The Downing Street Years (128 page)

I was no less conscious of those millions of eastern Europeans living under communism. How could a tightly centralized, highly regulated, supra-national European Community meet their aspirations and needs? Arguably, it was the Czechs, Poles and Hungarians who were the real — indeed the last — European ‘idealists’; for to them Europe represented a precommunist past, an idea which symbolized the liberal values and national cultures that Marxism had sought unsuccessfully to snuff out.

This wider Europe, stretching perhaps to the Urals and certainly to include that New Europe across the Atlantic, was an entity which made at least historical and cultural sense. And in economic terms, only a truly global approach would do. This then was my thinking as I turned my mind to what would be the ‘Bruges Speech’.

The hall in which I made my speech was oddly arranged. The platform from which I spoke was placed in the middle of the long side so that the audience stretched far to my left and right, with only a few rows in front of me. But the message got across well enough. And it was not only my hosts at the College of Europe in Bruges who got more than they bargained for. The Foreign Office had been pressing me for several years to accept an invitation to speak there to set out our European credentials.

I began by doing what the Foreign Office wished. I pointed out just how much Britain had contributed to Europe over the centuries and how much we still contributed, with 70,000 British servicemen stationed there. But what was Europe? I went on to remind my audience that, contrary to the pretensions of the European Community, it was not the only manifestation of European identity. ‘We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.’ Indeed I went on to argue that western Europe had something to learn from the admittedly dreadful experience of its eastern neighbours and their strong and principled reaction to it:

There were, moreover, powerful non-economic reasons for the retention of sovereignty and, as far as possible, of power, by nation-states. Not only were such nations functioning democracies, but they also represented intractable political realities which it would be folly to seek to override or suppress in favour of a wider but as yet theoretical European nationhood. I pointed out:

I set out other guidelines for the future. Problems must be tackled practically: and there was plenty in the CAP which still needed tackling. We must have a European Single Market with the minimum of regulations — a Europe of enterprise. Europe must not be protectionist: and that must be reflected in our approach to the GATT. Finally, I stressed the great importance of NATO and warned against any development (as a result of Franco-German initiatives) of the Western European Union as an alternative to it.
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I ended on a high note, which was far from ‘anti-European’:

Not even I would have predicted the furore the Bruges speech unleashed. In Britain, to the horror of the Euro-enthusiasts who believed that principled opposition to federalism had been ridiculed or browbeaten into silence, there was a great wave of popular support for what I had said. It was to become noisily apparent when I addressed the Conservative Party Conference the following month in much the same vein.

But the reaction in polite European circles — or at least the official reaction — was one of stunned outrage. The evening of my speech I had a vigorous argument over dinner in Brussels with M. Martens, his Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign minister. But perhaps that was only to be expected from a small country which thought it could wield more power inside a federal Europe than outside it.

From Brussels I flew to Spain on an official visit — the first by a British Prime Minister — with the press in hot pursuit, as the story rumbled on. My host, Felipe Gonzalez, was as always the model of courtesy and charm. He prudently, if ambiguously, told me that ‘careful study’ of my Bruges speech ‘could lead to some useful conclusions’. But most of our conversations concentrated on defence and on Gibraltar. Though relations had much improved since the Brussels Agreement of 1984 which reopened the Spanish-Gibraltar border, there was tension over the use of the airport. Spain was, I knew, doing so well out of the Community that I would never get a Socialist Spanish Prime Minister to challenge the arrangements that his country found so lucrative. Equally, I had no doubt that in the long term a proud, ancient nation like Spain would baulk at continued loss of national self-determination in exchange for German-financed subsidies. But that time had not yet arrived.

The Rhodes European Council in early December of 1988 was something of a non-event in Community terms, though it was enlivened for the press by my forthright recriminations against the Belgians and the Irish for their shabby part in the Ryan affair.
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The Community was — unusually — conscious that with the Delors Report on EMU in the making it had enough to be getting along with. Nor was the Greek presidency in a mood to press new initiatives: Mr Papandreou was in
fragile health and his Government’s political prospects were highly uncertain as a result of financial scandals which had caught up with it.

Nonetheless something productive did come out of Rhodes. I had one of my bilaterals with Helmut Kohl who was more sensitive than I was to the stories which by now regularly appeared in the press about our bad personal relations. Indeed, he had acquired the habit of beginning our discussions by stressing the importance of giving the public impression of being on good terms. In fact, we did not get on at all badly. The problem was that on certain economic and social questions we thought along different lines. At Rhodes he pressed again the invitation he had first made at Chequers in July for me to meet him at his home near Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland-Palatinate in the spring: I accepted with the greatest pleasure

As always on these occasions, I was accompanied by Charles Powell. Charles was my private secretary on foreign affairs from 1984 until I left office. He worked tirelessly and fast; he was a uniquely gifted draftsman who invariably in his minutes got both flavour and substance precisely right; he managed always to be charming and diplomatic — yet recognized, as I did, that there was more to foreign policy than diplomacy. He was, in all respects, simply outstanding.

