European Diary, 1977-1981 (18 page)

To Oxford to lunch in Univ. with Arnold Goodman. Only Arnold and the now very old Goodharts
¹³⁸
—the former Master of Univ. They were thoroughly agreeable but a bit out of touch with reality. At one stage Arthur Goodhart asked me if I had ever been to America, which left me slightly breathless. Arnold presided benignly, talking rather well on a number of subjects. One of his advantages is that he is largely audience-insensitive; he talks almost as well whether he has got a sympathetic, comprehending audience or not. Spent another sodden afternoon sitting in front of the East Hendred fire. Drove to Isleworth and dined with the Gilmours,
¹³⁹
plus
Anthony Lewis', Beaumarchais', Rees-Moggs,
¹⁴⁰
Robert Blakes
¹⁴¹
and Carringtons.
¹⁴²
Enjoyable and interesting dinner.

MONDAY, 13 JUNE.
London and Brussels.

Rue de Praetère dinner for the Gough Whitlams (former Labour Prime Minister of Australia). A surprisingly agreeable dinner after a slightly sticky start. Whitlam is most engaging and so is the mammoth Mrs Whitlam. The conversation became general halfway through dinner and he began to talk with extraordinary knowledge and interest about the genealogy of European nineteenth-century royal houses. He is a great expert on who exactly was every Hapsburg relation of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. No detailed discussion about current issues, but brief exchanges of view, with Mrs Whitlam mainly, on Fraser
¹⁴³
whom she was against -not surprisingly—and Peacock
¹⁴⁴
, to whom she was much more favourable.

TUESDAY, 14 JUNE.
Strasbourg.

Dinner for the
bureau
of the Socialist Group with an unsatisfactory conversation led by Fellermaier; they are not an inspiring group and most of the conversation was about some incredibly detailed, pointless, trivial matters of relationship between the Commission and the Parliament. The only man who tried to raise the level a bit, and up to a point succeeded, was John Prescott
¹⁴⁵

WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE.
Strasbourg.

Horrible morning as so often this summer. Lunch for a group of Labour stalwarts and possible candidates brought by Jim Cattermole.
¹⁴⁶
This was a surprisingly successful occasion. They were lively and good, temporarily raised my spirits and, as David Marquand said afterwards, made one realize what a lot of nice people there still are in the Labour Party.

THURSDAY, 16 JUNE.
Strasbourg and Brussels.

Jennifer rang to say that Ladbroke Square had been sold within two hours of being put on the market. Mixed feelings, both because it is one thing putting a house on the market and another to realize that (after twenty-three years) it has gone; and also because its going so quickly makes one think we sold it too cheap.
¹⁴⁷

FRIDAY, 17 JUNE.
Brussels and Bernkastel.

A meeting, followed by lunch, with Malcolm Fraser, the Prime Minister of Australia. He is a rather surly fellow who looks a mixture of the self-confident and the suspicious. What in fact he most reminds me of is a fast bowler on an off day, tall, quite strong, but looking as though throughout a hot afternoon he had been taking very long runs to the wicket and bouncing them down short without getting any result; shirt out, trousers slightly coming down. He was anxious to be awkward and I had to respond once or twice. He came out with a ludicrous theory that we had all been beastly to the Japanese and that, as a result of his talks with Fukuda, he thought that Japan, unless allowed much better access to markets than at present—surely a work of supererogation—would go back to its policies of the thirties, i.e. reversal of alliances, no support for the Western world, possibly moving into the Soviet sphere. I, and I think everybody else, had interpreted Fukuda's remarks—particularly about the thirties—in London in a totally different sense.

We then moved to lunch and I found Fraser slightly more agreeable. It emerged, most extraordinarily, that although I had begun by saying, ‘I don't think we have ever met,' and his agreeing, except to say, ‘Maybe we shook hands,' it then transpired in the course of lunch, fortunately coming to us both almost simultaneously, that I had in fact been to his house in the country in western Victoria in 1965 when I had been there on my visit as Minister of Aviation. I was driven over for a drink before lunch on the Sunday. Fortunately, as the occasion had been equally non-memorable for both of us, there was no great embarrassment about this. We then moved into a fairly rough discussion round the table which ran until 4 o'clock. An awkward, aggressive man, who does not put his best face forward. His attitudes obviously caused considerable embarrassment both to Peacock, his Foreign Minister, a much smoother man, and to his Ambassador (Sir James Plimsoll and not smooth), but perhaps ambassadors always dislike abrasiveness.

