European Diary, 1977-1981 (56 page)

We were met by the Chief of the Defence Staff, in effect the Prime Minister in a presidential system, called General Hamadu, whom I saw a lot of and got rather to like, and the new lady Foreign Minister, of whom I didn't think much.

No sooner had we got out of the airport than the most dreadful thing happened. I had thought it would happen sooner or later on one of my visits because of the ludicrous way in which motorcycle escorts behave. One of them shot out from the airport into the main road to hold up the traffic, utterly failed to do so and was completely crushed by a huge lorry which came down upon him. Fortunately, I suppose, I didn't actually see the accident, though I saw the corpse afterwards, but most of the others did, including the General who was with me and who was a good deal upset by it, as he ought to have been.

We first had a meeting with the General, the tiresome lady Foreign Minister, and an excellent man called Dr Abby who is the Commissioner for Economic Planning and a highly sophisticated economist with a lot of English and American training.

Then we went to see the head of state, Colonel Akuffo. This was an unsatisfactory meeting, mainly because it was foolishly organized, with about thirty people sitting in the room, apart from a press of journalists who were allowed to stand inside the door. The Colonel was talking so quietly that they could hardly hear what he was saying, but I was louder. A slightly stilted three-quarters of an hour, partly about the Lomé Convention, partly about the state of Ghana. He announced himself firmly resolved that they would hand over power to the civilians in the summer, though obviously not overconfident about the result. He was very critical of his immediate predecessors but less so of Nkrumah.

Indeed the general note about Nkrumah at my various meetings was surprisingly favourable. He has gone through a process of considerable rehabilitation, mainly by reference to how badly
things have been run since, though in fact there is only too much evidence of his extravagant, grandiose and unattractive building mania. The whole town looks full of stadiums built in cracked, discoloured concrete. The whole country looks appallingly run down: great laagers of cars unable to move through lack of spare parts, for example. There is a strong sense of near-disintegration, and needless disintegration, as Ghana is inherently quite rich, but with an inflation rate of 150 per cent; the complete neglect of basic products, notably cocoa, has brought its obvious result.

Then a dinner given by General Hamadu at army headquarters. Hamadu raised a surprising point for a General, the undesirable pressure of Western arms salesmanship in Africa, which, in his view, was doing great harm.

I then spent two late-night hours finishing
The Sea, the Sea
, feeling that the combined effect of staying in this rather gimcrack State House in this steaming, rundown country, and Iris Murdoch's phantasmagoria, was having a distinctly unsettling effect on me.

FRIDAY, 12 JANUARY.
Accra and Paris
.

Quite a good morning expedition to the Kpong Dam about fifty miles away. It is a major enterprise, with a lot of Commission money in it, and was worth seeing. Also it was an opportunity to get some impression of the countryside of Ghana, which is much more scrubby, less vegetated than that of Nigeria. I travelled in the car with Abby both ways and had quite a useful talk with him. He is fairly pessimistic and thinks maybe there is about one chance in three of pulling the country round. He was critical of many things, like the foolishness of trying to run a chain of state hotels, which merely means that ministers run up bills they don't pay.

Lunch with the French Ambassador to meet the other six Community ones, who were quite an impressive lot. The German (Herbert Weil), as is often the case in African countries, was probably the best, an old wartime refugee and BBC employee in London during the war.

UTA plane to Paris via Lagos at 9 o'clock.

SATURDAY, 13 JANUARY.
Paris and Brussels
.

Roissy at 7.25 a.m. France was covered in snow and freezing as when we left. Rue de Praetère at 11.30. Lunched with Jennifer alone. There was a lot to talk about, what with Africa and what had been happening in England about which I was signally ill-informed. She was surprised that I hadn't realized how the country seemed to have plunged into chaos during the previous week and how there was a mood of deep
morosité
and how ill-judged Callaghan's remark about ‘What crisis?' had been as he returned from Guadaloupe the previous Wednesday or Thursday.
⁵

FRIDAY, 19 JANUARY.
Brussels
.

