European Diary, 1977-1981 (54 page)

He was not wholly alone in this desire. The British were basically with him but, perhaps surprisingly, concentrated more on form, leaving the substance to Paris. The French had no difficulty about according me a guard of honour whenever I went to the Elysée, but objected if I did not speak as the servant of the European Council. The British did not seem to mind what I said, but their Foreign Secretary sent a minute around the Foreign Office (in 1978) instructing his officials to desist from the growing practice of referring to me as ‘President Jenkins'.

The French approach was more serious. It was obvious at the turn of the year that the six months of the French presidency were going to be a test of nerve such as no other presidency had provided. And so it proved to be. It was like living under the constant threat of an artillery bombardment. It was not in fact very damaging when it
came, but one never knew when it was going to recommence, and this did not make for a calm life.

Then, at the end of January, there appeared in the sky a totally different cloud, at first no bigger than the proverbial man's hand and never of much real importance, although it managed to consume a vast amount of time and morale over the next nine months. In late January the
Economist
published a couple of paragraphs complaining about the extravagance of Haferkamp's travelling expenses and also pointing a finger at the inappropriateness of Madame van Hoof having accompanied him to China (see pages 314–15
supra
). There was in addition a side-swipe at Vredeling.

The issue was widely re-reported in the British and continental press, there were questions in the European Parliament and the newly initiated and rather overgunned and underoccupied Court of Auditors (or
Cour des Comptes
as it was habitually referred to in all languages) was wheeled in to conduct a detailed inquiry into the expenses of all Commissioners. This kept the issue simmering beneath the surface until it erupted again in August and provided another two months of convulsions before finally subsiding because of a combination of boredom and an inadequate supply of scandalous lava.

The ‘scandal' was debilitating because it touched what was thought to be a vulnerable flank of the Commission. Particularly in Britain, but in some other countries too, it was widely regarded as a symbol of ‘fleshpot' living. No doubt my own predilections assisted the caricature. But in fact it was largely unjustified. The Secretary-General of NATO lives immensely more grandly in Brussels than does the President of the Commission for the very good reason that he is provided free with a house and a household establishment, whereas the President pays for them out of his own income. Equally, the main difference between ourselves and governments in the use of private aircraft (which became another point at issue) was that we hesitated because we had to hire them specially, whereas they used them more habitually because they were permanently at their disposal.

Haferkamp had undoubtedly behaved foolishly and sometimes extravagantly, although never dishonestly, but even his hotel bills needed to be seen in the context that he was the nominee of almost the richest country in the world, and that his choice of
caravanserai
in, say, New York was no more opulent than that of the then deeply indebted British Government.

The only amusement which I derived from this sad saga was the light which the
Cour des Comptes
reports shone upon the differing peccadilloes and prejudices of the several nationalities. The German temptation was undoubtedly the grand Babylonian palace hotels of the world. The Italians,
per contra
, wanted only to go home, as frequently as possible, and preferably at public expense. The French were addicted to a lavish supply of flowers for their offices, a minor vice one would have thought, even if accompanied, as it was, by an iron determination not to give the names of those whom they entertained in their reasonably modest use of their expense accounts. The Belgians were equally reticent here. The British, I have to recall, were boringly impeccable. Christopher Tugendhat was spotless.

The late spring was dominated for me by two elections, the British one on 3 May, and the Community-wide first direct election for the European Parliament on 7/8 June. I took no part in the first, but made speeches in all the nine countries except France (where I judged that an intervention would not be welcome) for the second. These speeches were directed to the importance of the constitutional development and not to support for particular candidates or parties.

The British election resulted in the beginning of Mrs Thatcher's long government. I had mixed feelings about the result, believing on the whole that a change of government would help Britain's relations with the rest of the Community. With the new Government my relations were on the whole good. I often disagreed with Mrs Thatcher, but I found her friendly to deal with, undismayed by such disagreements, and in no way resenting my not being an agent of Whitehall. With the new Foreign Secretary my relations were, paradoxically, closer than they had been with the outgoing one.

My hopes for Britain becoming much more
communautaire
were however substantially unfulfilled. Mrs Thatcher did not take to Europe like a duck to water. She was a duck who remained on a bit of offshore land. Furthermore she was almost immediately involved in a dispute with the Community which was to dominate the remainder of my presidency and to absorb much of the energy of the Community for at least four years after that. Britain, one of
the poorer countries of the Community, made a net budgetary contribution almost as large as that of Germany. This was essentially for two reasons: we imported more from outside the Community than did the others and therefore paid more in import levies; and our small (but efficient) agriculture made few demands on Community outgoings. The so-called ‘renegotiation' of 1974–5, which produced the minimum results with the maximum ill-will, had made only a small impact on this problem, which had however conveniently disappeared underground in 1976–7. It resurfaced during 1978, and Callaghan expressed concern to me at our meeting of 2 November (see
page 333
supra
).

It was a nettle which Mrs Thatcher had to grasp, and her hand did not flinch. The question is whether she grasped it skilfully. I thought not, from several points of view. The micro reasons emerge from the diary, although perhaps more strongly in 1980 than in 1979. The macro one was that she caused a justified but limited dispute (the total Community budget within which her marginal argument took place has never been more than 2 per cent of the member countries' public expenditure and substantially less than 1 per cent of their national income) totally to dominate the Community for five years and to run into the sand any hopes of, or ambitions for, a British leadership role within the Community.

