 1977-1981 (41 page)

Towards the end he suddenly raised the question of the reform of Community institutions, saying that this was a personal view of his, a lot of the French Government didn't share it, etc., but he was particularly worried about the presidency of the Council of Ministers and of the European Council and thought these ought to be done on a semi-permanent basis by someone who had been a major figure in the national government of a big country. I wasn't clear whether he intended this to be something—which indeed it might be—which would greatly devalue the Commission, or something which could be amalgamated with the presidency of the Commission, though I doubt this.

From the Elysée I went to see first the Hendersons and then the Beaumarchais' before travelling back to Brussels alone on the 8.30 TEE, dining—or rather ordering dinner, because it was almost completely uneatable—along the Oise. But I still like rolling across the plains of northern France on a long summer evening, even with a lot of clouds, which at least produce constantly changing light.

FRIDAY, 23 JUNE.
Brussels.

Into the office late to see Ambassador Harriman, not, however, Averell, but an agreeable Nigerian who is the United Nations Commissioner for Anti-Apartheid. I then gave a drink, with a speech and questions, to fourteen Dutch editors, lunched at home with Jennifer alone, and returned to the office to give an interview to an allegedly 7-million-circulation Japanese newspaper: a rather formal visit from the editor and three supporting journalists, but fortunately it seemed at the time to go rather well and lasted no less than one and a half hours.

Woodrow and Verushka Wyatt arrived to stay the weekend, but I had to go to the Palais d'Egmont for a dinner for the Federation of Socialist Parties which was meeting to draw up a direct elections manifesto. I had bilateral conversations with Brandt and den Uyl before dinner, at dinner with Mitterrand and Craxi,
⁸⁸
and after dinner with Soares of Portugal (for a long time), and Gonzales of Spain (for a short time). It was a good round-up of the great and the good of the European Left. There were brief speeches at dinner from Simonet, who was giving the dinner, Pontillon, who was the nominal President, and Brandt, who was much the most senior man there.

SATURDAY, 24 JUNE.
Brussels.

Took the Wyatts for my regular
giro
of Brussels, from the Forêt de Soignes to the Grand'Place. K. B. Andersen, the Danish Foreign Minister, accompanied by Ersbøll and Riberholdt, arrived for an hour's meeting at home before dinner. Then, at 8.30, we turned this into a social dinner as a mark of appreciation of K. B. Andersen's presidency of the Council of Ministers. This went very well. The Wyatts got on excellently with the Danes, and the Danes were nice and sensible, as they nearly always are. Half seriously they attributed Danish prosperity to the fact that they had never had any basic industries worth speaking of to run down: no coal, no steel, no shipbuilding, no textiles, no heavy engineering. All done on pigs, beer and porcelain.

MONDAY, 26 JUNE.
Brussels and Luxembourg.

Jennifer left for London after a fourteen-day visit to Brussels. Following the new Chinese Ambassador, I saw Talboys,
⁸⁹
the deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, whom I like very much indeed and whom I got without great difficulty to say quite clearly that the sheep meat regime, as at present proposed, caused them little difficulty. It was possible future changes which worried them.

Avion taxi to Luxembourg for the Foreign Affairs Council, which sat for five hours until nearly 10 p.m. There was a good deal of wrangling about the treatment of human rights in the Lomé Convention, of which most notably David Owen, but several other people too, were making very heavy weather.

TUESDAY, 27 JUNE.
Luxembourg and Brussels.

I took time off from the Council to see John Davies, the British Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, and give him some briefing about our attitude towards Australia and New Zealand. He was easily reassured on these points and anxious to be helpful, being more concerned about African questions and Soviet penetration there.

Lunch for Genscher and two of his collaborators at the Golf Club, the postponed meal from before he took over the presidency. Not a great deal of business was discussed but he was interesting in an anecdotal way.

Back to the Council from 3.15 to 6.30.1 then decided I had had enough and returned to Brussels by avion taxi. I had Charlie Douglas-Home
⁹⁰
to dinner and enjoyed talking to him, partly about Iberian enlargement and partly about the royal prerogative in Britain, on which he is writing a book.

THURSDAY, 29 JUNE.
Brussels and Bath.

