European Diary, 1977-1981 (26 page)

Ortoli again at 6.00, still making no real progress and parting in an
impasse,
but on reasonably good terms, with my saying: ‘The trouble is, Francis, that you and I have very different approaches. You are much more cautious and you don't believe you can move people's minds by shocking them. I do, sometimes.' I didn't add: ‘You believe in boring them rather than shocking them,' but this was the thought in my mind about his style of presentation. A short meeting with Davignon after that who indicated that while friend-lily disposed he thought I should find a solution with Ortoli rather than have a head-on challenge.

TUESDAY, 15 NOVEMBER.
Brussels and Strasbourg.

Avion taxi to Strasbourg. A conference at the airport with Michael Emerson, Crispin and Hayden before taking off, when we decided, rightly or wrongly, that we had better try to come to some arrangement with Ortoli rather than presenting two different texts for the Commission to decide between on the following day, as this would have considerable disadvantages. I would have a clear majority in the Commission, none of us was in any doubt about that; but the fact that we were split would leak, leaving Ortoli bruised and having to present to the Economic and Financial Council on the following Monday a paper which had been imposed upon him. Therefore Crispin was instructed to try and arrive at a last-minute compromise which was compatible with my Florence lecture but did not hammer the points too hard. A bridging passage was to be inserted in order to show the semi-real compatibility between my more adventurous approach and Ortoli's more cautious, pragmatic and, to judge from past experience, ineffective approach to EMU.

To the Parliament a little late after yet another nasty flight over the Ardennes/Vosges complex, but this did not matter as Simonet had been so shaken by his much worse flight that he had had to ask for a suspension of the session before he could address them. Took George Brown
²¹²
to lunch. I had not seen him for a year. He was a good deal changed: old, white, walking with a stick, but, at the same time, curiously sprightly in mind and, to some extent, in body. He had completely given up drink and cigars; he ate a great deal and, despite his unwonted teetotalism, was an immensely stimulating companion. It is curious how very good he can be: he was greatly enthused with the prospect of standing as an independent candidate under direct elections and drafting a great personal manifesto. He left me inspirited by seeing him.

Walked back from the Parliament to the Sofitel by the cathedral: a cold, early winter evening with a pre-Christmas atmosphere in Strasbourg already. Then a large dinner for the Conservative Group, which is almost entirely British. An excellent interchange afterwards. They are a pretty good group. Most of them even wrote appreciative letters.

WEDNESDAY, 16 NOVEMBER.
Strasbourg and Brussels.

A special but flat Commission meeting on the EMU paper over lunch. Ortoli opened at some length, and I then endeavoured to go round the table. But Cheysson, typically and mischievously, but maybe legitimately, said that what they all wanted to know was my opinion. So I, having done my deal with Ortoli, had to give a muffled reply, which took the heat but also the interest out of the discussion. There was undoubtedly a sense of let-down that there was no great gladiatorial contest between Ortoli and me, with blood on the sand. This would have exacted too heavy a price, but it is never satisfying to produce an anti-climax.

6.07 TEE back to Brussels. Gautier-Sauvagnac, Ortoli's
Chef de Cabinet
(who always looks as though he were playing Saint-Loup at Doncières), joined us in the restaurant car in too jaunty a mood. Rue de Praetère at 10.30, and there had a rather dismal discussion with Hayden who was obviously worried about the result of the Commission, though he had been in favour of what we had done.

THURSDAY, 17 NOVEMBER.
Brussels.

To the Palais de Bruxelles for half an hour's audience with the King of Spain: a very engaging young man. Even the Spaniards are now immensely less formal than the British Royal Family. At the end of the interview he discovered that there was a crush of cameramen outside the room, and that he had forgotten we were supposed to have photographs taken. Whereupon we went out and stood around shaking hands and talking while the photographs were taken. In the audience he spoke well, but not quite as authoritatively as I would have expected. His Foreign Minister, Oreja, whom I like, was with him and the King left him to do much of the exposition, although never looking bored, being extremely friendly and pressing me hard to go to Madrid.

