European Diary, 1977-1981 (97 page)

I had never much enjoyed electioneering, regarding it as a disagreeable cure which one had to endure every four years or so in order to have the indulgence of sitting in the House of Commons for the rest of the time. Such an approach was possible in traditional politics, but it was no way in which to found a new party, particularly as Brussels had inevitably given me a somewhat remote image. I therefore decided that I had better reconcile myself to a life of campaigning, and to my amazement found that I quickly came to enjoy it. During the five Warrington weeks my heart was rather in my mouth, because I had no idea whether the result was going to be an humiliation or a respectable defeat, but in retrospect at least the streets and landmarks of that somewhat sombre town have come to glow in my memory. This was as well, for the next two years were taken up with almost continuous electioneering. Apart from my own second bye-election at Hillhead and the General Election of 1983, there was Croydon and Crosby and Gower and Bermondsey and Darlington, as well as a number of less needle encounters. By a
curious irony it was the House of Commons, when I re-entered it in March 1982, which I came to regard as providing the disagreeable interludes between the stimulating election campaigns.

All this preoccupation accounted for my failure to find any time to go back to Brussels before October 1983. But it did not mean that my mind had turned away from European issues. I followed them closely, maintained a good number of personal contacts, and spoke frequently on the subject. Britain to my dismay continued to find an infinite series of unconvincing excuses for remaining outside the European Monetary System. If the mark was too high, the dollar was too low, or vice versa, or the moon was in the wrong quarter. Every conceivable set of circumstances was surveyed and rejected, not overtly on principle, but on the ground that a more favourable combination must be awaited. Even deprived of British adherence, the System achieved a distinct practical success and reduced the fluctuations between the seven participating currencies by a substantial and measurable margin. Governments did not however push on with the further phases of development of the EMS which had been envisaged at Copenhagen and Bremen. The main monetary advance of the mid-1980s came through the spontaneous increasing use of the
écu
in private transactions and not through Government action.

With the disappearance of the Giscard-Schmidt partnership in 1981–2 the political leadership of the Community became temporarily weaker and its energies were diverted for too long and too obsessively into the British budgetary dispute. Most of the years of the Thorn Commission were therefore disappointing, although they brought the negotiations with Spain and Portugal to fruition (these countries entered on 1 January 1986) and prepared the way for the Single European Act of December 1985. Partly as a result of this institutional reform, Iberian enlargement, unlike the admission of Britain, Denmark and Ireland in 1973, has led to no weakening of Community purpose. On the contrary, the plans for 1992 and associated developments amount to the greatest resurgence of dynamism since the great days of the early 1960s.

Throughout these fluctuating fortunes for the Community the old SDP and its Alliance partner maintained a wholly committed European position. I therefore experienced no ideological break on my return from Brussels. It was merely a very sharp change of gear.

TUESDAY, 4 JANUARY.
Brussels.

After lunch I went briefly to my temporary unattractive office in the rue de la Loi and then back to the house to begin a series of ‘portfolio' interviews. The first two on the list, Haferkamp and Ortoli, were both late, as all the members of the old Commission had been off on an excursion to Paris, where Ortoli had assembled them for a farewell lunch at Lasserre. There was fog on the road and they therefore all arrived back behind time and disordered.

Haferkamp made it clear that his mind had become more and more fixed on the suggestion that I had thrown out to him at Ditchley, that he should do External Affairs. I said the principal difficulty about this was the question of how the German Government, and perhaps Genscher in particular, was going to take the switch from expectations between him and Brunner, and that I must see Brunner but that he (Haferkamp) also must try to help handle this in Bonn. There was also the question of whether he was prepared to work hard at this job and at his English, which, although it had already improved a good deal since I had first seen him in the autumn, clearly needed to be better for relations with the Americans. On all points he was sensible except for a great and unconvincing protestation that he always worked immensely hard at all jobs. However, a reasonably satisfactory interview.

