European Diary, 1977-1981

1977–1981

ROY JENKINS

Preface

Sketchmap of Brussels

The Commission

The
Cabinet

Introduction

1977

1978

1979

1980

Epilogue

APPENDIX 1 Allocation of Portfolios, 4–7 January 1977

APPENDIX 2 Presidents, Ambassadors, Governments

The four years covered by this book are the only period of my life for which I have kept a narrative diary. I have fairly careful engagement diaries for the past forty years and from 1964 substantial chunks of unworked memoir raw material, dictated close to the event. But I had never previously (nor have I since) attempted a descriptive outline of each day in the calendar. However I decided that the Brussels years were likely to be a sharply isolated segment of my life, and that I might mark them by attempting this new exercise.

I found it fairly burdensome, for I am naturally a slow (and I like to think meticulous) manuscript writer and not a fluent dictater; and a slowly written manuscript diary was clearly not compatible with the scale of the task and the pattern of life which I was recording. However, I kept it up to the end, but was glad when it was done.

I dictated to a machine, sometimes within forty-eight hours of the events, but more typically a week or so later. When there was this sort of gap I worked from a detailed schedule of engagements. The tapes were then typed up and corrected by me during my next period of semi-leisure.

The result was a typescript of six hundred thousand words. About a quarter of these owed their existence to nothing more than the periphrasis of dictated work, and required pruning for any purpose. That left a total still more than twice as long as was convenient for one-volume publication. So I undertook a further two stages of stripping away. First I cut what was of least interest to me. And then, a more painful process, I cut what seemed to me and others to be of least interest to the likely reader.

The second stage involved sacrificing the principle of a separate entry for each day of the year and this to some extent diminished
the ‘pattern of life' aspect of the picture. Nevertheless, I have retained a good deal of material which is of interest for illustrating this rather than because the incident itself was in any way crucial; and I have also kept in mind my own tendency when reading other people's diaries to find that it is often the trivial which is most interesting.

If there has been a bias in the cutting it has been against the minutiae of Commission business and in favour of the broader issues of Europe, of clashes with or between governments, and, in 1979 and 1980, of political developments in Britain. As a result, although the book is bounded by my Brussels years, it would be wrong to describe it as a
Brussels Diary.
A good two-thirds of the action takes place outside that city.

There remains the question of cuts that I have made for reasons other than those of space. I have exercised some but not much censorship. I have cut out a number of unfriendly comments about individuals of relatively little note. If the degree of pain caused to the person concerned was likely to exceed the interest aroused in others that seemed to me a good reason for excision. The more important the person, the less discreet I have been. Thus Giscard and Schmidt are almost entirely unprotected by any afterthoughts. I took the view that they, and others near to their eminence, could look after themselves.

So it could be argued that to be the subject of sharp comment is a tribute. I hope that some of those involved will recognize the compliment to their self-confidence, or will at least look at the picture of themselves in the round. In a four-year relationship even with fundamentally respected collaborators, there are bound to be moments of irritation, and any accurate moving picture of events is bound to reflect them. I have also cut some comments recorded from the mouths of others, particularly where I thought the remarks might cause them embarrassment in offices they continue to hold.

So for a variety of reasons I have greatly shortened the text, and any shortening of course is bound to be selective. But have I doctored it? I obviously do not think so. I have tidied up a good deal, but I have never consciously changed the sense, I have resisted (with some difficulty)
esprit d'escalier,
and where I have added, mainly but not exclusively in footnotes, it has been for purposes of
clarity. The only exception has been where, seeking economy in words, I have suddenly seen that a new linking sentence could get one from A to B in fifteen words rather than five hundred.

I do not therefore claim complete textual integrity, as opposed to integrity of substance. But the original text exists, can be published in due course if anyone so desires, and is available in the meantime for inspection by anyone who feels they might have been maligned by
ex post
judgements.

My last comment is that editing a volume of diaries has proved an immensely more time-consuming process than writing an original book. It is the equivalent of altering an existing house as opposed to building a new one, and causes a good deal more trouble to the neighbours as well.