Dinner party at home for the Nanteuils, Robert Armstrong,
²¹³
who was staying with us for the night, Léon Lambert, etc. Luc de Nanteuil held forth to me for some time after dinner, urging me not
to get too bogged down in detail and to be as controversial a figure as possible, as that in his view was the way to play the hand of a President of the Commission.

FRIDAY, 18 NOVEMBER.
Brussels.

I gave a lunch for British Liberals, Thorpe,
²¹⁴
Steel and Gladwyn.
²¹⁵
Poor Jeremy was looking appallingly haggard, like Soames Forsyte in the last episode of
The Forsyte Saga.
But this did not affect the flow of his conversation. Even Gladwyn could hardly get a word in, partly because he has got rather deaf and hardly heard what was going on. David Steel was nice but silent.

SATURDAY, 19 NOVEMBER.
Brussels and Paris.

Motored to Paris on a beautiful morning. One and a half hours with Barre, most of the time on economic and monetary union, where we managed to achieve a considerable identity of view. He is a sensible, lucid man and I think if he has anything to do with it we should have a reasonably successful European Council. Alas, of course, he will not be there, but he said he would try to get a reasonably fair though not committing wind for my ideas on EMU.

I asked him whether he thought I should try and see Giscard in the next week or so. He wasn't sure, maybe Giscard would like to see me. ‘He has a very high opinion of you,' he added encouragingly but implausibly in view of the rows of last summer.

MONDAY, 21 NOVEMBER.
Brussels.

In a Foreign Affairs Council we had a long wrangle over Article 131. It was a typical example of being unable to contain at the same time the British and the French. It is like that pocket game in which you have to get little balls into holes. As you try to put the second in, the first comes out. The British, represented by Joel Barnett, were towards the end being quite good; if they had been good earlier I think we might have got a solution which would have been accepted by everybody and would have been rather favourable
from the British point of view. But by the time they had come round to it, the French had got difficult in a different way. The Council can deal with one recalcitrant major member, but not two.

TUESDAY, 22 NOVEMBER.
Brussels.

A rather good session of the Council before lunch, in which, amazingly, we disposed quickly and without difficulty of the question of Community representation at future Summits. It was agreed, without the French dissenting, that the Rome agreement on the Community being represented by the Commission and the presidency should apply indefinitely in the future. Thereby a difficult corner was turned.

THURSDAY, 24 NOVEMBER.
Brussels, Strasbourg and London.

A bumpy flight to Strasbourg for the twice-yearly meeting of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, which I had been under great pressure to attend. Formal speeches by Forlani, Oreja and me. Simonet failed to turn up. He is suffering from ‘Eurofever' to which it is almost impossible not to succumb at a certain stage in view of our mad
calendriers.

In the air again at 1.00, and set myself on the bumpy journey to try to get the last part of the Israel Sieff Memorial Lecture which I was due to deliver in London at 6.00 into some sort of shape. The lecture was at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street in a nice little theatre, with an audience of about 120. Harold Wilson, whom I had certainly not expected, sat huddled in the corner of a row, listening, applauding at the end though my lecture certainly contained no words of comfort for him, and then coming up very agreeably afterwards, saying he had agreed with parts of it. Eric Roll was in the chair.

FRIDAY, 25 NOVEMBER.
London.

One and a half hours' Downing Street meeting with Callaghan. He was extremely genial, as he had been on the previous occasion, but quite different from his attitude in the spring, and on a number of
issues not bad. Fairly confident, though not foolishly so, both about the economy and the next election. On the way out I said, ‘What worries me is that if you win the next election, what do you do after that? How do you control the Labour Party?' He said, ‘Well, it worries me a bit too, but I think I've got some thoughts as to how to deal with that.' Whatever they were, he did not disclose them.

