European Diary, 1977-1981 (61 page)

THURSDAY, 1 MARCH.
Peking and Karachi
.

Leisurely morning visit to the Temple of Heaven in the south of the city, the best of the Peking monuments. We lunched with Kang, the Ambassador in Brussels, and various other people who had accompanied us on the tour round, at the Imperial Restaurant.

Then back to the guest house, where Li, the Minister for External Trade, came to say goodbye. This turned out to be a rather serious conversation, in which he obviously thought he ought to say one or two things which he had omitted at the meeting the previous Friday afternoon, such as what great importance they attach to GSP and how good their silk was. So the conversation was a curious mixture of courtesy and rather excessive detail. Before leaving we made presentations to various people from Kang downwards, the interpreters, the Chief of Protocol, the head of the Security Service, my bodyguard, the cook at the guest house, etc. We had brought a lot of clocks with us, and there were also signed photographs and books.

Sung, the old Ambassador to London, came to drive with me to the airport and I had a rather good talk with him on the journey. Then at the airport we had the ambassadors, or at any rate five or six of them, and also the deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. The French did much better than the British, who in spite of requests produced no newspapers, whereas the French produced a complete set of
Le Monde
for the days we had been away.

We took off at 5.45, with one and a half hours of sunset and then dinner over South-West China. It was a slow flight as there was a great head wind of 160 knots, so that we took eight and a half hours to reach Karachi.

FRIDAY, 2 MARCH.
Karachi and East Hendred
.

Athens at 5 a.m. The light came up over Yugoslavia and we got into Charles de Gaulle just before 8.00 French time, an hour and a half late. A quick change round and on to the plane to London, with newspapers, boxes, etc. We were typically stacked over Heathrow. Filthy weather in Paris, slightly better in London. East Hendred by 10.00, feeling surprisingly well.

SUNDAY, 4 MARCH.
East Hendred
.

Bonham Carters came about noon to drive over with me to lunch with the Briggs' at Worcester (College).

It was a typical large Briggs Sunday luncheon party—twenty-two in all, I think: Berlins, John Sparrow, the American Ambassador and Mrs Kingman Brewster, Janet Suzman, Catherine Freeman, all an agreeable lot of people, although rather too many of them. However, I like the Briggs' very much. We walked in the Worcester garden for a bit, and then did a drive around Oxford, going in particular into the new St Catherine's, which I don't think Mark had ever seen.

MONDAY, 5 MARCH.
East Hendred, Brussels, Bonn and Brussels
.

8.25 plane to Brussels, caught with difficulty as the motorway was jammed from near Maidenhead. An hour's Coordination Meeting for the Foreign Affairs Council, and then back to the airport and an avion taxi to Bonn for a talk with Schmidt.

Lunched with Oliver Wright
²²
at the British Embassy, the first time I had been there since the Hendersons left. It was a good lunch, sitting at a little table in the window of the dining room looking across the river to the sun-bathed (for once) Siebengebirge opposite. Wright is a curious man, a good presence, well informed and shrewd about German politics, but lacks subtlety or breadth of vision. He is perfectly friendly and yet without warmth (towards me, at any rate).

Then to the Chancellery, where we had Schmidt for a full two hours. It was not a particularly illuminating talk. He was in one of his gloomy, complaining moods, not fortunately much about us, but about the world and almost everybody in it, although Carter had a special place in his demonology list. He was not particularly friendly towards Callaghan, indeed asking whether I thought a new British Tory Government would be more ‘predictable', which is now his favourite favourable word. There was not much reference to ‘my friend Valéry' either, though surprisingly little criticism, considering the way the French had messed up the start of the EMS.

We had a good deal of discussion about the CAP, on which he is a mixture of fundamental good sense and rather supine acceptance of being locked in to no reduction in German farm prices, which he interprets as being the same as no reduction in farmers' incomes, which it is not. However, a certain amount of progress was made on these subjects, although there was a complete unwillingness on his part to take the lead at Paris the following week and try to force through a solution to the still held up MCA/EMS problem. ‘I tried in Brussels,' he said. ‘It wasn't a success. I can't try again; now it's up to Giscard. He is the chairman. I mustn't interfere with him.' I tried on leaving to put a bit more enthusiastic backbone into him, but I am not sure it was successful. However, as a ground-clearing enterprise the talk was worthwhile.

