European Diary, 1977-1981 (2 page)

This was the background against which I went to see the Prime Minister for an hour's routine
tour d'horizon
in the early evening of Thursday, 22 January. The position was complicated, although not on the surface, by the facts that he had come to a settled resolve to remain in office for only another two months, and that I had been given the strongest possible ‘tip-off' of this, from an impeccable source, on the day after Christmas. But he was not I think aware of my knowledge which, despite the quality of the source, was well short of amounting to a certainty in my mind, and the subject was not open to discussion between us.

In the course of the discussion Harold Wilson raised, but not very strenuously, the future presidency of the European Commission, in which a change was due at the beginning of 1977. There was a predisposition in favour of a British candidate, he said, but it was not sufficiently strong that the British Government could nominate whomever they liked. Giscard d'Estaing and Schmidt had apparently reacted unfavourably for some reason or other to the suggestion of Christopher Soames, who was currently one of the five vice-presidents of the Commission. They had more or less said, half paraphrasing Henry Ford, that the British could confidently put forward any candidate they liked, provided it was Heath or Jenkins. I am not sure whether or not Wilson consulted Heath. In any event, he offered the job to me, saying that I ought certainly to have the refusal, but that he rather assumed that I would not want to go, and indeed hoped that this would be so.

I reacted at the time in accordance both with his expectation and with the settled groove of my thought over the past several years. I
thanked him, but reached for an old gramophone record and said that I was resolved to remain in British politics. Over the next few days I became increasingly doubtful of the wisdom of this reply. Brussels would certainly be an escape from the nutshell of British politics. It would be an opportunity to do something quite new for me and in which I believed much more strongly than in the economic policy of Mr Healey, the trade union policy of Mr Foot, or even the foreign policy of Mr Callaghan. There might also be the chance to help Europe regain the momentum which it had signally lost since the oil shock at the end of 1973.

There was however one major complication. If Harold Wilson was to resign in March there would obviously follow an election for the leadership of the Labour Party and the Prime Ministership. Contrary to the position from, say, 1968 to 1971, it had become rather unlikely that I could win. There was still a clear moderate majority in the parliamentary Labour Party (then the sole electing body), but too many of the cautious members of it had come to feel that I would be insufficiently compromising and might provoke a split. I had certainly not gone out of my way to respect Labour Party shibboleths.

On the other hand, I still had a substantial, gallant and militant body of troops behind me. They had been in training for this battle for years. Probably most of them had come to realize that the time for victory was past. But they nonetheless wished to fight. To have avoided the engagement by slipping off to Brussels would have been intolerable.

I therefore had not to dissimulate but to procrastinate. There was no need for dissimulation because my order of preference was clear. I would have preferred to be Prime Minister of Britain than President of the European Commission. Who would not? As the argument which was supposed to have decided Melbourne was put: ‘It is a damned fine thing to have been, even if it only lasts for two months. It is a thing no Greek or Roman ever was.' And this was a view of which there was no need to be ashamed in Europe (apart perhaps from the insular irrelevance of the addendum), for in view of the uncertain powers of the Commission President it would have been taken by every French, German and Italian politician, and probably by Dutch, Belgian, Danish and Irish ones as well.

I was however equally clear that if a change of leadership closed
up the succession and left me with no domestic opportunity but to soldier on where I was, I would be both more usefully and more interestingly employed in Brussels. I therefore wrote to Harold Wilson four days after our conversation, withdrawing my dismissal of the proposition and endeavouring to preserve my options for as long as possible.

Such attempts to have the best of both worlds are liable to leave one without much of either. However I was lucky in that the strength of my position, such as it was, did not stem primarily from being the candidate of the British Government. In late February I went to Paris for forty-eight hours, nominally for a bilateral visit to Michel Poniatowski, then Minister of the Interior, but in fact at the wish of the President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. In the course of a long interview in the Elysée, Giscard strongly urged me, saying he was speaking on behalf of Helmut Schmidt, the German Chancellor, as well as of himself, to become President of the Commission. I tried to preserve my room for manoeuvre by saying elliptically that there was an election I had to get out of the way first. At first he thought I was telling him of an imminent British general election, but when I steered him away from this he did not press either for clarity or for an immediate decision. One advantage of Harold Wilson's apparent but deceptive dedication to office was that, even with a hint, no one could conceive of his resigning.

The next day I lunched with Jean Monnet, the founding father of the Community, at Montfort L'Amoury, thirty miles from Paris. He also strongly pressed me to accept the Commission position. Insofar as I was still doubtful, the net could be perceived as closing in oppressively. Insofar as I was increasingly tempted, I was exhilarated by being blessed by the spiritual as well as the temporal authorities of Europe.

Three weeks after that Harold Wilson resigned and the contest began. Nine days later the result of the first ballot was announced. It was broadly as I had expected, although the gap between James Callaghan and me - 84 to 56 - was worse than I had hoped for. Michael Foot led with 90 votes, but this was not of the first relevance because he could manifestly be overhauled by whoever qualified for a run-off against him. The determining factor was therefore the relative positions of Callaghan and myself. The other
three candidates–Healey, Benn and Crosland–were all well behind. The last two were compulsorily eliminated, but Healey with 37 votes fought on with characteristic pugnacity for another round, though without improving his position. I could see no point in prolonging the contest into a third (maybe a fourth) slow round. The country needed a new Prime Minister, and from 56 votes it was clearly not going to be me. The barrier between failure and success was not vast. A direct swing of 15 votes from Callaghan to me would have given me the premiership. But it was nevertheless decisive. I withdrew and turned my thoughts, which was not difficult -perhaps too many of them had been there already—to Europe.

