European Diary, 1977-1981 (57 page)

After lunch we had a further forty-five minutes, in another room, mainly about the budget. This gave me the opportunity to say, as I had wanted to do for some time, that the fundamental error which had been made was both for the council to try and control the maximum rate of expenditure (which in my view was not unreasonable since even national parliaments on the whole did not have the ability to spend money except in agreement with the executive—and in any event they had the responsibility of raising the money in a way that the European Parliament did not) and, something else, which in my view
was
totally unreasonable, which
was to try to combine this with control over Parliament's priorities. It had been clear for some time past that Parliament was giving priority to the Regional Fund, and to resist this on the basis of the sacred texts of the European Council's decision of fourteen months before was to make a nonsense of Parliament as part of the budgetary authority. If it was intended to try and restrict them in both ways then it was hardly worth pretending that the Parliament had any budgetary powers at all, and certainly a mistake to move to a directly elected Parliament.

Giscard accepted this to a surprising extent and said, ‘Yes, within a ceiling I see that Parliament must have freedom to manoeuvre.' I also trailed the possibility that the Commission would put forward in due course a supplementary budget. It would be necessary because of the EMS arrangements, and we might do it in such a way that we went above the total of 11,000 million units of account which Parliament had voted. Giscard and Poncet did not look very pleased but took no violent exception.

We also had some pronouncements from Kutscher about the competence of the Court if the budget issue was put before it, to which on the whole he gave an affirmative answer, with Giscard warning that France would not necessarily recognize the validity of this and a very grave position might consequently arise, etc.

Despite all this, we left on reasonably good terms, with Giscard courteously coming out with us, although we soon discovered that this was because there were a lot of television cameras outside to which he duly spoke and then turned, first to me and then to Colombo and then to Kutscher, for us to add a few words.

I also gave a brief interview to Reuters and then drove off taking Colombo with me in my car as I wished to ask his advice on some parliamentary point. A slight farce then set in. I was proposing, in response to a note Nicko Henderson had sent to me at the Elysée, to go and see him at the Embassy. For some extraordinary reason, however, we also had in my car, accompanying Colombo (whose car had not turned up), François-Poncet's
Directeur de Cabinet
, and I was not anxious for it to look as though I ran straight from the Elysée to the British Embassy. I therefore rather unconvincingly dropped them in the rue du Faubourg St Honoré, made another time-wasting circuit by the rue Boissy d'Anglas and left myself only ten minutes for Nicko.

We then drove back to Brussels through pouring rain and a sodden landscape. Berlaymont at 6.45, where there was rather a lot of work, as well as a speech to get into shape for a Val Duchesse change of presidency dinner at 8.30. The dinner followed the regular pattern of these occasions. I had Hedwige de Nanteuil on one side and Signora Giolitti on the other. I made a rather serious speech, more so than the last time, which probably wasn't a bad idea. Sigrist as the outgoing President of COREPER had no difficulty in being equally serious, curiously apologizing for the incompetences of the German presidency, and then Luc de Nanteuil made, if not exactly a frivolous speech, one which was not remotely about policy or substance, but which was exceptionally nice about me, much more so than anyone else had been previously at these dinners.

FRIDAY, 2 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

Drove to Leuven where I was being given an honorary degree. It is an intensely Catholic university. At the Mass in the cathedral everybody except me took communion, including all the professors. Then a two-hour ceremony in a rather nice hall.

The other degree recipients were the ex-President of Venezuela (Caldera), the Cardinal Archbishop of Kinshasa (Malula), and the Polish composer Penderecki. I had to make the principal speech near the beginning, which was neither very good nor very bad. Tindemans then did an allocution about me, and towards the end the ex-President of Venezuela made a rather good speech in French which is not however the best language for Leuven. Then lunch with the Tindemans and back to the Berlaymont at 3.30, where two days away had produced a pile-up of work.

