European Diary, 1977-1981 (79 page)

MONDAY, 24 DECEMBER.
East Hendred
.

Charles and Ivana arrived at about 10.30, bringing clearing weather, and we then motored to Bath where we had an immensely enjoyable day, the city looking spectacularly good, better even than I remembered it, in bright, cold sunlight.

TUESDAY, 25 DECEMBER.
East Hendred
.

A memorable morning, hard white hoar frost with the mercury way down below the bottom of the thermometer (20°F). Drove to the Monument, and saw a splendid sunrise illuminating wide views, although there were little troughs of mist in the valleys. After church, I drove up again, with others. The light was different, but still very good, with a curious impression now that there was fog in the valley—though I don't think that it was fog—and with the tops of the cooling towers at Didcot Power Station and little elevations like the Faringdon Clump rising out of it like islands in the sea. I think it was a light refraction effect.

THURSDAY, 27 DECEMBER.
East Hendred
.

Lunch with the Eric Rolls at Ipsden. They had the Kingman Brewsters (US Ambassador), the Michael Stewarts, and Robert Marjolin, always their Christmas guest. An enjoyable long luncheon with a certain amount of good general conversation (but rather less productive than when I sold the EMS to Kingman Brewster there eighteen months ago) about America, Britain, France, the world, etc.

SUNDAY, 30 DECEMBER.
East Hendred and Cambridge
.

A particularly enjoyable lunch with the Bradleys at Kettering. Not much politics, though Tom indicated, for what it was worth, that on one occasion Hattersley had asked him if he could contemplate breaking with the Labour Party, and he had said, ‘Certainly.' Then on to the Rothschilds' at Cambridge. Victor morally in better form than I had expected to find him, though with some kind of residual bronchitis and frequently taking his temperature, as a result of
which he had to go to bed at about 9.30. Victor never goes out, sits in his shirtsleeves the whole time, and just shouts at Sweeney for dry martinis or Bucks fizz—a most incredibly unhealthy life. How he survives so well I don't know.

MONDAY, 31 DECEMBER.
Cambridge and Norfolk
.

Left after an early lunch and proceeded to the Zuckermans' at Burnham Thorpe. Upstairs before the New Year, after a dinner with Solly's spectacularly good wine. I sat reading alone over midnight. A change of decade, not merely of year. 1979 was not as good as 1978, but not intolerable either. The wretched, petty
Cour des Comptes
affair overhung some of it. The advent of the new Parliament began to look menacing in the early summer. But I was quite wrong. As the year turned out, the Parliament was a great advantage, showed its strength and muscle and improved the quality of Europe. The problem of the British budgetary contribution was in an important sense mishandled because it involved the creation at home by the Government of such a groundswell of anti-French but also general anti-European opinion. It was not skilfully played by Mrs Thatcher. However, I am able to take it reasonably calmly, partly because I think the Commission did its best at Dublin and came out quite creditably, but also because Dimbleby and thoughts of the future occupy my mind greatly. Goodness knows what 1980 itself, let alone the decade as a whole, may hold. Slightly intimidated by the thought of having let a genie out of its bottle.

 

1980 was a year sharply divided into two halves. In the first half (accurately five months) there was little time for anything except the BBQ. (These initials were first used in the diary on 18 February; I think they were originally intended to stand for British Budgetary Question, but the alternative of Bloody British Question increasingly became the connotation in my mind.) Not only I but the whole Community was rarely allowed to think about anything else during this period. This was a pity for it was a time when Europe's economic performance was faltering badly, when East/West relations were tense following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and when American leadership was unsteady.

It was also a time when the continued strengthening of Political Cooperation (printed with capital letters because it is the term of art for the attempt at foreign policy coordination which in 1970 was initiated within the Community but outside the Treaties) would have been particularly desirable. But there was little energy left for it. The
impasse
at the Dublin European Council had left the Community in a state of suspended crisis, and until it was resolved everything else seemed to the British at least, but to some extent to everybody, to be peripheral.

I believed that on the merits Mrs Thatcher had right broadly on her side, although she showed little sense of proportion, some of her favourite arguments were invalid, and her tactical sense was as weak as her courage was strong. All this, however, counted for little compared with the danger, of which I had become convinced in early 1979, that the issue, unless satisfactorily resolved, would alienate any British Government from the Community and do a good deal of harm to the whole European enterprise. I therefore gave as total a priority in the first half of 1980 to assisting a solution as I had done throughout 1978 to promoting the EMS—to which
Britain's continued non-adhesion was a considerable factor in reducing goodwill amongst the other eight.

‘Assisting a solution' meant trying to get these other eight to contribute, beyond as it were the terms of the contract, to a special subvention of 1000 to 1100 million
écus
(approximately £700 million) a year to Britain, and trying to get Mrs Thatcher to accept the two-thirds of a loaf to which, from her point of view, this amounted. The trouble with her constantly reiterated ‘it's my money I want back' argument was that this argument gave no recognition (surprisingly for the head of such a commercially minded government) to the fact that to forgive a bad contract involved some generosity on the part of those who were the beneficiaries.