Brussels by 6.30, and into the Council for one and a half hours. François-Poncet with Nanteuil and a young private secretary to dine, rue de Praetère. I was accompanied as usual on such occasions by Crispin and Christopher Audland. It was a surprisingly successful three-hour dinner, with really very good talk with François-Poncet, partly general conversation mainly about France socially, geographically, historically, and partly some business talk relating to the Council. It was a vast advance on relations in December and I thought we had got on pretty good terms for the first time. On this occasion at least, he was an agreeable, sensible, highly intelligent, well-informed, talkative man.

TUESDAY, 6 MARCH.
Brussels
.

A rather belated press conference on China. Then the Council for two hours. The discussion was mainly on the state of progress in the
MTNs and was not as bad as I expected. The opposition, from Deniau for the French, and to some lesser extent from the Irish and Italians, seemed broadly containable. Haferkamp and Davignon, particularly the latter, did well, and I intervened at the end to make it clear that while we would try to deal with one or two of the peripheral points which had been raised, there was no real chance of getting any substantial change in the package before we came back to them in April, when they would have to take a firm decision.

In the afternoon there was a long-drawn-out Concertation Meeting, with five or six representatives of the Parliament, on the budget question. François-Poncet dealt with this with great tact giving nothing in substance but being extremely polite, so that they left in a tolerable temper.

WEDNESDAY, 7 MARCH.
Brussels
.

Commission meeting for three hours in the morning. Then to Comme Chez Soi with Simonet, where all the family and staff were on particularly good form because they had just had advance notice of their third Michelin star. Their cup of joy would have been overflowing if they had also heard that the Villa Lorraine had lost its third star, but that was not the case. Henri (Simonet) was firmly convinced that there would be a Belgian Government under Martens the following week, hopeful that he (Henri) might stay on as Foreign Minister, and more than hopeful that Martens being too busy in Brussels he might be allowed to go to the Paris European Council alone and thus have the heady pleasure of dining with heads of government. He was as friendly and agreeable as usual.

Three and a half hours of Commission in the afternoon. Dinner at home for John Sainsbury,
²³
with Nanteuils (Luc being on particularly talkative form and agreeable in a way that would have amazed most of his COREPER colleagues), Brunners, etc.

THURSDAY, 8 MARCH.
Brussels and London
.

12.30 plane to London. Lunch with Hayden at Brooks's. One and three quarter hours with Callaghan at 4 o'clock. He was, as in
several recent interviews, immensely friendly, quite different from two years ago, and keen to talk on a whole range of issues, British internal ones to begin with. He was not very well informed or focused on the issues for the Paris Summit, but quite anxious to be told about them and not making any fuss about the bilateral issues which he raised with me, except for a hard continuing note of complaint about the British share of the budget being unfair. He tried to shrug off the devolution
débâcle
²⁴
but was not particularly optimistic about the political situation generally.

I then went to the City to give a lecture to the Overseas Development Institute in the headquarters of Barclays Bank. A rather good audience of about two hundred: Michael Palliser, Ronald Mcintosh, George Jellicoe, Leo Pliatzky. The lecture almost got off to an appalling start because I suddenly realized during the chairman's introduction that I had got the wrong text in front of me, the original one and not the one which I had laboriously amended on the way over. I signalled wildly. Crispin, whom I had warned that I may have eaten a bad oyster at lunch, assumed I was becoming desperately ill, but Roger Beetham, not being aware of this, made a more sensible judgement and came up with the proper text. So all was saved but not without the incident being fairly obvious and causing some amusement.

Home at Kensington Park Gardens where I discovered most surprisingly a letter of tentative invitation to be Master of St Catherine's College, Oxford—they must have seen me casing the joint the previous Sunday. I am not, however, tempted by being head of a college.

SUNDAY, 11 MARCH.
East Hendred and Paris
.

