European Diary, 1977-1981 (6 page)

TUESDAY, 18 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Suddenly a fine, cold winter's day. My first meeting of the Council of Ministers at 10.15. A rather good discussion on the accession of Portugal. Then back to the Berlaymont for a meeting of eight Commissioners in preparation for Mondale's visit. Fairly satisfactory, brisk going over of the brief. Then to the Château de Val Duchesse
¹⁴
for a luncheon given by the Council for the signature of the agreement with the Mashrek countries, Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Sat in the Council for Gundelach's excellent opening of the Fish discussion. Crosland a pretty effective chairman. David Owen,
¹⁵
though going on about one obscure point of very doubtful validity, also made a good impression around the table.

WEDNESDAY, 19 JANUARY.
Brussels.

A Commission meeting which was due to start at 10.00 and which I was able to get started, by an effort, by 10.10. A totally punctual start is a Brussels impossibility. We spent the morning on a variety of business, by far the most important aspects of which were dominated by Gundelach. He reported on the Fish Council and then went on to outline in a masterly half-hour
exposé
his thoughts about the agricultural price-fixing, and indeed about medium-term agricultural questions. Then we went into restricted session on the wretched subject of the disposition of director-generalships, and I circulated my proposals. We lunched together, unusually, in the Commission dining room, and had some fairly relaxed conversation there until we reassembled at 3.40 and came down to the real hard knots about directorates-general. However, we had untied
quite a lot of them by about 6.30. One of our rue de Praetère dinner parties mainly for Commissioners plus wives, with the Haferkamps and the Giolittis.

THURSDAY, 20 JANUARY.
Brussels.

A special Commission meeting for an informal
tour d'horizon
in the Château Ste Anne. I said we would start on internal Community matters as we had discussed these less than external ones in the Commission, and got Ortoli to open; strong on logical analysis as usual but not much suggestion of a way forward. We then went round the room with nine speakers before lunch. So far as intellectual content was concerned, Ortoli was probably the best, Davignon the second, and Tugendhat the third best.

We then had an enormously long speech from Natali about direct elections and enlargement. Cheysson then spoke quite well and much shorter, and Haferkamp (surprisingly) very well and for a still briefer time. I summed up, saying that enlargement could be a disaster unless we quickly worked out a programme for handling it in the Commission.

FRIDAY, 21 JANUARY.
Brussels.

An official visit from President Mobutu of Zaïre. Cheysson and I went down to meet him at the front door and conducted him up in due state to my room, where we had a twenty-minute talk before going to join what was nominally the full Commission but was in fact five members plus a number of Directors-General brought in to fill up the table. The talk with him went only moderately well. He handled himself quite impressively, but not friendlily. He spoke no English and his Belgian French was not very easy to dance in step with because he was completely unforgiving of all mistakes and hesitations made by others, particularly no doubt white others. We then went to the Commission room, where I made a six- or seven-minute speech of welcome to him. Mobutu then responded for about fifteen minutes, and talked well. He made more sense than he had done in my room, where he had launched a pretty lunatic idea, calling for the immediate mounting of a European expeditionary force to deal with Rhodesia, under British command
he implied, but possibly supported by a few
francs-tireurs
which he would be glad to supply. An hour's discussion with him and I then went off to the Château de Val Duchesse to greet him on his arrival for the official luncheon.

This was a peculiarly disagreeable occasion. I really disliked sitting next to him more than to almost anyone else I have recently encountered. Fortunately on the other side of me I had the thoroughly agreeable Ambassador from Trinidad and Tobago, but on the other side of Mobutu there was a silent and austere-looking Fleming (a Vice-President of the European Investment Bank). Mobutu gave practically nothing at lunch. I tried almost every subject under the sun. I must have opened about twenty with him -and got nowhere of any interest on any of them, and began to feel, which is not always the case, that my French was more and more inadequate.