Motored to Bernkastel to join Jennifer and the Annans, who had gone that morning. After dinner at the Hotel zum Post we went to a café where impromptu singing broke out, and I wondered how different it had all been forty-three years before when Noël had first been there. He thought not immensely, apart from more people now—it was a German holiday weekend. The Annans have an extraordinary attachment to Germany, rather surprising in Gaby's case as she was brought up as a small child in grand Jewish circles in Berlin and left sometime in the 1930s. Noël likes the
lederhosen
aspect, and had indeed been on a walking tour there in 1934.

SATURDAY, 18 JUNE.
Bernkastel.

To the Prüms at Wehlen at 11.00. He is both a substantial wine grower and a substantial wine merchant: a young man, who is a doctor of something or other, aged about forty, living with his mother. He gave us an extraordinarily good selection of Mosel wines to drink throughout the day, ranging from a 1921, through one of the wartime years, to the great 1949, and a whole variety of more recent ones. It taught me a lot about Mosel. It is remarkably unintoxicating because the alcoholic content, which I had long suspected, turned out on investigation to be not more than about 7
per cent. The Prüms live in an oppressive Wilhelmine house, built about 1902, of dark red, sombre appearance—all our wine tasting was done in a very heavy
salon
and the lunch, rather good, was in a hermetically sealed dining room. His mother, an opera-loving widow, was present at lunch but at nothing else. Then he drove us up to a hill on top of one of his Wehlen vineyards, where we had yet more tasting.

SUNDAY, 19 JUNE.
Bernkastel and Brussels.

Motored to Trier (good cathedral and Marx's birthplace) which we looked round briefly and agreeably; and then on into northern Luxembourg where we had a picnic just on the edge of the rain. In the evening we had a dinner party rue de Praetère for the Annans, with the Tindemans amongst others. After dinner I arranged with Tindemans that he would be glad to attempt a JET mediatory job. He would endeavour to see both Schmidt and Callaghan during the early part of the following week.

MONDAY, 20 JUNE.
Brussels.

Received and had a short talk with Seretse Khama,
¹⁴⁸
President of Botswana, before taking him in for a
pro forma
Commission meeting. I had previously suggested that our Wednesday dinner for him ought, if his wife were in Brussels, to be a mixed one, contrary to our normal pattern, but this had been resisted by the Protocol Department on the ground that it had not been done for other African heads of state; and I had not persisted, partly because Ruth Khama is an Englishwoman. On the way down in the lift, however, I said to Seretse that I understood his wife was in Brussels and I was sorry that the dinner was not a mixed one. ‘Oh, don't worry in the least,' he replied, ‘she is used to being treated like that in Arab countries.' The point was sufficiently well made that I insisted that we changed our arrangements immediately, particularly as Jennifer was in Brussels that week.

To the house of the American Ambassador to the Community, Deane Hinton, deep set in rhododendrons, for lunch with General Haig,
¹⁴⁹
Nixon's old White House aide and now Supreme Allied Commander. He turned up in full uniform. He was, however, an agreeable and interesting man, maybe, as some people say, rather a politicians' general, but so for that matter was Eisenhower.

Then in the evening I addressed a dinner for the Advisory Council of the Ford Motor Company—a rather grand body presided over by Henry Ford himself and containing about ten of their world managers but also a lot of notable outside figures, like Edwin Plowden,
¹⁵⁰
Karl Schiller
¹⁵¹
of Germany, whom I had hardly seen since the Bonn monetary conference of 1968, and Guido Carli
¹⁵²
of Italy. I rather liked Henry Ford, and did not find the whole dinner nearly as much of a chore as I had expected.

WEDNESDAY, 22 JUNE.
Brussels.