Ortoli came next and, given the fact that it was my view that he was bound to have Economic and Monetary Affairs (this, indeed, was one reason why it was essential to get Haferkamp out of them) and that he greatly wanted this, there was not much problem with him either. He was, as usual, a mixture of the warm and the prickly and talked a little too much about his dignity as an ex-President rather than about his qualifications, which were great, for the Economic and Monetary job.

We then had Gundelach to dinner, together with Hayden and Crispin, and had a productive talk. He confirmed that he was willing to do Agriculture, was insistent, but reasonably so, that he must keep Fisheries for the time being, as the subject was so very much on the boil and he was the only person who really knew about it, but equally willing to hand it over in perhaps four to six months.
¹
He also talked rather usefully about other aspects of the disposition of portfolios, sticking to the view which he had accepted when I put it to him at Ditchley that Haferkamp was the bigger man and would be better than Brunner in External Affairs. After dinner he talked a bit about agricultural policy, saying we would have to get an interim price settlement, which he would try and keep as low as possible, before we could embrace any question of structural reform, but that he hoped to be ready for structural reform by May or June.

WEDNESDAY, 5 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Vredeling at noon. No great difficulty with him on this occasion. Having rejected so contumaciously at Ditchley the ‘human face' portfolio of Environment, Consumer Affairs, Nuclear Safety and Transport, he expressed considerable pleasure and gratitude when I proposed to him Employment and Social Affairs together with the Tripartite Conferences.
²
As usual with Henk Vredeling there was a good deal of talk and it took me nearly an hour to deal with him.

After lunch I came straight up against what was likely to be one of the most difficult interviews: that with Brunner. And difficult indeed it proved to be. As I had never got near to promising him External Affairs he was not in any great position to complain. But complain he did and very hard indeed, and attempted to put a veto on Haferkamp's appointment. I said that I couldn't accept that and he then went off into, for him, some extremely rough talk indeed, talking at one stage, so Crispin avers, of ‘loosing the dogs of Bonn' upon me, and at another stage of becoming part of the ‘loyal opposition' in the Commission, and being about as threatening as he could.

We then boxed around a bit as to what alternative I could offer him, but I took the firm view that so long as he was talking in these terms there was no question of my making him any offer at all. He was threatening to resign; he was threatening all sorts of outside pressure and I thought it would be a great mistake to put forward any proposition even though I had a fairly firm one in my mind. When he had gone I decided I would have to re-summon Haferkamp to try and make sure that he was holding firm, as well as going through with the other interviews which I had lined up.

Giolitti was relatively easy. He was happy with Regional Policy, and the oversight of financial interventions generally. I also saw Vouél, the Luxembourger, and had a brief but I thought satisfactory interview with him, reiterating broadly what I had said to him at Ditchley: that if he wanted to he could keep Competition, but that, particularly as he had indicated to me at Ditchley that he might be slightly bored with Competition, I would also like him to consider the possibilities of Environment, Consumer Affairs etc. on the one hand, or the Budget on the other; but that he always had the fall-back of Competition. This, I learnt subsequently, raised great doubts about the security of his position in Vouël's suspicious and unsubtle mind.

Another difficult interview that afternoon was with Natali, who as a Christian Democrat and therefore the senior Italian automatically became a Commission Vice-President. Natali is an exceptionally nice man and one of considerable weight and solidity. Communication with him is difficult because his English is non-existent and his French rudimentary, but this is outbalanced by the fact that he is naturally helpful and friendly, with a proper sense of his own position, but this not taking a prickly form. However, the difficulty on this occasion was that I had practically nothing to offer him, except to talk rather vaguely in terms of special responsibilities, of which the main would be Enlargement. He wanted to get hold of Mediterranean agriculture and of Community relations with the countries on all sides of the Mediterranean, propositions which would have been impossible so far both as Gundelach as the Agriculture Commissoner and Cheysson as the Development Aid Commissioner were concerned, as well as being broadly unacceptable outside. So he had to go away with very little on his plate, though I made clear that this was not intended to be a final
interview and I hoped to have a more substantial one on the following day. But this clearly left a sizeable loose end.

