European Diary, 1977-1981 (63 page)

WEDNESDAY, 28 MARCH.
Brussels
.

Between the normal two Commission sessions I gave a lunch at rue de Praetère for the largely unoccupied
Times
journalists
³⁵
whom Charlie Douglas-Home had brought over, the various European
correspondents—Peter Nichols from Rome, who is rather a good man, Charles Hargrove from Paris, about whom I have mixed views, our local correspondents, Patricia Clough from Bonn—and one or two other people from London. It was all perfectly agreeable, as indeed I always find anything with Charlie Home.

In the evening a dinner primarily for Hugh Thomas, with Laura, the Tickells and Helena Tiné. We came out after dinner and listened with bated breath, as they say, to the BBC sound commentary, given by Nick Stuart's father,
³⁶
on the result of the division in the House of Commons. At first it sounded as though the Government, as usual, had won, which would have been an anti-climax, but then there was the news of the Opposition victory by a single vote, and therefore Callaghan's announcement that he would recommend dissolution the next day. I had no feeling of exhilaration in the sense of wanting to take part in the campaign, but a satisfaction that the anti-climax of another narrow Government victory had been avoided, and that the Government's life, long past its useful term, wasn't just going to drag on indefinitely.

Hugh Thomas—despite his occasions canvassing for me in Stechford—is now a dedicated Thatcherite Tory, but didn't seem too certain about the result. Laura and the Tickells—and me probably—were all in a way rather torn, Laura slightly Tory but firmly anti-Mrs Thatcher, Crispin keeping his counsel, Helena naturally not having many views. However, an election in five or six weeks and a new Government whether Labour or Tory after that, rather than one just hanging on, will certainly be a good thing.

FRIDAY, 30 MARCH.
Brussels
.

Leslie Bonham Carter arrived for the weekend just before lunch (Mark coming from Germany tomorrow). A 3.30 coordination meeting for the Foreign Affairs Council next week. In the course of it Crispin gave me the news that Airey Neave
³⁷
had been blown up in his car coming out of the House of Commons, which was fairly shattering. He was our East Hendred Member of Parliament. I neither liked nor disliked him, but thought he had a slightly bad
influence politically. I had always found him agreeable, but not constructive. However, an assassination at the House of Commons was a most terrible thing, and a dreadful beginning to an election campaign.

SATURDAY, 31 MARCH.
Brussels
.

The last day of the wettest March (so
Le Soir
informed me) in Brussels there had ever been since records started at the beginning of the Kingdom. March 1914, which had previously held the twentieth-century record, had been overtaken fairly comfortably about 25 March, and it was touch and go up to the night of the 30th whether the previous all-time record of 1836 would or would not be surpassed. However, it narrowly was and an absolutely filthy month it has been, raw, but not the exhilarating cold of January and February, and almost continuous cloud and pouring rain. This last day showed no improvement.

We left for Aachen at about 10.30, and met Mark at the railway station there. Then on a very raw day we walked round the cathedral and the Rathaus, the Rathaus looking curiously different, particularly the great hall upstairs, than on the occasion of the Karlspreis ceremony.

We recrossed the frontier and lunched at St Hubert near Eupen where we were the only customers, apart from our accompanying policemen. The restaurant was in one of those slightly ugly, bogus châteaux in a little park looking on to suburban villas which are a particularly nasty feature of some parts of Belgium.

TUESDAY, 3 APRIL.
Luxembourg and Brussels
.

Foreign Affairs Council at 10.15 on MTNs. A moderate round-table discussion. I then asked for a restricted session (because we were engaged in negotiations) before the replies, which Stevy Davignon and Gundelach gave very well indeed. The Council resumed at 3.30 and went on until 8.30. I thought we were then very near to completing the MTN package. But François-Poncet suddenly announced that we must adjourn and deal with the Greeks. I said, ‘No, no, it is impossible to stop at this stage,' and, being supported by the Germans, we got an agreement that we should split the Council
(no dinner except for those who were dealing with the Greeks) and that Poncet would take the negotiating council with the Greeks, and Deniau would preside over the MTN council.