12.35 plane to London, and then in the early evening of a day of pouring rain had a horrible slow drive to Bath, for the university
dinner before my honorary degree the following morning. I enjoyed the dinner, liked the Vice-Chancellor and his wife and the Mayor and Mayoress of Bath, as well as the Chancellor, Lord Hinton, and delivered quite a reasonably successful twenty-minute speech of the occasion to an audience of about 150/200.

SATURDAY, 1 JULY.
East Hendred.

To Buscot Parsonage at 9.15 p.m. for Diana Phipps's great opera ball. It really was a most extraordinary occasion, dinner for five hundred people, at tables of ten or twelve, all placed. My only concession was my Abruzzan cloak over a dinner jacket, and there was a fair number of other people who were dressed as no more than the conductor or the audience. There were some spectacular costumes, some successful, some not. George Weidenfeld,
⁹¹
as some vague eighteenth-century figure, looked surprisingly convincing, Claus Moser
⁹²
arguably a little less so because he had a more elaborate costume. Noel Annan as Prince Gremin also looked surprisingly authentic, as though he was in a perfectly natural uniform for him to wear as Vice-Chancellor or Provost.

The most spectacular-looking woman was Jessica Douglas-Home as the governess in
The Turn of the Screw,
who arrived in a governess cart with her two children, quickly disposed of for the evening, though the horse remained and was rather a nuisance. The Harlechs were paired as the Pharaoh and Phareen from
Aïda
, and poor David, who was sitting next but one to me at dinner, was so encrusted in golden armour that he had to spend most of his time trying to get bits of breast-plate off in order to be able to talk, eat, or do almost anything (he had already removed his helmet). Dinner went on for the greater part of the time we were there. We left about 12.45, as we were both tired. The weather was sad. Nonetheless it didn't ruin the occasion, which was a fantastic feat of organization (and extravagance) on Diana's part.

MONDAY, 3 JULY.
East Hendred, Warwickshire and London.

Accompanied by Nicko Henderson, I drove to Stoneleigh to open the Royal Show at 11.15. A curious, rather enjoyable, gathering. I addressed an audience of somewhere between two and four thousand, who were some distance away from me on a cold, windy morning. They listened surprisingly well to some tough warning words about milk, and some more acceptable ones about European monetary arrangements. Then a tour of part of the Show, which was impressive. Then a press conference, which I had been reluctant to do, at which rather sensible questions were asked, and then lunch in the Royal Pavilion, where the admirable Henry Plumb sat surrounded by two duchesses, the old Duchess of Gloucester and the less old Duchess of Devonshire.

Then with Nicko by train from Coventry to Euston for my meeting with Callaghan from 6.00 to 7.20. On European monetary advance he was obviously rather ‘miffed' (indeed I think this was, rather surprisingly, the word he actually used) that he hadn't been more closely consulted, although in fact (unless he took the view that Schmidt and Giscard should never meet on their own without him) he had nothing to be ‘miffed' about, because he had already been sent (whether he had read it I was not sure) a version of the so-called Schulmann/Clappier paper,
¹
which was more than I had seen at that stage, or indeed the Italians or the Little Five. However, the significant thing was that he
felt
‘miffed' and announced that he was declining the invitation to come before lunch to Bremen on the following Thursday in order to have a tripartite meeting. He claimed that it was very difficult because of a Cabinet meeting, but not with much conviction. As usual, on these recent occasions, he was agreeable, sensible, affable.

At the end of our discussion Callaghan kept me back alone for a short time, and then asked what I wanted done about my re-nomination as President.
²
He didn't want there to be any suggestion, as there had been last time with the French, that they were
hanging back so far as Ortoli's renomination was concerned. Would I like him to propose it at Bremen? I said I hardly thought this was necessary, and it was not exactly the same position as with the French in 1974, because he was not occupying the presidency (of the Council). However, it ended by his saying that he would do anything I wished, and adding: ‘Would you be all right if Mrs Thatcher were to be there after October?' In all electoral conversations I have had with him, most of them conducted tangentially in this way, he has never given the impression of overconfidence, which is very sensible on his part.

TUESDAY, 4 JULY.
London and Luxembourg.

