European Diary, 1977-1981 (73 page)

Jennifer went to London and I went to see Cossiga, the new Italian Prime Minister, at 2 o'clock in the Palazzo Chigi. I hadn't seen him for three years, but had known him fairly well in 1975/6 when I was Home Secretary and he was Minister of the Interior. I thought him then a nice intelligent man and this impression was fully confirmed. Also, unlike most Italian politicians, he talks quite good English, but was not, however, quite naturally, anxious to do any very serious business except through an interpreter. We talked until 3.15, getting very hungry. He was much more reasonable than Malfatti had been and I think I was able to persuade him on a number of issues: first, that the Italians would make a great mistake to block any British solution, because their budget problem really had turned round, and though they had certain wider problems, they were on a somewhat longer time scale and the hope of solving these in a way satisfactory to Italy would certainly not be enhanced by taking a dog-in-the-manger attitude at this stage. Second, that it was essential that they should not just complain about the Commission's inability to propound solutions to problems which they did not formulate clearly, but that they must submit some more precise proposals, either by sending some high-level officials to Brussels, or by putting in clear papers.

We then adjourned to an excellent lunch (the
tartuffi
season is the peak of the Italian gastronomic year) before returning to Brussels.

WEDNESDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER.
Brussels
.

Lunch at home for Madame Veil. I found her a good deal different from my expectation following our July meeting. She is nicer and less sharp. Her conversation is engagingly babbling. There are never any silences, never any difficulty about finding something to say: things just come out as they come into her head, a mixture of gossip, how nice her penthouse suite in the Amigo Hotel was (I hope the
Cour des Comptes
don't get on to that too quickly), what she thought about Strasbourg, what difficulties she was having with various people, what she thought about Pflimlin, how she was going to deal with the problem of Parliament wanting to move. A mixture of quite important things and quite unimportant things, all spontaneously pouring out.

I think she feels somewhat lost with the Parliament, which is not surprising considering that she has never sat in a Parliament in her life, and is forming a fairly low view of most of the groups. The British Conservative Group she put at the top of the list, and probably rightly so, so far as coherence is concerned. She is very determined not to be intimidated by Debré, who had been firing heavy Gaullist guns on her flank about the inadmissibility, in his view, of the armaments debate which is scheduled for the September session. But she seemed fairly unshaken by that, and indeed generally gave the impression that the fears she would be Giscard's woman in the Parliament were misplaced. The real danger is that she will be a slightly incompetent President, not that she will be anybody's agent.

Then back to the Commission for a rather excessively long session, from 3.40 to 7.50. However, in the course of this, we satisfactorily disposed of the reference paper, which had looked in real trouble the week before, but as a result of some re-editing and a good deal of lobbying of the more important Commissioners we managed to get through in a tolerable form. Home pretty tired at 8.15, but no respite as the Spierenburg group arrived to dine almost immediately and stayed until nearly midnight. It was mainly a thank-you dinner to them towards the end of their work, but we had some interesting conversation and I found them all in quite good morale.

SATURDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER.
East Hendred, London and East Hendred
.

Edward's wedding day and a most beautiful morning. Motored from East Hendred to the Savoy Restaurant, the Grill being closed, and at 12.30 installed ourselves in the window and waited rather a long time—despite the fact that they had been anxious to be early—for the children, all of whom eventually arrived together, Edward with his very agreeable Canadian best man. Set-piece family luncheons are liable to be a slight strain, but this one was agreeable.

The wedding in the Temple Church went off very well. I suppose there were 150/200 people, an amazing proportion of them wearing morning coats. I was surprised at the number of our old friends, because I had encouraged nobody to do it, who turned up so attired (Mark Bonham Carter, Ronald McIntosh, Madron Seligman
²⁹
), but what was far more striking was the very high proportion of the young who did so; they obviously rather like dressing up. The church was attractive and the presiding clergyman was good. So was the music, though a little unusual, and the scene was much improved by the fact that the west door, through which Sally came with her father (the guests had entered from a south door at the side), remained open throughout with crisp, clear, cool September sunlight streaming in the whole time.