I had intended to go back to Brussels, first on the 5.30 train, then on the 9.15, and therefore just went down to see the beginning of the MTN council. But I was persuaded by Davignon to stay—rightly, I think, not because there was much of great value for me to do, except that I was able to take the lead on any procedural point and hold the ring for Davignon and Gundelach to deal with the detail. At 2 a.m. we eventually got the package through. The Italians were the most difficult, but not impossibly so. We got them away from outright opposition after they had spoken to Andreotti in Rome on the telephone, and into no more than a holding reserve, partly by my threatening to speak to Andreotti myself (he, poor man, probably thought that the prospect of having to talk to me in French over the telephone would be even worse than his Italian political difficulties, and softened his line considerably).

At 2.15 a.m. we set off to drive back to Brussels. There was light snow falling as there had been during the day, but I did not take April snow seriously. Twenty-five miles out, just beyond Arlon, it became difficult to maintain this view. Going up the first slope to the Ardennes, there were stranded lorries all over the place, almost blocking the road, and we were very near the point of turning back (which was a discouraging prospect). It did not look as though we would get to Brussels before 8 o'clock; whenever we tried to go faster than 25 mph we took a nasty lurch across the road, and the only two cars which passed us ended up in the ditch. However as we came down the slope, somewhere near Marche, the snow died away. It is curious how subject to snow are those relatively low Ardennes hills.

WEDNESDAY, 4 APRIL.
Brussels
.

A postponed Commission at 11.00. I had the Westminster Bank chairman—Leigh-Pemberton,
³⁸
an agreeable man—and two other directors to lunch, rue de Praetère, and then did a press conference on the MTNs with Haferkamp, Gundelach and Davignon before
another two hours of Commission. Then I went to a Monnet Mass which we had, rightly, decided to arrange in Brussels at the instigation of Ortoli and Davignon—neither of whom however turned up, despite the fact that they were at the Commission until the end and, indeed, dined with me that evening. In fact, practically nobody turned up. It was in a very bleak modern church, which was, I would guess, about 11 per cent full, approximately the same proportion as voted ‘Yes' in the Welsh Referendum. However, the Papal Nuncio did it well, but no one could say it was an inspiring occasion in view of the attendance. There were very few diplomats, a curious mixture—Eugenio Plaja, the wife of Riberholdt, a few black men and the Swiss Ambassador. From the Commission, Vouël, Tugendhat, Brunner and me.

Then to rue de Praetère for the third of my ‘Four Horsemen'
³⁹
dinners. Gossip, but agreeable gossip, over dinner, with Ortoli as usual being very animated. He had every reason to be more animated than the rest of us as he had not spent the night trying to get back from Luxembourg. Some interesting conversation at the end, when Ortoli, strongly supported by Davignon, and up to a point by Gundelach (though he was getting sleepy by that time) said that immediately after the British election, whatever the result, it was crucial to solve the problem of Britain's relations with the Community, getting Britain to accept an enthusiastic commitment in return for dealing with her legitimate grievances, budget and otherwise. In that way the sore could be prevented from festering, but if it was just allowed to go on festering for even six months or so, they thought there would be a real danger to the future of our membership—perhaps to Britain's desire to remain a member, but even more to the desire of others that we should.

THURSDAY, 5 APRIL.
Brussels, Birmingham and Glasgow
.

11.25 plane to Birmingham for a Chamber of Commerce lunch speech which most curiously took place at the St John's Hotel, Solihull. An audience of about 250,1 think, and the speech went rather well. Then on to Glasgow to deliver the Hoover Lecture
(financed by vacuum cleaners rather than by the ex-President, I think) at the University of Strathclyde.

A text for my lecture had been sent down to Luxembourg, where Crispin and I both thought it fairly awful on first reading. It had then been redone by Nick Stuart, who was with me, but I still didn't think much of it. However, with a little improvisation it turned out to be a quite good lecture, so I must have been rather jaundiced about it. I got apprehensive when reading the correspondence in Birmingham and discovering, which I had not previously noticed, that so far from being a little faculty talk, it attracted a fee of £2000, enormous by British standards, which, although I felt I had to give it away, partly back to Strathclyde, inevitably–although perhaps wrongly–made me take it a little more seriously.