Took off from Northolt for Luxembourg just after 8 o'clock, entirely alone apart from the two pilots in the little plane, and a pretty disagreeable journey it was with the whole of Western Europe covered in endless layers of dirty cloud of almost limitless cubic capacity.

To the Parliament at 10.15, only a little late for the beginning of the Genscher speech, and sat in until 1.00, when I made a brief intervention. In the afternoon I worked in the Cravat Hotel, trying to clear my thoughts by writing a sort of letter to myself in advance of the Bremen Summit. Then I saw Deane Hinton, the American Ambassador, he having come to deliver some sort of
démarche
which I, or indeed he, didn't take too seriously, about the dangers of the MTNs going wrong in Geneva. This was a predictable artillery barrage before the engagement.

In the evening I drove in pouring rain down to Ehnen on the Mosel and the German frontier, where I had last dined on a baking evening almost exactly two years ago, and where on this occasion I gave Gaston Thorn, Prime Minister of Luxembourg, a three-hour dinner. I discovered that he had been fairly well briefed, but not shown the paper, about the Clappier/Schulmann work, having received a visit the previous day from Clappier. Clappier had done Luxembourg and Rome, and Schulmann it appeared had been to Belgium, Holland and Denmark. Nobody, alas, had thought to go to Ireland.

WEDNESDAY, 5 JULY.
Luxembourg, Bonn and Brussels.

A difficult Commission meeting from 9.00 to 10.15. Ortoli tried to make a great row with Vredeling because of the insulting remarks which Vredeling had made about the French Government at a press conference in Rome following the breakdown of the Social Council, at which the French had been isolated and intransigent. Vredeling had some justification, although he had obviously blown off rather foolishly. What was striking on this occasion was that this hot-tempered, irascible man didn't rise much to Ortoli's complaint, which, as Francis told me subsequently, was a great disappointment to him. Vredeling confined himself to saying that he had been mistranslated, that he had used the Dutch word ‘dum', which he implausibly claimed meant ‘without reasons given', rather than, as one might assume, ‘stupid', ‘imbecile'. (I was subsequently assured by the Dutch Foreign Minister that what it meant was precisely ‘stupid', if not something stronger.)

Crispin and I then left to motor to Bonn. Rather good country between Trier and Coblenz, though the weather was dismal as on every recent day. Bonn at 1 o'clock (German time) for lunch with Schmidt, for once not alone, but he with Schulmann and I with Crispin. This lasted until 3.40 and was immensely worthwhile. Schmidt began by saying, not altogether untypically, that he was feeling very unwell. He had got some bug in Zambia, as a result of which he could not eat much. He drank a rather eccentric mixture of port and coca-cola, and ate at least as much as I did, but this was because the meal was, by any standards, strictly inedible, and he was presumably used to it. At one stage he told us how he ran the whole of Germany from the Chancellery with a staff of, I think, thirty-eight, and it was at least clear that none of the thirty-eight was a qualified chef.

However, the conversation more than made up for this. He described his various plans for Bremen, and who had been consulted and who had not. I told him about Callaghan's slight sense of being left out and warned him he ought to try and deal with this. He gave us the paper, and also gave us some British paper which had been sent to them but of which I had never heard previously, and indeed never heard of again. We also talked about MTNs, about which he expressed some apprehension, having obviously been
pressurized by the Americans a little, as we had, and being quite willing to give way to them, but I said the moment for that had certainly not arisen. But it was altogether a highly satisfactory and friendly conversation, in which at one stage he went out of his way, which was peculiarly gracious for him, to say that I underestimated how much an influence I had had at our various meetings on the whole development of his thought on European monetary affairs and, indeed, European affairs in general.

Crispin and I then drove back in filthy weather to Brussels and went into the office for about an hour and a half. Ortoli insisted on coming to see me at 7.15 and I gave him a brief rundown on Bonn, including, with slight hesitation, showing but not giving him the Clappier/Schulmann paper. Schmidt had given it to me with great stress on secrecy, saying, which was true, that the Little Five, and indeed I believe the Italians, had not actually seen the paper, which made me a little hesitant about showing it to anyone else, particularly knowing the state of Schmidt/Ortoli relations.