European Diary, 1977-1981 (53 page)

In this interval I therefore paced up and down desperately to try and think of something funny to open with. Absolutely nothing came. I arrived in despair. However, the whole occasion gave me the impression from the beginning as being friendly and likely to be helpful. It seemed a much better atmosphere than when I had last been there twelve years before as a young Home Secretary. It was much fuller for one thing, and when I actually got up to speak several entirely impromptu mild jokes of the occasion came to me, so that the first five minutes were a great success and thereafter the speech followed through rather easily. Then a good question period, fast, easy questions, and so off with high morale for the 3 o'clock
shuttle to New York. We drove on a beautiful New York afternoon to Marietta Tree's apartment in Sutton Place.

From 5.15 I went to the Links Club and talked to a dozen bankers assembled by George Ball. They were all personally agreeable and basically friendly to the EMS. They were certainly a high-powered lot, including the main people from Chase, City Bank, Hanover, Chemical, etc., plus the head of IBM. At 8.00 Marietta had a large dinner party (thirty-four) with a fairly predictable grand New York mixture: Kissingers, Schlesingers, Betty Bacall, Kitty Carlisle,
⁷⁵
Bill Paley,
⁷⁶
Brooke Astor,
⁷⁷
Mrs Agnelli.
⁷⁸
I much enjoyed it.

SATURDAY, 16 DECEMBER.
New York.

A day off in New York. Took the Brian Urquharts to lunch at the Caravelle, went to the Metropolitan and the Frick in the afternoon, and dined on the West Side with the Irwin Ross's.

SUNDAY, 17 DECEMBER.
New York, Ann Arbor and Brussels.

8.30 plane to Detroit. Drove to Ann Arbor for lunch with the President of the University of Michigan and about forty other people at about 12 o'clock. It was a ghastly luncheon, not a drop to drink at the long reception beforehand—I hadn't expected anything at lunch—totally inedible food, and speeches, which again I hadn't expected, after lunch. Then over to the theatre for the commencement and honorary degree ceremony and my address to an audience of about four thousand. To be honest, I don't think the address went very well: it was a good speech, but too long, thirty-four minutes, and slightly too elaborately prepared, as well as trying to say too much. In any event I always find commencement addresses difficult, and the total absence of alcohol didn't help either. However, it passed off, the ceremony was over and we got away just after 4 o'clock and drove back to Detroit Airport on a sparkling, cold, clear winter afternoon.

La Guardia at 7.30, and the 8.45 Sabena plane from Kennedy to Brussels. Dinner and two hours' sleep before I awoke over Ireland.

MONDAY, 18 DECEMBER.
Brussels.

Another special Commission meeting at noon to try and extricate ourselves from any damage which might have been done by Vredeling's late-night one on Thursday. However, good work had been done over the weekend and it was fairly clear what view we should take on the budget. There had been irregularities in the Parliament's handling of the matter, but illegality should not be compounded with further illegality, and we should accept as a fact that the budget existed, and was certified as valid by Colombo as President of the Parliament, which was within his constitutional rights. This was our firm view, without any clear dissenters.

I gave lunch to Klaus von Dohnanyi, Sigrist and a third German. Klaus was more or less on time for once and we had an agreeable lunch with rather good talk. I lectured them a little on being pushed around by the French, which I hope they took reasonably well.

TUESDAY, 19 DECEMBER.
Brussels.

Foreign Affairs Council with lunch from 10.30 a.m. to 8.15 p.m., which was more than long enough. It was never tremendously productive and pretty boring for much of the time. What was not boring, but not agreeable either, was a 5 o'clock meeting, which I had at my request, with François-Poncet. I found him in a highly excitable state about the budget and everything else. He was at least trying to be agreeable most of the time and arguing with himself in some ways more than with me, saying, ‘No, I am a man of conciliation, I want to seek a solution, a political solution if possible. But if this goes wrong, the possibilities of damage are enormous, the Commission will be in the same position as the Hallstein Commission. We could call off direct elections, it could affect the whole future of the Community.'

The French do get into an enormously overexcited state and find it difficult to believe that there can be different interpretations of things and that people who don't agree with them are not necessarily knaves or fools. They treat people as craven, threaten them too
much, and believe that they will succumb to a ‘thunderbolts of Zeus' treatment. I think that it stems from the fact that the French Government is too hierarchical and authoritarian, and that they are all terrified if they can't bring home to Giscard exactly what he wants. This corrupts people like François-Poncet, who is in general a decent, sensible, intelligent man. The whole interview left a disagreeable taste in my mouth.

WEDNESDAY, 20 DECEMBER.
Brussels.

A morning Commission to 1.35, by which time we had succeeded with a little difficulty in completing all the business. Then a Commission Christmas lunch. Last year they complained that they hadn't been given enough traditional English food, so this year we organized Christmas puddings with brandy butter, mince pies and, of course, turkey. It was all quite successful, I thought, except the turkey, which was pretty badly cooked, appallingly carved and filled with what was supposed to be chestnut stuffing, but which tasted to me rather like stale liver pâté. However, that apart, the occasion wasn't too bad.

In the afternoon I went to the Greek negotiations from 4.45 to 6.30, which Natali was conducting very well. Then I saw Bassols, the Spanish Ambassador, who came in to announce (i) that the Spaniards were extremely pleased that we had got them the formal opening of the negotiations on 19 February, and (ii) that on reflection they would be extremely glad to work with Signor Papa as our representative in Madrid—a very typical example of the way in which one can get sensible results from Calvo Sotelo, though he would have done better not to have got into an untenable position to begin with.