So it was that on Sunday 30 April we arrived in the charming village of Deidesheim to be met by a beaming Federal Chancellor on his home soil. In fact, there was not a great deal for him to beam about. He was in domestic political difficulties. West Germany had been rocked by the strange phenomenon of ‘Gorby-mania’ and, under intense pressure from an always instinctively neutralist German public opinion, the staunchly pro-NATO Chancellor Kohl had begun to shift his ground on the subject of short-range nuclear weapons (SNF). I took him to task on this, deploying all the arguments for a credible short-range nuclear deterrent and for sticking by previously agreed NATO decisions.
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The discussion on this subject lasted two hours and became quite heated. Chancellor Kohl was, I thought, deeply uncomfortable, as any politician will be whose instincts and principles push him one way while his short-term political interests push him the other. But we both made an effort to live up to what our diplomats rather than the press — out as ever for a story of Anglo-German ‘hand-bagging’ — wanted.

And indeed the atmosphere at Deidesheim was otherwise amicable. It was jolly, quaint, sentimental and slightly overdone —
gemütlich
is,
I think, the German word. Lunch consisted of potato soup, pig’s stomach (which the German Chancellor clearly enjoyed), sausage, liver dumplings and sauerkraut.

Then we drove to the great cathedral of Speyer nearby, in whose crypt are to be found the tombs of at least four Holy Roman Emperors. As we entered the cathedral the organ struck up a Bach fugue. Chancellor Kohl, knowing how much I love church music, had thoughtfully arranged this gesture. Outside, a large crowd had gathered which I understood was telling the Chancellor how right he was to get British and American tanks off German soil and stop the low-level flying.

Only afterwards did I learn that Helmut Kohl had taken Charles Powell aside behind a tomb in the cathedral crypt to say that now I had seen him on his home ground, on the borders of France, surely I would understand that he — Helmut Kohl — was as much European as German. I understood what Helmut meant and I rather liked him for it. But I had to doubt his reasoning.

This desire among modern German politicians to merge their national identity in a wider European one is understandable enough, but it presents great difficulties to self-conscious nation-states in Europe. In effect, the Germans, because they are nervous of governing themselves, want to establish a European system in which no nation will govern itself. Such a system could only be unstable in the long term and, because of Germany’s size and preponderance, is bound to be lop-sided. Obsession with a European Germany risks producing a German Europe. In fact this approach to the German problem is a delusion: it is also a distraction from the real task of German statesmanship, which must be to strengthen and deepen the post-1945 traditions of West German democracy under the new and admittedly challenging conditions of unification. That would both benefit Germany and reassure her neighbours.

By now attention in British politics was turning to two issues which, much as I sought to disentangle them, became entwined: the elections to the European Parliament and the occasion of my tenth anniversary. On the second of these, I had given strict instructions to Central Office and the Party that it should be handled with as little fuss as possible. I gave one or two interviews; I received a commemorative vase from
the National Union; and a rather attractive publication was issued by the Party, which was a modest success without being exactly a bestseller. But, of course, there were plenty of journalists anxious to write ‘reflective’ pieces on ten years of Thatcher and to conclude, as I knew they would, that a decade of this woman was quite enough.

In such an atmosphere it was natural that the Labour Party would claim that the 1989 European elections were a ‘referendum’ on Thatcherism in general and the Bruges approach in particular. I might have accepted that the European elections were a sort of judgement on Bruges if we had had European candidates who were Brugesist rather than federalist. With a few notable exceptions that was not the case.

As every advertising expert or political strategist will tell you, perhaps the most important requirement in any campaign is to have one clear message. But the Conservative Party now seemed to have two quite contradictory messages which Peter Brooke, as Party Chairman, and Christopher Prout, as leader of the European Democratic Group (EDG — the Conservative MEPs from Denmark, Spain and the UK) struggled to try to reconcile. Many leading members of the EDG had gone into the European Parliament because their views were out of sympathy with the rest of the party: they were a residue of Heathism. Their criticisms of the campaign strategy, of our general policy towards Europe and — whenever they thought they could get away with it — of me too rebounded directly on themselves. For, by undermining the Party’s credibility on European matters they destroyed their own political prospects.

I had put Geoffrey Howe in charge of preparing the manifesto. He tried to reach a consensus and consequently it was an unexciting document, although nicely written by Chris Patten. The advertising by contrast was sharp but not very good. I was shown the last proposed advertisement of the campaign when I was at Central Office after one of my few press conferences of the elections and was not at all happy with it. So, with various astonished creative experts standing around, I designed my own which read: ‘Conservatives have created a strong Britain. Vote Conservative today for a strong Europe.’ Uninspired, perhaps, but direct and a good deal more effective than the frivolous and obscure advertisements we had used earlier.

The overall strategy was simple. It was to bring Conservative voters — so many of whom were thoroughly disillusioned with the Community — out to vote. Perhaps it might have worked if the message had been got across with greater conviction and vigour by the candidates themselves and if we had been free of highly publicized attacks from Ted
Heath and others. In fact, at the very last moment — as the regular polling information which I received subsequently confirmed — there was a late surge to the Green Party which undercut our vote. People had treated the European elections rather as they would a by-election, voting not to effect real changes in their lives but to make a protest against the sitting government. Labour were the beneficiaries and gained thirteen seats from us. For all the mitigating factors, I was not happy. The result would encourage all those who were out to undermine me and my approach to Europe.