Dinner party, rue de Praetère, for General Haig plus wife. We expected the Harlechs, who were due for the weekend, but had been frustrated by British Airways. Therefore we had a slightly truncated party with only the Tickells and the Davignons to help entertain the Haigs. It went just tolerably well, I think, no more. It was a little difficult to get it to jell, but things improved later on. Haig is a strange man, with a simple manner and very right-wing views, very critical of Carter, full of political ambition and I think rather overrating his chances. She is more agreeable than I had thought on the previous occasion.

MONDAY, 22 JANUARY.
Brussels and London
.

To London, taking four or five hours, for a meeting followed by dinner with the Labour Committee for Europe. I had an interesting bilateral conversation with Shirley at dinner, who was in a great state of political gloom and was disposed to agree with me that the big mistake we had made was not to go and support Dick Taverne in 1973; everything had got worse since then. By an irony we hadn't supported Dick when we ought to have, and we had supported Reg Prentice, and although neither of us regretted this, there was a good deal less compelling a case, in retrospect at any rate, for having done it. She thought the election lost whenever it came and that the party would be in a very bad state after it, and she was thinking very clearly in terms of splits and anxious for me to come back.

TUESDAY, 23 JANUARY.
London and Brussels
.

I was due to make a speech in Dublin to the Irish Confederation of Industry, lunch with them, and see the Taoiseach in the afternoon. We awoke to quite thick snow and I was told that the avion taxi which we had ordered could not possibly get into Northolt and that no commercial flights were running. Therefore I firmly cancelled the Irish expedition (Crispin was fortunately in Dublin already and able to perform on my behalf) and set about the difficult but necessary task of getting back to Brussels. London Airport was announced as closed until 1 o'clock. When I got there at about 12.30 I was told that it was now closed until 4 o'clock and so went away to lunch until then.

There then seemed a good prospect of a Sabena plane leaving, but an endless sub-farce set in. We got on the plane, but were told that the plane was iced up and they couldn't find any de-icing equipment, and we would have to get off. Then we were told that they had borrowed some de-icing equipment from KLM (Benelux solidarity), then we were told that the de-icing equipment wouldn't work, so that we
would
have to get off the plane. So we got off the plane and were off it for about three-quarters of an hour, during which I had some quite useful telephone conversations with both Callaghan (who seemed surprisingly pleased to hear from me) and with Gundelach in Brussels.

Then we got back on the plane again. Then came a frenzied request that passengers should please sit down in any seat as the plane was moving away and if we missed the slot we might easily be there all night. Then it was eventually discovered that there were five passengers for whom there were no seats. An attempt was made to get the five people who had got on without boarding cards to own up, this being put in high moral terms, the steward saying, There are five of you here not entitled to be on the plane. Unless you identify yourselves you may prevent 110 people who are entitled to be here from getting to Brussels at all tonight.'

Eventually one man, looking rather like a young version of Christopher Mayhew, did own up; the other four did not. Thereupon an announcement was made that the only alternative was to clear the plane and re-check everybody—although fortunately not first-class passengers. This enterprise needless to say took a good
forty minutes. Passengers came back on, having been cleared, looking as though they had had a successful interview with the Parole Board and were being allowed their freedom again, half sheepish, half pleased. Eventually we got into Brussels at about 10.30, having spent literally the whole day trying to do this simple journey.

THURSDAY, 25 JANUARY.
Brussels
.

In the late afternoon Noyon, head of the Commission Security Service, accompanied by a British security officer, came in to see me in great agitation and secrecy. Apparently the Belgians had been informed through British sources that there was a serious IRA plot to assassinate in the fairly near future a senior British representative (as it was put) in Brussels, and they had narrowed the list of possible targets down to me, Tugendhat, Crispin rather surprisingly, the three ambassadors and, I think, two generals.