The long-suffering neighbours in this case have been Diana Fortescue, my research assistant, who, with the help of the libraries of Chatham House, the French, German, Italian, American, Japanese, Greek and Belgian embassies, as well as those of the House of Lords and House of Commons, has done an immense work on footnotes and references, and Lord Bonham-Carter and Miss Alison Wade, my Collins editors. Sir Crispin Tickell and Mr Hayden Phillips provided a perspective on Brussels, and Sir Christopher Audland and Mr Michael Emerson assisted on several more recondite points of Community lore. The original texts were typed by Mrs Bess Church and Miss Patricia Smallbone, the reduced version (with great speed) by Miss Monica Harkin and the footnotes by Mrs Xandra O'Bryan Tear.

ROY JENKINS

East Hendred, April 1988

From the late 1950s onwards a commitment to European unity, and to Britain's participation in it, became my most dominating political purpose. It provoked my first withdrawal from the Opposition front bench in 1962, although from a post so minor that hardly anyone noticed, and my only political quarrel with Hugh Gaitskell in that same last year of his life.

In 1964–701 was much occupied with the day-to-day business of being a minister, but I think that from Aviation to the Home Office to the Treasury I managed to remain reasonably faithful to Europe within my own Departments as well as, of course, enthusiastically supporting Harold Wilson's conversion and the consequent lodging of Britain's second application to join the European Economic Community in 1967.

When the exigencies of the party game led him to change his position again in 1971 I considered this second switch to be neither good politics nor good sense and had no hesitation in leading sixty-eight Labour MPs into the ‘yes' lobby on the principle of joining. And six months later, when it had become clear that the majority of the Labour leadership attached more importance to the short-term embarrassment of the Government than to either the long-term orientation of Britain or to their own reputation for consistency, I resigned again from the Opposition front bench. This time I at least attracted more notice, for I had progressed from being number three spokesman on economic affairs to being deputy leader of the party and shadow Chancellor.

I did not see this resignation at the time as a decisive separation. I thought that I would probably be back in full communion within a few years. In retrospect however these 1971–2 events obviously marked the beginning not merely of my separation from the Labour Party but also of a disenchantment with the mould which two-party
politics had assumed by the early 1970s. I reluctantly went back into government in 1974, but nothing fully engaged my general political enthusiasm until the European referendum of the spring of 1975. In that campaign I was President of the Britain in Europe organization, with Willie Whitelaw and Jo Grimond as the principal vice-presidents, and achieved the most satisfactory national election result in which I have ever significantly participated.

By early 1976, when the question of my becoming President of the European Commission first arose, it could therefore be said that my general European credentials were fairly good. But they were very general. My conviction was complete, but my experience was negligible. The only ministerial portfolio which I held after Britain's entry in 1973 was that of the Home Department, which, as its name implied and its ethos confirmed, was about as far removed from the business of the Community as any within the compass of the British Government.

I participated in no Councils of Ministers. I liked to say, only half as a joke, that I kept my European faith burning bright by never visiting Brussels. And this was almost startlingly true. France, Italy, Germany I knew fairly well. But the embryonic capital of Europe I had visited on only four occasions between 1945 and the date of my appointment as the head of its administration. I was an enthusiast for the
grandes lignes
of Europe but an amateur within the complexities of its signalling system.

Until January 1976 I had no thought of penetrating these complexities. I regarded myself as a buttress rather than a pillar of the church of European unity. I would support it passionately from the outside when called upon to do so. But the
rouages
were not for me. I remembered my dismay one evening in the spring of 1972 when George Thomson told me that he had accepted an invitation to go to Brussels as a Commissioner in the following January. I thought our joint role was to save the Labour Party from extremism and Britain from insularity. But we should accomplish these tasks without getting mixed up in issuing directives or administering regulations. Success in domestic politics was the way to achieve international goals.

By early 1976, however, this devotion to national politics had considerably but surreptitiously eroded itself. The pleasures of
membership of a Government with the general outlook and policy of which I was fairly steadily out of sympathy were distinctly limited. The Home Office was perhaps the best department from which to be the licensed leader of an internal opposition, and my prerogatives there as a senior minister were not infringed upon by the easy-going regime of the second Wilson premiership. But it was a job which I had done before when I was forty-five not fifty-five, and a
réchauffé
helping did not keep the blood racing. Furthermore, I was increasingly interested in foreign rather than domestic issues (which made the Home Office a bit of a cage), and increasingly impatient of Britain's addiction to believing it always knew best even though its recipes ended only too frequently in it doing worst.