European Diary, 1977-1981 (82 page)

The Spaaks had a huge dinner for me, forty-eight I think, with his fairly normal but rather good selection of people, a few Senators, a few Congressmen, Harrimans, Chief Justice Burger, Vangie (Bruce), I think no ambassadors of the Nine (other than Nicko), a few White House people, Lloyd Cutler,
¹¹
Henry Owen, Dick Cooper—all quite well done and well organized. The only difficulty was that Madame Spaak was distinctly gloomy, as she thought that when Fernand went back to Europe she would lose not only her embassy but her husband,
¹²
and therefore reproached me for agreeing to his return. (I had no alternative. He had done four very effective years and wanted a change.)

SUNDAY, 27 JANUARY.
East Hendred.

The Rodgers' to lunch; found them on good and friendly form, Bill's political position not having changed much: i.e. much tempted by movement but had to wait until the autumn.

MONDAY, 28 JANUARY.
East Hendred, London and Brussels.

A Savoy lunch at which I presented the Granada journalistic awards of the year. Then the 4.45 plane to Brussels, on which I easily beat all my records doing the door-to-door journey, central London to the Berlaymont in 1 hour and 41 minutes.

TUESDAY, 29 JANUARY.
Brussels.

At noon I received the Minister President of North Rhine Westphalia, Herr Rau,
¹³
for a talk alone, followed by a short luncheon. He seemed all right, not vastly exciting but quite interesting enough to go on with. A Social Democrat Landpresident in coalition with the FDP.

Made a brief speech at a farewell party for Alan Watson, Director of Television in the Commission—in which difficult job he has done very well.

THURSDAY, 31 JANUARY.
Brussels, Bonn and Brussels.

Up at 7.40 with my speech on Afghanistan to the Political Committee of the Parliament (a great public affair with television, etc.) rather weighing on my mind. I worked rather frantically on it before going to the Palais d'Egmont for the much-publicized hearing at 10.00. The fifteen-minute speech seemed to go fairly well, and I had no great difficulty with the exchange of views afterwards, which went on for about two hours. Brandt made a rather wobbly speech, Scott-Hopkins a pompous one about butter, but up to a point I seemed to satisfy him. I was slightly concerned as to whether I had not, on butter and other agricultural export sales, gone a shade further in the direction of banning anything going to the Soviet Union than was compatible with the 16 January decision of the Council of Ministers.

Then a singularly ill-timed COREPER lunch. It was my lunch for them, but I arrived slightly late and more than slightly bad-tempered. I was immediately nobbled by Luc de Nanteuil with an attemptedly menacing complaint about my speech that morning. I don't think he had read it, but he kept on saying that it would be studied very carefully in Paris and if I had said we weren't going to sell butter there would be
remous
in Paris, and the French Government would deeply disapprove, etc., to which I was fairly off-hand, being fed up with Luc always treating Paris as the areopagitica of Europe, and just ill-temperedly and dismissively said, ‘Quel dommage!'

However, the row persisted during lunch, when Dillon (the
Irishman) was at least as bad as Luc, and nobody was very helpful except for Butler who is somewhat counterproductive. I again got rather bad-tempered at one stage during lunch, saying that it would just firmly stick in my mind that the whole reaction of COREPER to Afghanistan was an argument about butter and they seemed unable to raise their gaze out of the milk churn.

I left feeling dissatisfied with them and with myself. They weren't all quite as bad as they might have been: Poensgen wasn't there, Eugenio Plaja was trying to pour oil on troubled waters and Riberholdt wasn't too bad. But Dillon and Nanteuil and one or two of the others were extremely tiresome.

Then I drove off with Crispin on a filthy day, all the external circumstances unpropitious at the moment, to Bonn for Schmidt at 6 o'clock. Schmidt was very late, not emerging from a meeting of the National Security Council until 6.45, having apparently been at it from 2.00. He complained a good deal about his health (he apparently has some nasty form of angina), but this didn't prevent his looking more or less all right and proceeding to have the most extraordinary wide-ranging, ‘brain-storming' conversation, which lasted, first with Crispin and Horst Schulmann present, from 6.50 until 8.45, and then with Schmidt and me alone until 10 o'clock, so that the whole encounter was well over three hours with no dinner, one or two drinks I thought rather reluctantly brought in, a few
kleine essen,
and nothing else.