SATURDAY, 3 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

On a beautiful clear, cold morning I drove Neil Bruce
⁷
(staying) and Jennifer to Crupet beyond Namur where after a half-hour's walk up to and round the village on an extremely slippery surface we lunched at Les Ramiers and then drove back to Namur via the river
and walked for another half-hour on the Citadel. A small dinner party for Neil and the Plajas (Italian Ambassador). A lot of talk with Plaja after dinner about the Italian position and some of my complaints about the way the French presidency was conducting itself so far, although my views had been a little assuaged by Thursday's Elysée luncheon, which had undoubtedly done some good.

MONDAY, 5 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

At noon I addressed a group of about eighty so-called US leaders, who were people from business working in government for a year, or vice versa. They looked quite bright, I spoke to them without a text and spoke quite well, but they then asked very boring questions, mainly about the technical details of tariffs affecting the industries from which they came.

Then to a lunch of about ten for the Spanish Foreign Minister Oreja which Simonet gave in the Palais d'Egmont. The anecdotal conversation was all in French, which meant that I couldn't tell as many anecdotes as I might have liked! My command of punch lines in French is inadequate.

At 6 o'clock we had the formal opening of the Spanish negotiations, a long speech from François-Poncet, a shorter but in some ways better one from me, and a good and serious reply from Calvo Sotelo. Then a dinner for the Spaniards at the Val Duchesse, at which François-Poncet and Oreja spoke, but not me, and at which I had a good talk with the latter, whom I was next to, and decided that he was an exceptionally nice and intelligent man with a wide range of interests. After dinner I had a prearranged forty-five minutes with François-Poncet alone, during which we went through the agenda for tomorrow's Council and made it clear on which we were going to have difficulty. I told him what we would have to say on the budget and also warned him that we were bound to have a major clash on Euratom questions, where there could be no question of our not upholding the Court ruling, which the French must understand absolutely clearly.
⁸
He took all this fairly
well and there was certainly a vast improvement in atmosphere from my very unsatisfactory meeting with him before Christmas.

TUESDAY, 6 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

Still beautiful weather, very cold and clear. Jennifer went to London and I spent the morning in the Foreign Affairs Council. Then lunched with the Council and had another four hours in the afternoon. It was quite a good Council from my point of view and rather morale-boosting. I made an intervention summing up the budget debate in the middle of the morning, then carried on the Euratom argument in the afternoon, getting support from nearly everybody except the French, and eventually putting them into an oddly pleading position of saying would we accept this, would we accept that. We had a long-drawn-out negotiation on this and eventually reached a slightly inconclusive but much more satisfactory outcome than might have been expected. Dohnanyi played his hand well and helpfully on both occasions.

I saw Richard Mayne and was greatly relieved to discover that he was happy to accept retirement from the London office with goodwill and that there was no unpleasantness there. I dined with Davignon, Ortoli and Gundelach (who joined us rather late from the Agricultural Council). Morale was slightly higher than when the four of us had met before Christmas, but not vastly so. I gave them an outline of the Haferkamp affair, and they cluck-clucked in a suitable way, though Ortoli made the perceptive but depressing comment that things would probably swing round on to Willy's side and that he would be regarded as a persecuted semi-hero and that the rest of us would get nearly as much mud as he did himself without deserving it.

WEDNESDAY, 7 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

Pouring with rain. I had noticed a ring around the moon in an otherwise clear sky when walking back from the Charlemagne to the Berlaymont at 7.15 the previous evening. It is the most reliable of all weather signs.

Commission for three hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon. The afternoon session was rather exhausting, with one or two difficult items. I persuaded them with only a little difficulty that we should not present a new budget at this stage. Then there was an unexpected raising of the Haferkamp affair by Cheysson, who did it nominally in helpful terms but who only has to see any bubbling pot to want to stir it. And then an unexpected and tiresome defeat on GSP
⁹
for China. Haferkamp presented it fairly badly. I thought it was all arranged, but to my dismay, Ortoli, Gundelach, Davignon and Cheysson (Cheysson was expected, the others not) all came out in a rather hostile way, so there was nothing to do except half accept a negative decision for the moment but say that I would have to come back to it before I went to China: a boring end to the meeting.