Then we at first stood about in the piazza-like courtyard outside the church and I wished we had arranged the reception there—it would have been just about the right temperature. But eventually we moved into Middle Temple Hall where everything went on for a surprisingly long time, from 4.00 to 6.30 or so, but quite satisfactorily. The best man's speech was perceptive about Edward and funny in bits. The whole thing was tremendously traditionally done, to a far greater extent than I had expected, cutting the cake, champagne, confetti for the departure of the bride and groom and God knows what else.

MONDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER.
Brussels
.

Roy Mason, accompanied by Gavin Strang, his assistant agricultural spokesman, to dinner at home with Jennifer. Mason was in
one sense very agreeable, very pro-European, even prepared to defend almost all aspects of the CAP, which seems to me to be pushing it a bit, and I think enjoyed himself (and wrote a nice letter afterwards). But he is incredibly obscurantist (straight Paisleyite, as Jennifer put it) on Northern Ireland, where his lack of imagination and inability to understand
any
of the Catholic case really were absolutely shattering. He just loves the Northern Ireland Protestants. Also he is a remarkably insensitive man in other ways. After dinner he held forth in a great set piece about the terrible rigours of his security protection and how he was under constant threat, which may well be so, but all done as though he were addressing three friendly members of his General Management Committee in Barnsley, with not the slightest hint of understanding that I knew anything about these security problems or had ever been Home Secretary.

TUESDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER.
Brussels
.

In the margins of the Foreign Affairs Council I had a good bilateral talk with Dohnanyi, which was interesting because he was very keen to get out of me what I thought was a sum on which it would be possible to settle with the British, and to tell him what I thought the scale of the problem was. I said I thought one could envisage a settlement at around 1000 million units of account. I couldn't be pinned to this, but if he wanted some idea of an order of magnitude, this is what I would insert into his mind.

THURSDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER.
Brussels
.

An interview with a lady called Miss Keays who has been recommended to us as a replacement for Patricia Smallbone when she gets married at Christmas. I thought she was rather good in spite of having a very Tory background, and pretty well decided to engage her. Celia is a bit worried about her because she thinks she is too strong a personality; she will find it very difficult to be as strong a personality as Celia!

SATURDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER.
Brussels and Fontainebleau
.

Drove to Fontainebleau, or more precisely the Hôtel Bas Bréau at Barbizon, and on a most beautiful, cool, sunlit day, lunched in the
garden of this rather flash establishment. (A
‘baiserdrome'
, the Beaumarchais' described it as when they arrived to lunch next day, though the appearance of most of the other guests didn't make this terribly plausible.)

At 4.30 on the outskirts of Fontainebleau we had the INSEAD ceremony for the opening of their academic year. There were several preliminary speeches, all quite good, one by Olivier Giscard d'Estaing, one by the President of INSEAD, one by Uwe Kitzinger,
³⁰
who gave a striking and dramatic performance, starting in German and switching to English; and then mine.

SUNDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER.
Fontainebleau and Brussels
.

After running early in the forest, I was driven into Fontainebleau to buy the newspapers and had a cup of coffee in a café opposite the château. I had hardly been in Fontainebleau or at a zinc
comptoir
since 1938, and was suddenly transported back to Third Republican France. Then we drove to near the obelisk and got a most memorable ‘September morn' view of the château (west facade). Lunch again in the garden of the hotel, during which Ortoli telephoned to say that they were locked in discussions with the Finance Ministers as there was the first EMS readjustment of currencies (certainly the Danish kroner, maybe the Belgian franc going down, the mark going up) being negotiated.
³¹
Back to Brussels by the early evening train from Paris.

TUESDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER.
Brussels and Strasbourg
.

8.16 train to Strasbourg (no avion taxis these days) feeling nervous of the new Parliament which we had hardly met in July and which, after two months away, would surely have sharpened its teeth. Even the two relatively easy questions which I had to answer filled me with apprehension. They passed easily, however.