It was an amazing conversation, much of it fascinating, and it covered almost every subject under the sun: mainly the world strategic balance, his distrust of what the Americans had done in relation to Afghanistan, their lack of any overall concept, the closeness of his relationship with Honecker,
¹⁴
into which they had been forced by a mutual nervousness of their superpower leaders, the fact that there were very few people in the world to whom he could speak in great confidence—Gierek
¹⁵
(surprisingly) was one, Brezhnev was not, Mrs Thatcher was not, Giscard was, Carter was
not, maybe Vance was, maybe Carrington was, he didn't know him well enough.

This led on to the one positive proposal to come out of the meeting, which was that I would try and arrange for him to have a private meeting with Carrington as otherwise I could see no way forward on the British budgetary question, on which he had become distinctly hard, moving back to a position less favourable than he had been prepared to take in Dublin. I therefore said, ‘Let's see if we can't arrange a meeting, as you say you would like to talk to him about general things. It is difficult to do this in a normal way in London because you would then have to do it with Mrs Thatcher.' He said, ‘It is difficult to do it in the normal way in Bonn, because I then ought to have Genscher with me and he is the touchiest man in the world.' So I said, ‘Why don't you come to my house in Brussels? I will arrange a dinner there.' He replied, ‘What about England?' and out of this began to germinate the possibility that he might come to spend the weekend, nominally seeing his daughter, who lives in London, and that we might arrange something at East Hendred. It did not seem to me likely that anything would come of this, but at least it seemed worth trying.

Although no practical progress was made on the wretched British budgetary problem, and although the conversation was basically depressing, I got closer to the nub of matters with him than I have perhaps done before, particularly the nub of the difficulty of the British position in Europe if the Franco-German position was as locked-in an alliance as, he quite frankly explained, it has inevitably become.

A part of the hour's private conversation I had with him alone was political, a reversion to the possible Carrington plan, some of it was what one might call gossip about our responsibilities, my talking to him about future German Commissioners, for instance, and some of it was just conversation, with his talking about his pattern of life, his reading (he had amazingly just been reading the complete plays of Oscar Wilde, and the night before had read a whole Agatha Christie novel during a long insomniac spell). He struck me as being in an attractive mood, in some ways a bit unhinged, but on balance, as always, an interesting and formidable man.

I left him feeling nearly as exhausted as he said he was. Crispin
and I drove back on a still most filthy night, getting to rue de Praetère just after midnight. I went to sleep feeling distinctly uneasy about the Political Committee speech, the reactions to it, and the fact that I had probably been too
cassant
with Luc de Nanteuil and not much better with Dillon and the other members of COREPER. It had been an extraordinary day and no one could say that the interview with Schmidt was dull or that relations with him were inhibited. But these close personal relations don't seem to be leading to any solution of the budget problem.

FRIDAY, 1 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Commission meeting at noon. Rather an awkward time on butter, as there was strong feeling, reasonably courteously put on the part of Gundelach, Ortoli and Cheysson, that I had gone too far on banning butter sales in the Political Committee the day before. No doubt some of them had been nobbled by their governments. However, I was able to hold the thing without too much difficulty, getting quite strong support from dear old Natali and fairly dear old Haferkamp. Still it was quite an awkward little storm, slightly bigger than in a teacup.

Then Henry and Shirley Anglesey arrived to stay the weekend. I went to the Berlaymont, first to telephone Cossiga in Rome, and then to have a short hour's meeting with Andov, the Yugoslav Trade Minister who was here to try and conclude our long-drawn-out negotiations for a contractual link agreement with the Yugoslavs. I was very keen on this happening, particularly as I proposed to go to Yugoslavia at the end of the month and had to get the agreement out of the way before this would be possible. Andov seemed at first a rather dour Soviet-looking little man, but I slightly warmed to him later when I took him to the lift.