THURSDAY, 8 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

A difficult meeting with Aigner,
¹⁰
who is Chairman of the Budget Control Committee, about the Haferkamp affair and its repercussions. Then had Francis Pym, accompanied by Crispin, to lunch, rue de Praetère. He was extremely anxious to learn not only about Brussels, but how to be Foreign Secretary which, as I recorded at the beginning of January, he is quite confident that he will be, although he is not necessarily expecting an election before the autumn. I felt a bit like Lord Melbourne with Queen Victoria, although apart from a certain dumpiness they do not look exactly alike. However, I think Pym is nice and straightforward, even if not intellectually sparkling. Crispin liked him too. Then to Bruges, where I spoke and answered questions at the College of Europe for an hour and a half. I enjoyed the meeting which was attended by all their 180 students.

FRIDAY, 9 FEBRUARY.
Brussels
.

Cheysson at 9.45 to try and move him, not very successfully, on GSP for China. I then saw Napolitano,
¹¹
and a delegation of about five from the Italian Communist Party, who had made a great issue about coming to see me. Napolitano was talkative, svelte and moderate, and indeed agreeable and sensible, as I had thought when I had seen him in London about three years before; most of the others were silent.

At 12.30 I had Klose, the Governing Mayor of Hamburg, for half an hour's talk and a lunch. Unfortunately before seeing him I made the mistake of reading the summary of the German press comment on the Haferkamp affair, which Tugendhat had sent me, and was horrified and depressed to find how anti-British, anti-Tugendhat, and indeed how anti-me the German press comment had turned into after its initial, but brief, anti-Haferkamp phase. How right Ortoli was. Therefore I started in a gloomy and not very pro-German mood. However, Klose is a nice agreeable man, though he doesn't get on with Schmidt I am afraid, nor with Apel.

After lunch I saw George Thomson and wept a little on his shoulder about the Haferkamp affair as he had done on mine over the Rhodesian sanctions affair the year before. Then I got the figures for which I had asked for various forms of expenditure, and discovered the horrific bit of news that our 1978 expenditure on avion taxis was more than twice the previous year's, and that as a result we were over our budget for this part of Commissioners' travel and accommodation expenses, though not over the budget for either representation expenses or travelling expenses in the Commission as a whole (that is including officials). After seeing Tugendhat about this bad beginning to the weekend I went home, where Caroline had arrived to stay and where we unusually had a purely English dinner party.

MONDAY, 12 FEBRUARY.
Brussels and Luxembourg
.

I saw the acting Egyptian Foreign Minister, Boutros-Ghali, for just over half an hour at 10.30: an agreeable, intelligent man. Then I
attended a reception which Brunner was giving for Heath and the European Youth Orchestra, spoke briefly to Ted and listened to one or two rather good little performances.

At 12 o'clock I saw Greenborough
¹²
and two or three other people from the British CBI and then, at 12.30, Vredeling, to lobby him successfully about reversing the previous Wednesday's GSP decision for China. Crispin had done a good and much more difficult job with both Davignon and Gundelach the previous week.

After this I gave lunch to a highly distinguished body of Norwegian parliamentarians containing at least two ex-Prime Ministers and, so I was told, either one or two future Prime Ministers—that is always more difficult to tell. At 3 o'clock I saw Ortoli on several matters, including telling him that I was going to try and change the GSP decision, which he accepted with neither enthusiasm nor complaint. He was not going to be at the meeting on Wednesday so he was not of crucial importance, but I thought it necessary to tell him.

4.27 train to Luxembourg and worked all the way, mainly on my draft statement relating to expenses, while Nick Stuart and Laura did a breakdown on the dreaded avion taxi figures. We arrived in filthy, gloomy weather and I went to see Colombo to discuss various bits of business for the week with him—a friendly conversation as always.

TUESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY.
Luxembourg
.