10.30 plane to Paris with Jennifer. To the Embassy where we are staying a night for the last time in the Henderson régime (they only have three weeks to go) and possibly ever,
²⁵
as it is unlikely we will have close friends there in the future. Lunched with them alone, worked in the afternoon and walked in the twilight. Crispin came at
7.00 and we went through various points for the European Council, and then dined with him, the Hendersons and Jennifer.

MONDAY, 12 MARCH.
Paris
.

A rather desultory morning's work until I left the Embassy at noon and moved into the Ritz.
²⁶
Lunched with Jennifer, Crispin and Michel Vanden Abeele, before moving up, under motorcycle escort, to the Kléber, where the European Council began fairly punctually at 3.10 and sat for four hours. We ran through a range of subjects: the economic situation of the Community, world trade relations, Japan, energy, and then a general clutch of social papers, all introduced by the Commission, i.e. Ortoli or me.

In the first discussion Callaghan made a prepared and subsequently heavily leaked statement of position, mainly on the CAP and the budget. It all sounded too electoral, although he did not do it badly. The note of the Council was distinctly low key, and Giscard to my surprise did not appear to be trying to get very much out of his summing up on the social
volet
,
²⁷
or indeed energy, where I would have expected him to go for a more positive outcome.

The room was not satisfactory. It was bigger than the ones in which we normally meet, so that Giscard and François-Poncet were isolated at one end of the table, Ortoli and I at the other, with four delegations down either side, Schmidt and Giscard for once not sitting next to each other.

A heads of government dinner at the Elysée at 8.15. The
place à table
was rather more satisfactory from my point of view than usual;
au bout de la table
inevitably when alone with heads of government, but on this occasion between Schmidt and Callaghan, which was a change from between Thorn and Andreotti, to which I had become rather too used. However, that mattered little as the conversation was almost entirely general and not very good at that.

Giscard opened rather typically by asking about the Queen's visit to the Middle East, and there then developed a discussion conducted mainly between him and Callaghan, Giscard taking a fairly hard, pro-Arab line, i.e. more extreme than the Egyptians,
Callaghan being certainly pro-Egyptian, even pro-Israeli. There was some discussion at the end about Turkey, on which Schmidt reported depressingly.

Then after dinner, ‘round the fireside' as it is quaintly called, there was first a discussion about China, on which I was asked to report. Then a discussion about the French desire to have a new look at the Euratom treaty, not to amend it they were careful to say, but to see if any adaptations of interpretation were necessary. This was pretty coolly received by the others (in many ways more favourably by me than by most, except for my saying extremely firmly that we had competences in the non-proliferation field, which the French were inclined to deny), with the outcome that it should be discussed at the French Schloss Gymnich, but without, I think, anybody expecting much to happen.

Giscard's launching of his great Euro/Arab/African dialogue plan was also coolly received, with a suggestion from Schmidt that it was perhaps best to start with the Africans before one brought in the Arabs, and that the whole thing should not be done on too grandiose and clumsy a scale. However, there was no great ill feeling on any side, and we broke up at about 11.30 in reasonably good order.

TUESDAY, 13 MARCH.
Paris and Strasbourg
.

To the Kléber by 9.30. Everybody arrived more or less on time, except for Callaghan and Schmidt who had breakfasted together (on defence matters) and, somewhat inconsiderately, didn't turn up until 10 o'clock, so that even Giscard was kept waiting for half an hour. I had a good deal of conversation with him during this time. Throughout the whole of this European Council he was quite friendly, and he was obviously going to make no difficulty about my presence at the press conference, as he asked me for how long I thought, on previous experience, it should last.

When the session eventually started, we opened with agriculture, on which I made a fifteen-minute statement, distancing myself from Callaghan, for obvious reasons, by putting in a certain general defence of the CAP, but then being extremely hard on the need to deal with surpluses by a price freeze. We discussed this for an hour, with I thought a rather good reception round the table.
Callaghan kept fairly quiet, though he was obviously on our side on practical matters even if not on matters of theory. Thorn was silent. Lynch, Jørgensen, Andreotti and even van Agt expressed general approval for our position. Schmidt didn't say yes and didn't say no (he picked a rather pointless semi-argument with Callaghan on the assumption that Callaghan was advocating deficiency payments, which he was not), but the general thrust of what he was saying was favourable to our point of view and anti the farm lobby.