After the lecture I dined agreeably with the academic weight of Strathclyde, and then returned to the Central Hotel. It really is a rather magnificent hotel, old railway style at its best, expressing all the self-confidence and splendour of 1890s Glasgow: tremendously good polished woodwork, downstairs and upstairs, and a comfortable sitting room, bathroom and bedroom, not at all rundown.
⁴⁰

SATURDAY, 7 APRIL.
London, The Hague and Brussels
.

9 o'clock plane to Amsterdam, cursing myself for having agreed to do a direct elections speaking engagement in The Hague, without which I could have gone quietly to East Hendred. However my morale improved when we arrived at Amsterdam in the first good weather I had seen for five weeks, and drove fairly dangerously, under motorcycle escort, to The Hague. And it improved further when I spoke to a rather good audience of about two hundred, including a lot of notabilities (den Uyl, van der Klaauw, Brinkhorst, Berkhouwer, etc.). But it declined again with an absolutely filthy lunch, a sort of sitting-down snack, all of it quite inedible, and nothing to drink until I asked for a glass of beer, which they brought. Whereupon, van der Klaauw, the Foreign Minister, sitting next to me said, ‘Where did you get that from? I wish I could have one.' I assured him that he could, if he asked. The Dutch, although stubborn, are often undemanding.

Laura and I then drove to Scheveningen, had a walk on the sea front, and went on past Delft, round Rotterdam to the sea at Veere, and back across the ferry–it was still a beautiful day–from Vlissingen to Breskens. Brussels at about 8 o'clock.

MONDAY, 9 APRIL.
Brussels
.

At last the last half-week of this seemingly endless (partly owing to calendar, partly owing to weather) Christmas/Easter term. Plaja at 10.45, with Italian complaints about MTNs. I was reasonably sympathetic but think they may be pushing their luck a bit. I then saw rather a good delegation from the Italian Republican Party at 12.30, and afterwards took Spierenburg to lunch and was rather encouraged by the way he seems to be getting on. I found him agreeable and think his ideas are
probably
sensible, although he is a little too interested in the wider questions of how the Commission should be appointed, and what its relations with the Parliament should be, and not quite interested enough in the duller ones of internal bureaucratic organization.

Dined with Deane Hinton at a farewell party for General Haig, and had some serious conversation with both of them afterwards. Haig appeared as usual as a nice man, plenty to say, right-wing views, but not offensively so. He has been a good SHAPE commander, and believes, though I have my doubts, that he may have a great political future, but he is not to my mind remotely a great man.

TUESDAY, 10 APRIL.
Brussels
.

On a most beautiful day—it had suddenly become 70° - Crispin and I lunched at a little restaurant on the corner of the Petit Sablon. Then an afternoon and early evening of clearing up in the office before going off to the Wakefield
⁴¹
dinner (new British Ambassador to the Kingdom). That was rather enjoyable; it is a splendid house, almost as good as the Paris Embassy, which I hadn't been in since coming to Brussels. I liked both the Wakefields very much; they are a great improvement. It was a slightly predictable group, mainly of
Belgians apart from the Killicks: the Burgomeister, the Grand Marshal of the Court, etc. After dinner I talked for a long time to old Sir James Plimsoll, the Australian Ambassador (he is not in fact as old as he looks), whom I always like.

FRIDAY, 13 APRIL.
East Hendred
.

To the Berlins for lunch with Annans, Quintons, Michael Astor, John Sparrow and Arnold Goodman. After lunch, walked round Addison's Walk with Jennifer and also through Christ Church.

MONDAY, 16 APRIL.
East Hendred
.

Lunch with the Gordon Richardsons just west of Cirencester, who had Kit McMahon, former Magdalen economics don, former economic adviser to the Bank, now executive director, plus wife, staying. McMahon nicer and less thrusting than I had thought him to be, and the Richardsons on excellent form. A grand but rather unused house. Drove back through appalling traffic, with Bibury a scene of congested chaos, to see the Tickells at Ablington. The third day of perfect Easter weather.

FRIDAY, 20 APRIL.
East Hendred
.

Davenports, Michael Astors and Hendersons to lunch. Nicholas (Davenport)
⁴²
beginning to age at last. Michael Astor seemed in surprisingly rude health in spite of his winter of illness. Nicko violently right-wing, much more than anybody else, on the election. In the evening I watched without enlightenment or inspiration various political broadcasts.