There were a few hazy clues, such as that they had set up some sort of watching/firing post quite some time previously outside the house of the person who was the target and that they had reported that his habits were somewhat irregular—which is not true of mine. My morning walking or running habits are only too regular, particularly as this report came from before Christmas, before the snow introduced a certain irregularity. And they also reported that near the house in question there was a school, which posed certain dangers of shooting the children by accident. That seemed to rule out rue de Praetère, although, on the other hand, of all the targets mentioned, I (to the IRA) was much the most obvious one, as well as, presumably, being the best known generally. Crispin, on the other hand, did have a school near him, although on other grounds he seemed the least likely target.

Noyon took it all very seriously and said that we must take much heavier precautions. Obviously I couldn't ignore the matter completely, particularly as they stressed it was a real threat and that the attack was likely to be made in the course of the next few weeks.

I went home for a short time, rather rushing across the pavement in an embarrassed way, and, looking round the house, realized how incredibly exposed it was for shooting through a window for it is overlooked on all sides.

FRIDAY, 26 JANUARY.
Brussels and East Hendred
.

I saw the
comité des sages
, Robert Marjolin, quite well known to me, Edmund Dell, also quite well known to me in a different way, and Biesheuvel, Dutch ex-Prime Minister, who was unknown to me but who, in some ways, made the best, most agreeable and coun-structive impression of the three. I talked to them in a fairly animated way, leading them on to subjects rather than waiting for them to ask questions, for two hours. I formed the impression that Biesheuvel had the concept closest to us, that Marjolin though very sensible on many things had a typical French antipathy to the Parliament, which he refused to regard as a significant institution, and that Dell, although broadly a European, was pretty firmly against any form of more effective decision-making and rather complacently satisfied with the Council from his experience of it. What effect I had on them I didn't know. However, it was a more agreeable two hours than I had expected.

Then to London by a plane which was only one and a half hours late, and to East Hendred.

SATURDAY, 27 JANUARY.
East Hendred
.

On a very cold beautiful sunny day I walked in deep snow over the Lower Downs for three miles. Then with Jennifer to Seven-hampton to lunch with Ann Fleming, who had the Lees-Milnes,
⁶
John Sparrow and a keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum called John Gere, whom I liked very much. I also liked the Lees-Milnes more than on previous occasions and much enjoyed the whole occasion. We returned in a perfect winter sunset at 4.30.

THURSDAY, 1 FEBRUARY.
Brussels, Paris and Brussels
.

I left at 9.30 in lowering skies and heavy rain to drive to Paris for the lunch of the four Presidents which Giscard had summoned, and, arriving at the Etoile by about 12.151 decided to call unexpectedly on the Beaumarchais'. Even so, I arrived slightly too early at the Elysée, the first of the Presidents. Kutscher arrived soon afterwards and then Colombo. Giscard, accompanied by François-Poncet, only
descended when we had all assembled—rather typical behaviour. However he was out to be gracious and to smooth some of the many feathers already ruffled by the French presidency. It was a bit overdone because he began by saying to me, ‘Ah, Monsieur Jenkins, vous parlez admirablement le français maintenant, il y'a quelqu'un qui me l'a dit au cours des dernières semaines, j'ai oublié qui. Non, non, je me souviens, c'était le Roi d'Espagne.' I said, ‘C'est un peu étrange, Monsieur le Président de la République, parce que le Roi d'Espagne et moi avons toujours parlé en anglais.'

We then proceeded into lunch, which was in its way agreeable, in a small dining room on the ground floor with a burning fire which slightly illuminated the gloom of the day. The conversation was moderately serious, mainly conducted by Giscard and me. It was in French, which was indeed the only remotely common language of everybody, but was a disadvantage for Kutscher and me, as Kutscher is much better in English than in French, and to some extent a disadvantage even for Colombo, though he is no good at all in English.

It was partly about agricultural prices, Giscard advocating some small increase, and my saying firmly that we were against this. Giscard asked at one stage whether I was not worried by having the Commission isolated with the British alone on the price freeze, which was a slightly malevolent way of putting it, and to which I replied that I did not think this would be the case. The Italians and maybe some others would be with us, but, in any event, I had opposed the British sufficiently firmly when I thought they were
wrong
and I was certainly not going to move from a position I was convinced was
right
merely because the British happened to share it.