Perhaps his ill-humour was partly due to the fact that in helping myself to the fish course I had managed to get a large unfilleted sole to come apart on the plate with a splash of sauce over one of his holy hands. As he apparently regards himself as a near God-like figure and appears on television in Zaïre coming out of the clouds, no doubt this was almost sacrilege. However, the impression I had towards the end of lunch was that he was a man of a certain effectiveness, considerable disagreeableness, with no general interests at all, certainly not in anything historical, geographical, not really much in what was going on in Europe or the rest of the world, not even interested in his own life, since most of the early parts of it were not glorious enough for him to wish to recall them.

At the end of lunch I made a two-minute speech and then, to the great dismay of Cheysson, Mobutu did what apparently he is quite inclined to do, which was not to respond to it himself but to get his Foreign Minister
¹⁶
to do so. I did not mind this alleged slight nearly as much as others appeared to—what I minded was having an extremely boring hour and a half at the table with Mobutu–after which I conducted him downstairs fairly chillily, delivered him to his press conference and escaped as quickly as I could.

Back at the Berlaymont I saw the New Zealand Ambassador (Ian Stewart), a nice, very pro-European Community man who was about to leave reluctantly and go back to live in New Zealand for the first time in ten years. I never expected to be so pro-'white Commonwealth'.

SATURDAY, 22 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Woke feeling more buoyant than at any time since arrival. Two hours' French before breakfast, two hours on Commission papers after breakfast, before leaving with Jennifer at 11.45 to drive ourselves to Namur, my first substantial drive in Belgium. Drove up most of the way to the Citadel, a fine dominating complex with a lot of fortifications by Vauban above the junction of the Sambre and the Meuse. There we walked for three miles before descending to the town for lunch. Afterwards a quick walk round the
centre ville,
which has a few attractive things in it, but the whole badly spoiled by redevelopment. The general atmosphere was slightly reminiscent of Aylesbury, or Gloucester without the cathedral.

SUNDAY, 23 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Bill Rodgers
¹⁷
arrived to spend twenty-four hours. Took him to lunch at Groenendaal, which was good in a heavy Flemish way, immensely slow, with very serious eating going on all around us. At 4 o'clock we were almost the first people to leave. Bill was enjoyable, not obsessed by English politics, but giving me a good insight into what was going on, as usual perhaps a little more optimistic than circumstances warranted, but not ludicrously so. He was not enchanted by the Cabinet, but enjoying the Ministry of Transport. It was a satisfactory talk, no chasm created by the separation of our paths. We had the Tugendhats to dinner with him, plus Laura (Grenfell). Both the Tugendhats very nice; he in my view is turning out to be an excellent Commissioner.

MONDAY, 24 JANUARY.
Brussels.

An audience with the King of the Belgians at 10 o'clock. It was in the Palais de Bruxelles in the city, which he uses entirely for business purposes, living all the time at Laeken, five miles away. The Palais de Bruxelles is almost on the scale of Buckingham Palace, built I suppose at about the same time (1840). Grand rooms, rather sparsely furnished, no ornaments or signs of life about it. I was conducted in to him and found an agreeable-looking, shy, young middle-aged man, whose whole manner was quite unlike that of any member of the British Royal Family, less ‘royal' I suppose is the simplest description. Talking to him was remarkably like talking to David Astor;
¹⁸
one had the same feeling of intelligent involvement, sense of worry and concern with ‘the world on his shoulders', interest in a wide range of subjects and anxious in a slightly unchannelled way to do something about them.

We had fifty minutes' conversation, mostly in English though he occasionally lapsed into French. He asked a great deal about the work of the Commission, the new Commissioners, how I saw the future of Europe, and did it out of apparent deep interest. He has a strong commitment to the idea of Europe and cannot understand why governments are so foolish as not to move it forward further. At the end he said he would very much like to come to the Berlaymont, and ‘assist' (in the French sense) at a meeting of the Commission. I said that we would be delighted to arrange this, thinking that if we could arrange a special meeting for Mobutu we could certainly do one for the King of the Belgians, and asked him to lunch afterwards. He expressed pleasure at all this and saw me off very graciously, conducting me out to my car, which again is very different from Buckingham Palace protocol.