Our dinner for Sir Seretse and indeed Lady Khama at Val Duchesse, with a more or less adequate complement of about 25 per cent women. I found Ruth Khama thoroughly agreeable, although a curiously uncoordinated mixture of south London secretary and Botswana duchess, rather reminiscent of old Mrs Philips Price,
¹⁵³
who was a still more uncoordinated mixture of Berlin proletarian (Philips Price did indeed literally pick her up in the gutter after she had been clubbed in a 1919 Rosa Luxemburg/Spartacist riot) and Gloucestershire châtelaine. I made a brief speech, Seretse a rather longer one. He is a man of interest and distinction, though seems fairly ill.

THURSDAY, 23 JUNE.
Brussels.

Our six-monthly dinner for COREPER to mark the change of presidency, which I had decided against all precedent to give, not at Val Duchesse because we were so fed up with it, but in a restaurant, the Barbizon, in the splendidly named suburb of Jezus-Eik. By some miraculous chance the weather changed and the sun came out for the first time for weeks in Brussels. Speeches from me, Donald Maitland as the retiring President of COREPER, and Van der Meulen,
¹⁵⁴
the incoming President, the last partly in English, partly in French, partly in Dutch, and embellished by two Latin quotations.

TUESDAY, 28 JUNE.
Brussels, Keele and London.

Breakfast with Tindemans in the rue Ducale, finding him rather depressed about the collapse of his efforts to solve the JET problem. He had telephoned Schmidt and found him in a very disagreeable, hard, anti-British mood, saying that it was no good at all Tindemans coming to see him. However, it was quite useful intelligence before the London European Council to know Schmidt's state of mind.

Short Commission meeting at 9.45, then by plane to Birmingham and through pouring rain to lunch at Keele University with Princess Margaret before the degree ceremony. She was in quite a good temper considering she had just got her feet wet planting a tree. Professor Paul Rollo delivered a very warm encomium of me in his honorary degree presentation speech.

WEDNESDAY, 29 JUNE.
London.

The first day of the two-day London European Council meeting. Downing Street luncheon. Most people had arrived when I got there and were assembled in the garden, Schmidt looking in a heavily black and gloomy mood. The luncheon conversation was fairly desultory to begin with; I sat between Cosgrave and Andreotti. Cosgrave was particularly agreeable and I am sorry that he is going. Towards the end of lunch when we began to get on to
some more general discussion, Giscard, supported by several others, said that he thought it would be useful to go on in this way for some time, and we therefore decided to put back the formal meeting in Lancaster House for two hours and adjourned to one of the drawing rooms in Downing Street. During this move I talked to Schmidt for about five minutes, trying to see if there was any ‘give' from him so far as JET was concerned, but found him very complaining about the British attitude, particularly in relation to the budgetary contribution, and disinclined to move except as part of some broad overall settlement.

In the general discussion Giscard opened with an account of his talks with Brezhnev, saying broadly that Brezhnev found Carter very difficult to deal with, alleging that his amateurish foreign policy was endangering
détente
; French sympathy, Giscard said, was much on the Russian side. Schmidt supported this strongly, making it clear that his relations with Carter had gone back to their pre-Summit nadir. Indeed, Schmidt and Giscard supported each other on every point which came up during this European Council. This axis is always very powerful when working smoothly, and can sometimes be advantageous, but on this occasion was the reverse as they were both in a negative mood.

Schmidt and Giscard also worked themselves into a fine old anti-American mood, which Callaghan, supported by me, tried to resist. We then had some discussion about JET without getting anywhere much, though with various people, notably den Uyl, suggesting that the Commission ought to produce a solution for the next meeting and Schmidt suggesting openly the possibility of a package arrangement. Callaghan was definitely in a corner, both on this and on direct elections, but handling himself well, as he often does in such circumstances.

At 5.00 we moved to Lancaster House and a more formal meeting. There we began with our Commission loans proposal,
¹⁵⁵
which I introduced briefly and not very well and then handed over to Ortoli. The discussion on this and some other matters went on until about 7 o'clock with a general
tour de table,
most people speaking and supporting us, including, surprisingly strongly,
Callaghan, as did Jorgensen, Cosgrave and den Uyl. But Schmidt and Giscard were both depressingly negative. Schmidt's view was to be expected but we were not quite prepared for Giscard's wet blanket, particularly as he argued rather more powerfully than did Schmidt.