SATURDAY, 2 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Filthy weather, and Jennifer, seized with some awful stomach bug, was unable to get up. Angleseys and I left at 11.45 to try and do Waterloo before or after lunch, and to lunch at the now favourite Trois Canards at Ohain. Before lunch we did the Panorama and Hougoumont, but decided that the pouring rain was too much for the Mound. Then a successful and enjoyable lunch and back to the
Mound where, despite cold driving rain, we crept in through a hole in the hedge and clambered up the grass bank, a formidable feat.

After that into the town of Waterloo and the Wellington Museum, which in spite of a number of curious solecisms in the labelling is definitely interesting. Then we had the success of discovering on enquiry, but without too much difficulty, the burial place of the first Marquess of Anglesey's leg (Uxbridge when he lost it), which is more or less opposite the Wellington Museum, in a sort of water-closet in the garden of what now looks like a nursery school. A very successful day given the weather; Angleseys very good guests, full of enthusiasm and interest.

SUNDAY, 3 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Still in filthy weather I took the Angleseys on an afternoon expedition to Malines, where, by remarkable luck, we coincided with the installation service of the new Archbishop, Cardinal Suenens's successor. A great Mass, a packed cathedral, with people climbing up on pulpit supports and any dais or ledge that they could find. There was a very wide age spread, Catholicism clearly thriving in Flanders. There was a great array of purple in front of the altar, including Cardinal Willebrands from Utrecht, Suenens and, obviously, his successor.

TUESDAY, 5 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Peter Carrington and Crispin to breakfast, rue de Praetère, at 8.45. A satisfactory conversation on a variety of issues, but not least because he was enthusiastic about the idea of a meeting with Schmidt, though preferred it to be at East Hendred; and said that he then could handle Mrs Thatcher all right. He agreed with me, not exactly reluctantly, but extremely nervously, that if we could try and get a settlement around 1000 million units of account, maybe he could sell it to her, maybe it was reasonable, etc.

I sat next to Carrington again at lunch and had a further long talk about my future wishes in relation to the Commission,
¹⁶
and what I
thought about a possible replacement as a British Commissioner.

In the Foreign Affairs Council Gundelach disposed of the butter issue, for the moment at any rate, rather satisfactorily. He is at his best on an occasion like that, looks confident, is persuasive.

WEDNESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

We dined with Madame Feher, the widow of the Hungarian chemical manufacturer who made his business into the second chemical firm to Solvay in Belgium. Remarkably good pictures. The dinner was for General Rogers,
¹⁷
Haig's replacement, but I did not talk to him much. Talked most of dinner to Marie-Louise Simonet and after dinner to Hedwige de Nanteuil, with whom I had a sort of love-in with messages of how upset Luc had been because he thought he had had a row with me, which he hated, about butter, on which he was acting under instructions, and my sending a message back to him saying it was partly my fault, not on the substance, but I feared that I had shown a lack of courtesy to him before lunch: and there was a great deal of cooing all round, including for two minutes with Luc himself, at the end. It was as well, as we are dining with them tomorrow evening and I am in any event probably the person in Brussels official life who most likes Luc.

MONDAY, 11 FEBRUARY.
Brussels and Strasbourg.

Schmidt on the telephone at 2 o'clock, with the rather surprising good news that he wanted to go ahead with the Carrington meeting and that he would like to dine at East Hendred on Saturday, 23 February.

Avion taxi to Strasbourg for the normal boring hour and a half of questions which didn't start until 6.20 and therefore didn't finish until 7.50. I thought that was supposed to be a fixed feast, but nothing, alas, is fixed in this Parliament. I did not have many questions and they gave no great difficulty. The only tricky point was when somebody tried to ask me a question not on the paper at the beginning and I had very firmly to say that if the Parliament
conducted its business like that it would get into a great mess. There would be imprecise answers and it would be unfair to those who put questions down. They seemed to accept this.

TUESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY.
Strasbourg.

I delivered my annual Programme speech at 10.00. Crispin, who can be quite a severe critic, said he thought it was the best of the four Programme speeches, but that perhaps wasn't saying much.