Davignon also came that evening, but caused no trouble. Despite all the rumours in the press that he would resign if not given External Affairs, he was perfectly happy, as I had known to be the case since Ditchley, to accept the new portfolio of Internal Market and Industrial Affairs. The interview with him was brief and amicable.

Then I re-summoned Haferkamp. The important point here, following on the Brunner interview, was how far he was prepared to hold firm. If he was going to weaken, my position
vis-à-vis
the German Government could be extremely difficult, and if I was going to be forced back into putting Brunner into External Affairs and finding it difficult to get Haferkamp out of Economic and Monetary Affairs, there were obviously going to be great repercus-sive difficulties about the disposition of other major portfolios affecting Ortoli and Cheysson and Vredeling, as well as the humiliation of having to appear to change under Brunner's threats.

Haferkamp at this meeting was fairly firm. I do not think I could put it above that. He wanted External Affairs, he thought it right that he should have it, but he was obviously a bit worried as to what the Bonn reaction would be, and I therefore could do little more than stiffen him and tell him we would talk again next morning. This interview did not encourage me, though I was nonetheless quite clear that I ought to hold firm on this major disposition. By this time Emile Noël, the Secretary-General, had been waiting for an hour and a half or so, and I could not do a great deal more than go down and have a scratch dinner with him and Hayden and Crispin and talk over the difficulties and bruises of the day and see what solutions we could find to them.

THURSDAY, 6 JANUARY/FRIDAY, 7 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Immediately after my 9.45 arrival at the Berlaymont I had to take Ortoli aside and tell him that I had leaned very much in favour of his being reappointed, while Giscard had at times positively invited me to ask for the reverse to be the case, and that I now needed some help from him. In particular there must be no question of his adding to Directorate-General 2 (Economic and Monetary Affairs), DG15
(Financial Institutions and Taxation), nor I hoped of DG18 (Coal and Steel Funds), and that I also hoped that he would be generous in dealing with the frontier with Giolitti and would arrive at an amicable settlement with him. Ortoli freezes up, not so much in manner as in substance, as soon as anything touching his prerogatives is raised, and he said that he would have to think about these matters and let me know, but implying that it would all be very difficult.

I had several other interviews in the course of the morning: a useful one with Cheysson. There are no problems except marginal frontier ones about his portfolio (Development Aid—Relations with the Third World), although he obviously has some territorial ambitions in the Arab world, and like the clever busy little bee which he is he was very anxious to be consulted and get involved with other dispositions.

I also saw Haferkamp that morning. He was stronger than the previous evening: very firm on the fact that the German package as a whole was perfectly adequate (Brunner to have Energy as well as Science and Research). But I urged him very strongly to make his own soundings in Germany. Brunner was on the telephone the whole time; he (Haferkamp) really ought to talk to people, to Schmidt himself if possible, to Genscher, and also to Brandt, to whom he attached great importance. He left me shortly before lunch saying he would do this.

In the meantime, mixed messages had come in from Ortoli. He was clearly willing to be reasonably accommodating about DG15, totally unwilling to be accommodating about DG18, and inclined to be pretty difficult in dealings with Giolitti, certainly so far as the European Investment Bank was concerned. We then adjourned for lunch in my dining room. Haferkamp came in with the news, just before we started, that he had spoken to Brandt, he had spoken to Vetter (the head of the German trade unions), he had spoken to Wischnewski (Schmidt's aide and a member of the German Cabinet), who had spoken to Schmidt who was in Spain (I suspect Haferkamp has a slight fear of talking to Schmidt direct himself), and had got very good and positive reactions from them and was therefore totally stiff on External Affairs and was going forward to it with confidence and thought that Brunner would undoubtedly in due course accept Energy, etc. He had not, however, spoken to
Genscher, saying, not unreasonably, that he hadn't done badly in the twenty minutes since he had seen me previously.