Then home to the quadripartite dinner, with Ortoli, Gundelach and Davignon, which flowed from Ortoli's conversation with me when he was so apprehensive after the European Council. I think the occasion was worthwhile. They all talked well. It was certainly a social success and they stayed a good deal too late, until 12.45. We argued round the problems of relations with the French in particular, including the row, mainly between the French and the Germans, which had broken out over MCAs in the Agriculture Ministers Council. I am not sure that we arrived at any firm view
about how to proceed, except that we all thought that the Community faced a fairly critical six months in which the Commission had to steer a difficult and narrow course, but one could no doubt have predicted that without the dinner.

SATURDAY, 23 DECEMBER.
East Hendred.

I had a fairly excited evening telephone call from Cheysson, he having seen François-Poncet for two hours that morning, who was obviously going on trying to fulminate against the Commission, though not to my mind in any way more disturbingly so than he had done the previous week.

SUNDAY, 24 DECEMBER.
East Hendred.

To Oxford for an early evening drink in Univ. with Arnold Goodman. He had Ann Fleming and at least two other ladies staying, and we could feel mounting tension on Ann's part, although Arnold, always apparently blandly indifferent to atmosphere, was dispensing generalized benevolence and rising splendidly above this.

MONDAY, 25 DECEMBER.
East Hendred.

Mild and soggy, as usual on Christmas Day. For the first time ever, I think, I played tennis on Christmas afternoon.

THURSDAY, 28 DECEMBER.
East Hendred.

Lunch with the Wyatts at Connock. Arnold Weinstocks were also there. I continue to like him much more than I used to. We played croquet on a damp afternoon for too long, well into the twilight. I played with Weinstock, who was absolutely hopeless but, rather interestingly, instead of getting impatient with the game became anxious to go on and on, with a determined but misplaced faith that if he did he would quickly master it.

SATURDAY, 30 DECEMBER.
East Hendred and Hatley.

Hatley, with snow beginning to fall, at 4.30. Jakie had the Rothschilds to dine, bringing with them Alan Hodgkin, the new Master of Trinity and an exceptionally agreeable man, plus his American wife. I had a long talk with Tess (Rothschild) at dinner, who delivered elaborate apologies and nervous reactions from Victor about whether I was very offended with him for not finally agreeing to join the external review body. The answer is that I was somewhat fed up with his havering but certainly not to an extent of it causing continuing offence.

1978 has undoubtedly been immensely better, despite the setback in December, than 1977, though that perhaps is not saying all that much. For 1979 the prospect looks less good, more like 1977 I suspect, though I hope not as bad.

 

Of my four Brussels years, 1979 was the least dominated by one or two clear themes. In the first months of the year the EMS, which had been the
leitmotif
of 1978, was still waiting to be brought into operation. The French Government forced a delay because it proclaimed itself dissatisfied with the agro-money arrangements by which Monetary Compensatory Amounts could make the rates of exchange at which agricultural products were traded different from those generally prevailing. By early March, however, it allowed this problem, still unsolved, to be moved aside, thereby confirming my feeling that it was more a symptom of a burst of general Elysée
morosité
towards the Community than a root cause.

This
morosité
came at an unfortunate time, for it coincided with the French turn to assume the six-month presidency of the Council of Ministers (and consequently all the other inter-governmental institutions in the Community) at the beginning of January. The authority of Council presidencies varies substantially. A new member country can be overawed, a small country overstrained (in its diplomatic resources), and even a big old member country like Germany can suffer from a lack of coordination within its government. France was neither new nor small, and its government, whatever else could be said about it, did not suffer from a lack of coordination. The tradition and the expectation therefore were that France provided the most authoritative presidency of the Nine, good for Europe if the mood in Paris was constructive, extremely bumpy to work with for everybody, but above all for the Commission, if it was not.

The auguries at the beginning of 1979 were not good. At the Brussels European Council in December 1978 Giscard had shown unusually little concern for the susceptibilities of Italy or Ireland, or
even of Germany. The French had been further excited by the old nominated Parliament passing its last budget in a form which they (and several other governments) regarded as illegal, by Emilio Colombo as President of the Parliament nonetheless certifying it as valid, and by the Commission accepting this as a fact. The imminence of direct elections for the Parliament (due in June) did nothing to assuage these feelings. The French had never been keen on this advance, although loath to block it, and they rightly opined that the new Assembly (they insisted on denying it the name of Parliament) would be more presumptuous in general and more critical of the French agricultural interest in particular.

In addition there was Giscard's almost
ex-officio
determination that the Commission should not play too independent a role. De Gaulle had put down Hallstein. He, by contrast, had failed to keep me out of the Summits which were his own creation. But he was certainly not going to encourage the authority of the Commission. This had been a large part of his motivation for launching his idea of a
comité des sages
or ‘Three Wise Men'. He had got the proposition through the other governments but only in a form which meant that he quickly lost faith in the ability of those nominated to do the job he wanted done, which was to turn the Commission into a strengthened secretariat of a European Council to be presided over by a permanent President. He also, I think, wanted to use the French presidency to curb the independent prestige of the Commission.