The trouble with my position in 1980 as opposed to the other three years of my presidency was that for the first time I could be accused of playing a British hand and of putting my whole weight and attention behind it. I believed it was in the general European interest, but I doubt if this view of my motives was taken in Paris, and perhaps not in some other capitals too. In these circumstances attempts by the French Government to neutralize in advance such firepower as I possessed were only to be expected, and they were duly forthcoming, although more from the Quai d'Orsay, it appeared, than from Giscard or Barre. Perhaps more significant was the withdrawal of the Belgian Government from their advocacy of a renewal of my presidency (see the entry for 14 May).

What I am above all struck by, however, on a rereading of the diary, is the extent to which the dispute put under strain my relations with the other Commissioners, nearly all of them by that stage close and friendly associates. On one occasion I found myself in a minority of two in the Commission, with only Christopher Tugendhat supporting me. This was a position I had never previously been remotely near, indeed only rarely in even a strong minority.

It was the long-drawn-out nature of the dispute, I think, which built up the personal strains. At Dublin, Francesco Cossiga, as the head of government of the country about to assume the presidency (of the Council), had launched the idea of bringing the next European Council forward to February. However on the 18th of that month he and I decided that insufficient progress had been
made and that we should revert to the normal date at the end of March. Then on 24 March he decided unilaterally on a further postponement. The European Council eventually met in Luxembourg on 27/28 April, when Mrs Thatcher to almost universal amazement rejected a very favourable offer.

There was then no alternative, unless the Community was to break up, but to begin a cosmetic operation to save Mrs Thatcher's face without overstraining the generosity of Chancellor Schmidt and the others who would have to pay. This meant dressing up approximately the same deal in a somewhat different form. It was this which was achieved in the Council of Ministers (not the European Council) on 29/30 May. Lord Carrington then showed himself a more skilful and sensible negotiator than his head of government. He knew when to settle. She did not.

It was the run-up to this final encounter which produced the real
morosité.
Everyone was tired, bored, and knew that the repeat performance was an unnecessary charade. However there were brighter aspects to the sorry saga. We were lucky that it took place during the Italian presidency, and we were doubly lucky with the composition of the Italian Government. Both Cossiga as Prime Minister and Emilio Colombo, who had taken over as Foreign Minister in early April, were consistently helpful. So was Klaus von Dohnanyi, the German Minister for European Affairs, who from this relatively junior position took great risks, negotiating well beyond his authority, in order to settle the damaging and divisive issue. The French were by no means bad at the end of the day, and other smaller governments were also surprisingly amenable, most notably the Irish, who forwent an opportunity to remember the wrongs of centuries.

When the settlement came (at the end of an eighteen-hour session) it did so with a sudden completeness. The issue went away like a summer storm. It was bound to resurface in the future, but not until well after my time as President. And there was little that my Commission could do about preparing for that resurfacing except to set in train studies on longer term Community financing (the so-called ‘mandate') for our successors to pronounce upon. The governments would never have accepted unpalatable policy recommendations, on an issue not immediately pressing, from a dying Commission.

The beginning of June therefore saw a complete change of gear. The leaders of Europe had become both irritated and wearied by the issue. When it was over they went into a condition of stasis. The two June Venice meetings, first the European Council and then the Western Economic Summit, were flat. My own mood matched that of the Community. In early June I began to feel unwell, which happily I had hardly done during the previous three and a half Brussels years, and did not fully recover until well into September. The symptoms were vague, perhaps stemming more from general exhaustion than from anything else, but the net effect was a period when I approached issues with more dismay than zest. Luckily there was no major European issue with which to deal. After 30 May no dominating Brussels theme seized my attention.

Nor did I do much external travelling in the second half of 1980. In the first half I had been to New York and Washington for a week in January, to Yugoslavia in February, to Portugal in March, and to India for nine days at the beginning of May. I had intended to do a major South American trip in the early autumn, but cancelled it when my June/July exhaustion set in. I went only to Norway in July, Spain in October and Sweden in November. The Yugoslav, Norwegian and Swedish visits were because of the attention which the Commission devoted to relations with the small adjacent countries which had to live in water greatly affected by any movements of the vast hull of the Community. The Indian visit was to discharge a postponed commitment to the largest Third World country. The American visit was routine although I got much involved in discussions of their reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. At the end of the year I felt that I owed the Americans a farewell visit, but was only able to fit this in during January, after I had ceased to be President.

With the BBQ out of the way, my thoughts inevitably turned increasingly to my impending return to England which had become far more associated with the political prospect than I would have believed possible twelve months before. On 8 June I delivered a follow-up to the Dimbleby Lecture in the form of a speech to a luncheon of the parliamentary press gallery. It raised more explicitly than did Dimbleby the forming of a new party. It received more press publicity than Dimbleby and by just over a year later had come back into my favour because of the inclusion of the phrases
about the experimental aeroplane which might ‘well finish up a few fields from the end of the runway' but which might equally well ‘soar in the sky' and ‘go further and more quickly than many now imagine'; and after the Warrington bye-election this seemed a happy juxtaposition with soaring much more likely than crashing.