European Diary, 1977-1981 (88 page)

THURSDAY, 29 MAY.
Brussels.

Meeting with Colombo in my office from 10.30 to 11.45. Then the Commission again at noon. I tried to catch back a bit of what Hannay had complained about the previous evening: very partial success. In a minority of two with Tugendhat, which I had never been near in the Commission before.

The fateful Foreign Affairs Council started at 3.30 and went on, with a break in the middle during which we got our paper ready and
presented it, to 8.30 p.m. The gap appeared wide in early exchanges (the Council was entirely devoted to the BBQ, apart from purely routine items). Then we adjourned and dined from 9.15 to 11.15. Neither François-Poncet nor Genscher was there. In the latter case, this did not matter at all as Dohnanyi was active, less inhibited, keen on a solution, and knew the
dossier
much better than Genscher. In the former case it may or may not have been an advantage. François-Poncet, I assumed, would be harder and sharper than Bernard-Reymond, who had not been particularly difficult in the early session. But at dinner Bernard-Reymond became very awkward and prickly, saying that he could not possibly stay the next day, giving a series of unconvincing excuses about what he had to do in Paris—something to do with the Pope's visit—but nothing seemed to hold together very well, and Peter Carrington became extremely irritated with him. The atmosphere for an hour or so at dinner deteriorated to such an extent that Carrington was on the point of breaking off the negotiations before they had even started. Fortunately, Ian Gilmour, with great nerve and firmness, got him off that. Even so, it still appeared that, the gap being still wide, though possibly not unbridgeable, the only thing to do was to adjourn and meet again, possibly on the Saturday, which Bernard-Reymond again said he could not do, possibly the Sunday, which was not attractive, or the Monday. However, Colombo, with very good judgement, gently rejected this and said no, no, what he thought we should do was to proceed by a series of individual discussions with the heads of delegations, which he and I would conduct, and see how far we could get.

Therefore we settled down at 11.30 at night, Colombo and I, Crispin, Renato Ruggiero and Plaja also in the room most of the time, and proceeded to see everybody. The exact order I cannot remember. I think we began with Bernard-Reymond and Carrington, or vice versa, but without getting particularly far, though Peter by this time had recovered his equanimity and was agreeable and quite skilful.

Then we saw Dohnanyi, who came in with a great scheme. He thought he could see a way through and he presented his solution with confidence and lucidity, and indeed it seemed to me a perfectly possible basis for settlement. Then we saw Carrington again and I presented it to him. He was not as enthusiastic as I expected,
but thought there might be something in it, so we went on with further discussions. We saw the Benelux ministers together, and they did not make too much difficulty, though this was quite late in the night and they were a bit discontented at not having been brought in earlier: the Luxembourgeois in particular, for some reason or other, but the Dutch too, the new Belgian Minister (Nothomb) being rather easier. The Irish were remarkably amenable, the Danes a bit sticky as usual, but not impossible.

Then we saw the three main ones again several times; this process went on until about 6.30 in the morning, when we seemed to be getting near to a settlement. We then broke up for some time: there had been other intervals during the night during which I had to sustain myself with Irish whiskey, which I do not much like, for the bar for some curious reason had run out of all other supplies. By the morning the only real difficulty remaining, provided the French would accept—it was by no means clear either that they would or that they would not—was the question of a linkage between the 1981 agricultural payments and the supplementary payments to the British for that year. In other words, the French—or anyone else if they so wished—would have an opportunity to block if they did not like the view the British took about the agricultural price settlement. This, rather against my will, was in our paper, and it had been made semi-explicit at the insistence of nearly all the other members of the Commission who took part during the night, Davignon, Ortoli, Gundelach—a powerful trio.