There were two hiccups. I had decided following the Giscard meeting that my order of preference was clear. First was to be Prime Minister, provided I did not have to do too much stooping to conquer. Second was to become President of the Commission. Third, but not all that far behind, was to become Foreign Secretary. And a bad fourth was to remain where I was. In drawing up this list I think that I had rather complacently assumed that James Callaghan, both on grounds of seniority and out of gratitude for the early release to him of my 56 votes, would be happy to offer me the Foreign Office.

I was wrong, as clearly emerged when I saw him on 6 April. He was evasive at the time, but his memoirs
¹
put his position with convincing frankness: ‘The post of Foreign Secretary had to be filled and in other times Roy Jenkins would have been a natural successor.... But the wounds had not healed since his resignation as deputy leader during the European Community battles, and as he had been the leading protagonist on one side, every action he would have taken as Foreign Secretary would have been regarded with deep suspicion by the anti-Marketeers on our benches.... In any case there was another suitable candidate, in the person of Tony Crosland.'

This had the perverse effect of temporarily upsetting my preference between courses two and three. That however was both short-lived and irrelevant, as the new Prime Minister knew his mind on this issue. His alternative offer of a reversion to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer after ‘six months or so' did not
tempt me. It was, to mix the metaphor, the offer of another
réchauffé
helping which remained very much in the bush.

In late April the bird in the hand also showed some faint signs of fluttering. Giscard indicated that he was against any early announcement of my presidency. His mind was firm on the substance, he said, but there must be no premature publicity: it might prejudice the position of François-Xavier Ortoli, the incumbent French President. This was strange, in view both of Giscard's urgent pressure of February and of the fact that he had never previously shown much consideration for Ortoli—nor did he subsequently. It was balanced however by enthusiastic support given publicly from the Italian Government and more privately by Chancellor Schmidt, who did not wish to seem publicly out of step with President Giscard. Thus I had an early taste of a pattern of European attitudes which was to become only too familiar to me over the next few years.

The explanation of Giscard's wobble, I retrospectively think, is that my candidature, launched by him and Schmidt, was being too enthusiastically received by the small countries of the Community. This was because they wanted a politician and not a bureaucrat and found a Briton with European conviction a heady combination. When I visited two or three of them that spring I was treated very much as a President-elect. Giscard's response was not to change his mind but to try to demonstrate that I was becoming President not by the acclaim of the little ones but by the nomination of France. Up to a point he succeeded.

The issue was however safely out of the way by the end of June, when the European Council, meeting in Luxembourg, conveyed to me an informal (legal formality followed only in December) but public and unanimous invitation to assume the presidency at the beginning of January. Thereafter the majority of my time and the overwhelming part of my interest was devoted to the affairs of Europe. I remained Home Secretary until 10 September, when I left a British Government for the last time, but this was only because it suited the Prime Minister better that way, and a large part of this twilight period was in any event taken up by holiday.

During July a number of Commissioners who were candidates for staying on came to see me in London, and I also began a series of visits to the governments of the member states. Rightly or wrongly,
I kept away from Brussels. I decided that if I was to make any impact both upon the bureaucracy (which I thought of as being dedicated but rigid) and upon the tone of Europe, I must arrive only with full powers and not become a familiar figure hanging about in the corridors in the preceding months. I went there only once, in mid-November, mainly to see the house which we had taken, and to visit the Belgian Prime Minister, although we were in no dispute about the excellent Commissioner, Etienne Davignon, whom the Belgians had chosen in consultation with me. This abstinence from Belgium may or may not have given drama to my arrival, but it certainly had the effect, when I eventually plunged into the murk of a Brabant January, of making the ambience of the Berlaymont (the Community office building), the ways of those who lived in and around it, and indeed the whole atmosphere of Brussels, seem almost gothically strange to me.

It was only Belgium as the areopagitica of the Community (and Luxembourg, its subsidiary in this respect) that I eschewed. The other six countries I went to frequently. Over the summer and autumn of 1976 I made twenty visits to their capitals. I also went twice to the United States, mainly on preparatory Community business. And there was a fairly constant procession of visitors -future Commissioners, senior officials, politicians—to see me in London. After I left the Home Office I was established in a modest suite of rooms in the Cabinet Office. Crispin Tickell, whom I chose from a list of strong candidates, came to me as
Chef de Cabinet
from the Foreign Office in October. Hayden Phillips left the Home Office with me to become
Chef Adjoint
but disappeared fairly soon on a month's ‘immersion' language course in the South of France. I devoted a good deal of time, both over the summer holidays and during the autumn, to improving my French by less baptismal methods. I also spent many hours on the history of the Community and on the structure of the Commission, playing with a variety of plans for its improvement.

The main purpose of my European visits was to discuss who would be my future Commission colleagues with the nominating heads of government. The Tindemans Report on European Union, drawn up by the Belgian Prime Minister at the request of the other governments in 1975, had suggested,
inter alia,
that the incoming President of the Commission should have a considerable voice in
this. Many of the Tindemans proposals wasted on the desert air, but it was difficult for the heads of government to deny this one so quickly after it had been put forward; no firm precedent was established, however, for I believe that neither of my successors, Gaston Thorn and Jacques Delors, has attempted to play much part in this process.

Nor did the relative enthusiasm with which different governments embraced this obligation follow any predictable pattern. The three governments in the Community most opposed to supra-nationalism were the British, the French and the Danish. With the small one of these three there was no issue. The Danish Government and I were both equally eager to renew the appointment of Finn-Olav Gundelach, and quite right we were from every point of view except that of his own health—he died in early 1981. He was one of my two best Commissioners. The British Government was equally but more controversially (with Mrs Thatcher) willing for me to nominate Christopher Tugendhat as the second and Conservative British Commissioner. He turned out to be a very good choice.