The only issue on which we got near to a snarl-up was direct elections, on which he fairly quickly gets emotional; starts thumping away about his difficulties and how he has done as much as he possibly can and how he is much more interested in British elections, etc. But on other issues, even the CAP, certainly 131, certainly regional policy, even EMU, certainly Community loans, he was reasonably forthcoming and helpful.

MONDAY, 28 NOVEMBER.
London.

Michael Palliser to lunch at Brooks's. While not on as good a form as he was when dealing so self-confidently and reliably with the problems of my transition to Europe in the summer of 1976, he was more buoyant than when I had last seen him in July. He said that he was undoubtedly getting on better than at the beginning with David Owen; he thought that Owen's relations with the office still had room for improvement but had picked up somewhat. He complained about his unnecessary rudeness and, probably in response to a suggestion of mine, gave enthusiastic endorsement of the view that David ought now to lengthen his pace a little, as his whole prospect was different from that during his first six months when he might soon have been out of the Foreign Office and even the House of Commons. He said that, while meetings with David were often very difficult, he rarely, in his (Palliser's) view, failed to come out with a sensible policy decision at the end of them.

In the afternoon I went to see Harold Macmillan to fulfil an undertaking I had made to the Liberals to try to get him to use what influence he had in favour of a proportional list (for European elections). He did not seem to have aged a great deal, was friendly and relaxed, a little difficult to get to focus upon the point, as it were playing himself in with a lot of high generalizations which, for once, were not particularly well directed. However, when we got on to the point he was quite good. He was not enthusiastic for proportional
representation, though not strongly against it either, open-minded so far as the effect on Britain was concerned. He was therefore quite disposed to go along with it for Europe and maybe to lobby a little in its favour. He put his finger rather well on the weakness of the regional list system, which was that it gave excessive power to the party machines. ‘I am not sure', he said, ‘that under such a system I would have been elected for Stockton in the thirties.'

THURSDAY, 1 DECEMBER.
Brussels.

Gundelach at 10.45. I tried to persuade him to go for a 1 per cent rather than a 2 per cent Common Agricultural price increase, but did not feel I was making much progress, not because there is a great gulf between us, but because his judgement is that 2 per cent might stick and 1 per cent certainly won't. He may easily be right and, in any case, the general thrust of our policies march alongside each other fairly closely. In spite of some attempts to stir up suspicion against him, I think he is a nice, effective, overworked, somewhat ‘flying by the seat of his pants' man, whom I enjoy talking with and whom I think is reasonably straightforward.

At 6.30 to the little prime ministerial
hôtel particulier for
a meeting with Tindemans. After half an hour he arrived rather flustered and was as usual not only late but extremely nice and agreeable. However, his mind did not appear to have focused very sharply upon the European Council, and he was very open to every possible piece of advice.

FRIDAY, 2 DECEMBER.
Brussels.

At 12 o'clock Mrs Thatcher arrived on a visit. I received her at the top of the lift shaft, Tugendhat having met her at the front door, which it is protocol for me to do only for heads of state or government, of which grave issue Mitterrand's visit made me aware. (I have in fact made exceptions for Mondale and Hallstein.)

She brought with her Douglas Hurd, John Davies and a PPS called Stanley. We began in a small meeting in my room with these plus Crispin and Tugendhat. She was anxious to be pleasant and the conversation ran into no great snags over the next hour. I spent a
good part of it explaining how the different Councils work and what was the difference in atmosphere and form between a Council of Ministers, a ‘Schloss Gymnich'-type meeting, and the European Council. She seemed interested in all this, no doubt hoping that, in the last at any rate, she would be a fairly early participant. At the end we got on to economic and monetary union for about ten minutes, in which John Davies, nice and well-informed man though he is, showed a certain capacity to get the wrong end of a point. She, if anything, seemed more pro monetary union than he did.

Then seven or eight other Commissioners joined us for lunch. The conversation was partly bilateral with me, which was quite easy, and then general. She was in no way tiresome, but left me with not the faintest sense of having been in the presence of anyone approaching a high quality of statesmanship, or even of someone who was likely to grow into this; she just seemed slightly below the level of events.