The British said they could not possibly accept this. If it was explicit they could not defend it in the House of Commons. I tried hard to get them to do so, and indeed Ian Gilmour was in favour of taking the risk. Peter Carrington was not. We then had a series of agitated comings and goings, in the course of which Ortoli and I had our second row of the Council. The first had been after my statement in the pre-dinner session when he said I had presented the issue in an unbalanced way—he was in a very agitated state all the time—no doubt under great Paris pressure. But as is mostly the case with Francis, as soon as we had had that row he apologized and more or less made it up. But on this early morning occasion he was huffing and puffing and walking around looking even more like Brezhnev than usual, and was clearly very tense. So was I, for that matter. This row remained unresolved.

FRIDAY, 30 MAY.
Brussels and East Hendred.

There was great pressure from the Benelux ministers in particular to get back to a plenary session, so we resumed at 7.15 a.m. and went on until 10.10, though we were suspended from 8.00 to 9.45. First, we had the problem of getting round the linkage problem. We set up a drafting committee of officials under Stevy (Davignon) in the chair (the British complaining he would be a very partial chairman). This committee curiously and surprisingly produced a satisfactory formula: it was extremely, almost excessively, simple, but ingenious. Emile Noël, typically and with a sudden shaft of subtle brilliance, was the author. It seemed to say nothing and might, I suppose, mean different things to different people. However, it had been accepted by Michael Butler and Hannay who had been in the committee for the British.

The French were a little reluctant to accept it, but there was then a considerable effort to persuade them on Davignon's part, who seemed to have swung round, and on Emile's, who naturally had the pride of authorship. They both argued with the French in a huddle behind their places at the table for some time, after which the French asked for a suspension for a quarter of an hour. This lasted not fifteen but ninety-five minutes.

When the French eventually trooped back into the room, my heart was almost literally in my mouth because I thought that after all this interminable work, and being so near to a result, it was going to be a repetition of Luxembourg, with the whole thing coming apart at the end. But miraculously and mysteriously the French announced quite simply that they would accept, but that they wanted a bit of the original British draft put in as well! Then I thought for a moment that the British were going to be sticky, but no, they accepted too, and the whole thing was over by just after 10 o'clock, eighteen and a half hours after we had begun. It was a prodigious achievement, leaving me exhausted but with a sense that something I did not believe could have come off had really been achieved and achieved very effectively. For the moment I even forgot the bitter thought that all the effort on the part of Colombo, Carrington, Gilmour and others, and all the strain on my relations with my Commission colleagues, was made necessary only by a foolish woman's stubborn whim a month before. The new
settlement was only cosmetically different from that which Mrs Thatcher had turned down at Luxembourg.

We got back into my Berlaymont room at 10.20, had a glass or two of champagne to celebrate and then after an hour or so I went home to rue de Praetère, had a large breakfast there at noon, caught the 12.45 and got to East Hendred by 2 o'clock. I slept fairly contentedly all the afternoon. Still good weather.

SATURDAY, 31 MAY.
East Hendred.

Up at 9.15, did a certain amount of telephoning in the morning to try to find out what was happening within the British Government, and then went to meet Marie-Alice (de Beaumarchais) at Didcot. Brought her back for lunch, to which the Gilmours also came. I had discovered on the telephone beforehand that the picture was that Ian and Peter Carrington had an extremely frosty reception from Mrs Thatcher at Chequers where they had gone straight from the airport and had had altogether three and a half hours with her, not apparently being offered even a drink, let alone lunch, until 2.30 Brussels time. Then a drink, produced rather reluctantly on a direct request from Peter Carrington, followed by a late and apparently not very adequate lunch. But it was not so much the refreshment as the atmosphere which depressed them, for there was no sense of welcoming them back as heroes from the battlefront, but of being extremely reluctant to accept what they had so unexpectedly and successfully negotiated. They left her feeling that she was going to see how things developed over the weekend and by no means necessarily going to recommend the settlement to the Cabinet. However, the press on Saturday morning had been quite satisfactory.
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SUNDAY, 1 JUNE.
East Hendred.

Lunch at home for Marie-Alice, Ann Fleming, Wyatts and Charles. Croquet in the afternoon. Gordon Richardsons to a drink at 6.30. Drove to the Monument after dinner for the view in the twilight. An agreeable weekend, a sense of achievement, and a major weight lifted.