After a late sitting of the Parliament I attended a dinner which
Mme Veil was rather ineffectively organizing. First I had invited her to lunch and she had riposted by saying it should be her lunch. Then she changed it to dinner. Then she asked all the other available members of the Commission without telling me. Then she changed the time on no fewer than three occasions during the day: first, it was to be 8.00, in an adjournment of the Parliament, then it was to be 10.30, then it was back to 8.00, then it was back to whenever the Parliament was adjourned. We eventually assembled in a slightly bad temper in the Sofitel at about 10.15. It was a highly francophone dinner, which is quite good for me from time to time, although the main conversation between Mme Veil and Ortoli and Cheysson I found a bit fast, but they are fully entitled occasionally to get their own back on us anglophones.

The main interest of the dinner emerged only in retrospect. Vredeling, the fourth member of the Commission present, was next to me and appeared throughout to be perfectly sober. However, at some stage after 12.15 a.m. he got involved in an affair with ‘Chrystal'. I was not sure, when it was first reported to me, whether this was a form of glass or a German lady. It subsequently became clear that it was a question of glass, for in a fit of anger with some Dutch MEP at some unspecified time later in the night, he had picked up a heavy ashtray, thrown it, missed (I suppose fortunately) the MEP, lightly grazed the chandelier and shattered a plate glass window. The cost was £5000; the cost to Vredeling's morale was much higher.

THURSDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER.
Strasbourg
.

To the Parliament at 11.15 to attend the budget debate, begun by Christopher Tugendhat with a very good speech. Afterwards I gave lunch to the British Labour Group. They were all quite agreeable. They nearly all turned up, although, apparently and typically, they had had a great debate (I am not sure they hadn't even had a vote) as to whether or not they should come. It was almost like the legendary motion of sympathy on an MP's illness carried by nine votes to seven, with eight abstentions. However, there was no trace of this in their behaviour. Barbara Castle made a nice speech at the end of lunch, to which I responded.

MONDAY, 1 OCTOBER.
East Hendred and Vienna
.

To Vienna, to be met on the tarmac by Kreisky
³²
together with a great array of lesser dignitaries. At the Imperial Hotel I was installed in enormous grandeur (thank God there was no question of our having to pay the bill). It was rather a pleasure to be back in Vienna, where I had not been for twenty-three years and which I found surprisingly unchanged.

At 3.00 a meeting with the President of the Republic, Kirch-schläger
³³
a non-political former diplomat, who has been elected as an Independent (although a Socialist nominee) and who is a tall, distinguished man, who held an entirely appropriate head of state conversation with me. We discussed the evolution of Austria's foreign policy since 1945 in general but interesting terms and also the internal balance and the problems of one party holding power for a long time. It was a worthwhile talk in the splendid room where Francis II had worked and died at his desk, the ante-room being the bedroom where Maria Theresa had died. The Austrians have official buildings of extraordinary grandeur, greater I think than is so in almost any other country. The Italians are in a high class, the Germans in a low class for obvious reasons, even the French I think not quite as grand as the Austrians, nor the British.

Then across the courtyard for another hour's meeting in the Chancellor's office. This was the old Ballhausplatz of pre-1914 diplomatic fame. In the ante-room here is the spot where Dolfuss was shot. (There is no lack of notable death sites in Austria.) I talked with Kreisky about a variety of things, but not least the Labour Party, in which he is extremely interested from the Socialist International point of view, and the leadership of which he was rather naïvely asking me to go back and take over. I explained to him the impossibility of this and disclosed a little of my thought about the re-orientation of British politics, which was somewhat of a shock to him. Although he thinks the Labour Party is appalling, he nonetheless has a typical Germano/Austrian reluctance to comprehend any organizational break.

After that, a meeting with ministers, over which he presided,
which was detailed but not difficult. The problem of relations with Austria is that they are at once outside the Community and a crossroads of the Community. Perhaps we could give them some money to build a new autobahn on what is called the Gästenarbeiter route. It is appallingly overcrowded at the moment with traffic from the Community through to Yugoslavia and Greece, and it will become worse as a result of Greek accession.