The European elections produced from Britain an appallingly low poll and a vast Conservative preponderance. From the rest of the Community a greater sense of European commitment and a fairer electoral system produced a much higher participation and less distorted party balances. For the Commission, however, it produced a potentially formidable new Parliament, twice the size of the old, which we approached with a mixture of respect and apprehension. In retrospect I think our hopes were better founded than our fears. The directly elected Parliament had at least a good first six months.

In late June I went to Tokyo for my third Western Economic Summit. It was dominated by the second oil shortage and price increase, which had already destroyed the Bonn Summit plans for coordinated growth, and which the world statesmen there assembled, with all the prescience of flat-earthers who saw no reason why spring should follow winter, assumed would be permanent.
Tokyo also provided the background for the last bumps of the rather queasy six months of the French presidency.

During the autumn the two inquiries which had been set up at the end of 1978 completed their reports. Giscard's
trois sages
had, however, so disappointed their instigator that the French Government lost interest in the publication of that report. They had at least done no damage and provided some sensible reflections. The findings of my Spierenburg inquiry were available to us by early October, were accepted by the Commission, and substantially implemented. The rigidity which kept some people in useless sinecures while others of equal rank were overworked was modified. So was the national grip on particular posts. But the firm and sensible recommendation that as the Community was enlarged big countries must give up their right to nominate two Commissioners withered on the bough. So the position of too many Commissioners chasing too few jobs, with which I was confronted in 1977, was exacerbated by Greek entry in 1981 and Spanish and Portuguese entry in 1986.

Enlargement negotiations probably absorbed less of my time and attention than in 1977 or 1978. The Greek treaty of accession was signed in Athens in June, and that was that for the time being. The Spanish and Portuguese negotiations were in a midstream calm, although by inviting the Spanish Prime Minister (then Adolfo Suárez) for a Brussels weekend in December I made a reasonably successful attempt to give them a new momentum.

I travelled outside Europe more than in 1978: a three-country West African trip in January; a major visit to China in February; Japan for the Summit in June; and Egypt in October. It was, however, the only year of the four in which I did not go to the United States. In Europe, outside the Community, I went only to Greece in June and Austria in October.

Over the summer and during the autumn a substantial part of my interest began to move back to British politics. My working assumption during 1977 and 1978 was that I had finished with them, even though I would stay only the normal four years in Brussels. After that I had little idea of what I would do, although I was sufficiently confident in March to reject without hesitation both James Callaghan's kind suggestions of a peerage and of the governorship of Hong Kong.

Then (this, and the reverse, can sometimes be the case) horizons began simultaneously to widen in several directions. An invitation to give the Dimbleby television lecture (on any subject that I liked, although I think the expectation was that it would be a European one) came in May, and my thoughts gradually settled on the idea of using it to propound a new, anti-party approach to British politics. Much of my working leisure, to coin an oxymoron, of the late summer and autumn was devoted to composing what I wished to say.

At the same time there was an agreeable boomlet fostered by some governments and by some Commissioners in the view that I should stay on as President, breaking the post-Hallstein pattern, for a further two or four years. I was flattered but not particularly attracted by this prospect, except insofar as flirting with it might enable me to avoid a lame-duck year. I had come to think of the Commission presidency as a sort of Grand National course, with the fences and the ditches occurring at predictable intervals, and four times around it seemed to me enough. But it was agreeable to have a prospect of the option and this, together with the blood-coursing effect of Dimbleby, meant that I approached and survived the Dublin European Council (Mrs Thatcher's charge of the Light Brigade, except that she had more resilience than Lord Cardigan) and the turn of the year 1979/80 in a higher state of morale than at any of the times under survey except for that period of 1976 when I had the illusion that Europe was open before me, and the spring/summer of 1978 when, with less illusion, I believed we were quickly fashioning the European Monetary System.

MONDAY, 1 JANUARY.
Hatley
.

Francis Pym,
¹
the new Conservative foreign affairs spokesman, came over for a drink and a talk. Although I had been in the House with him for years and indeed had an old Monmouthshire connection, our fathers having been members for adjacent constituencies
and, across parties, quite close, so that Pym's father gave me a wedding present, I had hardly ever had any direct talk with Pym himself. I found him rather impressive, firmly pro-Europe although not starry-eyed. He thought the European cause was quite a difficult struggle but one which had been allowed to go much too much by default in the Conservative Party. He is brisk, quite self-confident, no great intellectual range, no great phrase-maker in conversation but everything said sensibly, succinctly, even powerfully, and there was clearly complete confidence on his part that, unlike the previous shadow, John Davies, who was probably destined (illness apart) to be only a shadow, he, Carrington or no Carrington, Soames or no Soames, would be Foreign Secretary in a Conservative Government.

FRIDAY, 5 JANUARY.
London and Brussels
.

I became extremely depressed on reading the newspapers, and decided that the French monkeying around on MCAs and holding up the start of the EMS meant that Europe was in danger of falling apart and that I had better try and do something about it. Therefore I did some vigorous telephoning to Brussels and set up a meeting for the Sunday morning in Paris with Barre with the intention at least of trying fully to understand the French point of view. The commercial planes being totally unreliable, I set up an avion taxi from Northolt to Brussels at 3.45.