TUESDAY, 3 JUNE.
East Hendred and Brussels.

9.45 plane to Brussels. Relatively calm morning except for the
Daily Mail
having a front-page story announcing that I was resigning from Brussels immediately to launch a new party. I did not take it too seriously, but it obviously caused a certain amount of agitation and excitement. We issued a firm denial during the morning saying that I was definitely staying until the end of the year. Nevertheless, with the BBQ temporarily out of the way, British politics were beginning to loom. My speech at the Press Gallery on the following Monday and the form it should take was already weighing on my mind.

FRIDAY, 6 JUNE.
Brussels and East Hendred.

East Hendred by 8.00, where Bonham Carters and Hayden and Laura had all arrived to stay just before me (Jennifer in Edinburgh). After dinner gave them an outline for my speech for Monday. Mark rather sensibly was inclined to take the view that if he were me he would say as little as possible, but this was not the view of the others nor at that stage mine.

SUNDAY, 8 JUNE.
East Hendred.

Half-way through lunch Shirley Williams rang up to ask if I had heard her on
The World at One
and I said alas, not. She said she hoped I would agree with what she had said and was very friendly. As in fact what she had said, which was much quoted subsequently, was that a centre party was out because it would have no roots, no conscience, no principles, no God knows what else, this was rather a curious telephone call, particularly as I, not knowing what she had said, nonetheless thought it a good idea to run through my speech with her, which I did, and she said it was more or less all right. (It did not of course actually mention a centre party as such.) She merely asked for a change at the end where I referred to a possible revival of Liberal and Social Democratic Britain. She said, ‘Couldn't you use small letters and leave out the “and” - “liberal social democratic Britain”?' Thinking that if Paris was worth a Mass, Shirley was certainly worth an ‘and' (and a lower case) I
decided to do so, after which we rang off on terms of great amity. She said she was sure we would all be together in six months or so.

MONDAY, 9 JUNE.
East Hendred and London.

Motored to London. Poisoned finger (which had developed on Saturday) worse. To Kensington Park Gardens for a short time, where there were a lot of photographers. Then to the House of Commons for the Parliamentary Press Gallery speech. Large, packed audience. The speech took just under half an hour, and I answered, not particularly well or particularly badly, three or four questions afterwards. Reception more or less all right, but not wildly enthusiastic. You could hardly expect that with an audience of hard-boiled journalists seasoned by a few parliamentary guests like Neil Kinnock.
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However, Tom Bradley and one or two other friends who were there seemed quite tolerably pleased. I went off feeling rather like Guy Fawkes having set fire to a fuse and wondering what on earth was going to happen.

A meeting with Lindley, Phipps etc., from 7.00 to 8.30, by which time the speech was all over the evening papers and dominating the news bulletins. They were obviously pleased with the impact and so was I, at the time at any rate.

John Harris came to dine and we watched the various news bulletins, including hearing Denis Healey describe it as ‘all bunkum'. This was done aggressively rather than skilfully by Denis, though he was able to use Shirley's words of Sunday with considerable effect.

TUESDAY, 10 JUNE.
London and Brussels.

The speech was dominant in the newspapers, with a good deal of fairly adverse comment. The
Guardian
had a definitely unfriendly leader. So did one or two other papers, but the
Financial Times
was much more friendly than it had been after the Dimbleby Lecture.
The Times
was not bad, the populars mixed, but all giving it a great deal of space. Had barely time to take them in before leaving for the 9.45 plane to Brussels.

The President of Costa Rica for a brief meeting at 7.30, followed
by a Berlaymont dinner for him. An agreeable and interesting Central American, but my mind somewhat on other things.

WEDNESDAY, 11 JUNE.
Brussels.

Home at 4.15 p.m. and tried to sleep off exhaustion for a bit but in fact by this time I had got into a thorough gloom about the speech, which I was beginning increasingly to think had been a major tactical error. It took me to a ledge on the cliff-face from which it was going to be very difficult to get up or down. Had a mildly reassuring telephone conversation with David Steel.