In the afternoon we had a visit from Vice-President Mondale, which wasn't bad going on the fifth day in office of the new administration. I received him at the front door at 3 o'clock. We then had an hour's discussion with five people on each side. The conversation covered an obvious range of subjects and was not particularly deep, but was friendly with a fair mutuality of
approach, particularly about a timetable for various meetings, the Summit, the resumption of the North/South dialogue
¹⁹
etc., and was generally thought by those on our side–perhaps to a greater extent than by me–to have been very satisfactory and worthwhile. I thought we only skimmed the surface of issues, but that was clearly all that he wanted to do at that stage and indeed all that he was briefed to do. But within the limits which he wanted to explore he was well-informed and spoke fluently and confidently without any significant reference to notes.

He made it clear, to our pleasure, that he was strongly in favour of Community representation at the Summit, and also at the end delivered to me an invitation to go to Washington on an official visit to the President at some reasonably early date. He presented me with an embossed and personally signed copy of Carter's inaugural address, the oratorical quality of which, such as it was, seemed to me to be somewhat diluted by ending up ‘Thank you very much', which is not exactly how I think the Gettysburg Address concluded.

We then proceeded to the Commission room, I introduced him before cameras to all the other Commissioners, and we settled down for a rather formal twenty-five minutes, with expressions of greeting and exchange of views. Haferkamp and I saw him off downstairs, with great mutual expressions of goodwill.

TUESDAY, 25 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Left home just after 10.00 for my second visit in two days to the Palais de Bruxelles, this time for the diplomatic reception given by the King and Queen for the Commission and for the ambassadors accredited to the Community. On going in I noticed that the Commissioners who were before or round about me walking up the stairs all seemed rather more formally dressed than I was, i.e. wearing black suits, white shirts and dark ties, whereas I was wearing a striped shirt, having been firmly told that dress was informal. However, I need not have worried, for Davignon, who was presumably the most at home in those surroundings of any Commissioner, had also omitted to reduce himself to white, and
indeed more significantly the King, when we were taken in to see him, was wearing brown shoes with a very light blue suit!

George Ball
²⁰
and Fernand Spaak (our Ambassador in Washington) to lunch, rue de Praetère.

In the evening we gave the first of our obligatory Val Duchesse dinners for the Permanent Representatives, other Commissioners etc. to mark the change of Council presidency, i.e. from Dutch to British. A party of fifty.

WEDNESDAY, 26 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Our longest ordinary Commission session yet: 10.05 to 1.05, and 3.20 to 6.30. It is exhausting presiding for this length of time. The degree of strain is quite different from that of participating as a non-presiding member in the British Cabinet. Apart from the fact that they go on longer in total, being in the chair imposes a different degree of effort, for one is not able to have those agreeable half-hours or so in which to abstract one's mind from the boredom of the colleagues by doing some forward diary planning or concentrating on some similar matter. That is nearly impossible in the chair, though I noticed that Davignon—not of course in the chair—was wisely doing precisely this at one stage.

We had Gundelach's fish issue, then the so-called Complementary Memorandum
²¹
which has to be put before the Luxembourg Parliament at the same time as my Programme speech, and then an interesting but rather sombre debate, so intractable are the difficulties in this field, about the accession of Portugal. During the afternoon we then had about an hour's discussion on an exposé of Gundelach's thoughts on agricultural price-fixing. Although the two Frenchmen gave notice that they were not going to give up the tax on vegetable-oil margarine without a fight, he on the whole got a pretty fair wind behind him.

Towards the end I rather galloped them through a résumé of my speech for Luxembourg; the subsequent discussion politely warned me not to be too encouraging or optimistic. Ortoli and Brunner rather predictably did this, so to some extent did Davignon, and so
more surprisingly did Vredeling. He seems to have been converted to pessimistic conservatism fairly early in his Commission career compared with his ebullience of two and a half weeks ago, when he gave the impression that he was going to solve the unemployment problem of Europe at the stroke of a pen.