European Diary, 1977-1981 (8 page)

The Conservative Group had me to dinner at the dreaded Aerogolf. This Group is in reality a purely British concern, although they manage to find one Dane who will affiliate to them. As a result they count as a Group, as opposed to a collection of individuals, and are able to get all the finances and secretarial services which go with being a transnational group. They were thoroughly agreeable. Peter Kirk,
³⁵
who was in the chair, was as always a highly intelligent neighbour, and we then had an interesting general discussion.

THURSDAY, 10 FEBRUARY.
Luxembourg and Brussels.

All-day discussion on my Programme speech. I replied for thirty-five minutes in an unprepared debating speech. In the luncheon interval I entertained Thorn at the Restaurant St Michel. Prime Ministers of little countries do not mind eating in public in their own capitals. Those of big ones do.

Back to Brussels by the evening TEE.

FRIDAY, 11 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

A special Commission meeting from 11.00 to 1.00 and again from 3.15 until 5.45, to deal with Gundelach's agricultural price package. He presented it very well. As a result no really solid pro-farm lobby
opposition built up. I lunched with Gundelach in my dining room and had an agreeable talk with him. We were able to get through remarkably early. A successful day.

SUNDAY, 13 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Jennifer and I drove to Antwerp where we had an hour's look round and then drove on across the Dutch frontier (which indeed is so little of a frontier there that we never noticed when we were passing it), first to Goes and then to Middelburg in the centre of the Walcheren peninsula, where we lunched. Middelburg seemed curiously dead on a Sunday compared with the Belgian towns. To Vlissingen to take the ferry back to the other side of an arm of the Scheldt, and thus within a few miles we got back into Belgium, with a very noticeable change of countryside. Holland looks much neater than Belgium; the roads and the houses are somewhat better. That bit of Belgium has a dark and dejected air which would make it natural suddenly to see King Albert leading a defeated troop of 1914 soldiers down the side of the road. We drove through Ghent which was a surprisingly large, very splendid town, and got home at about 6.00.

MONDAY, 14 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Denis Healey
³⁶
to see me between 11.00 and 12.00. It was during this meeting that we first heard the news of Tony Crosland's illness the previous day. It was difficult to tell how severe this was, though there was clearly some risk of it being very serious indeed. Denis and I contemplated, not I think his death, but the possibility that he might be out of action as chairman of the Council of Ministers for some time to come.

I had asked Denis what were his own intentions about the future, slightly independently of this, and he said that he intended to stay at the Treasury at least until after the Budget, that a move then had been seriously discussed, but in his view it was not definitely a switch with Crosland, and that in any event his (Healey's) mind
was moving towards staying at the Treasury for a substantially longer time. This was based on a typically complacent view by Denis, who although he knew he had very bad trade figures that afternoon told me nothing about these and indeed spoke in terms of the utmost euphoria about every aspect of the situation.

I then lunched with the Economic Council. Healey there was in a way quite good, though as insufferably know-all as ever, lecturing everyone about every detail of the new American administration, which he said, manifestly untruly, was going to have all its policies absolutely cut and dried by the end of February, and interrupting everybody a good deal. When I complained, Apel
³⁷
said, ‘Oh, we are used to that; we all have to put up with that. ‘I said, ‘I am used to it too, but that is no reason for not complaining.'

I then went to the Agricultural Council for one and a half hours, and watched Silkin
³⁸
get into a mess about the agenda (but I am told he did rather well later in the evening on fish), and heard Gundelach present his price proposals for the first time, and listened to the reactions: the Belgians—not very good, but to be expected; the Danes—pretty good; the Germans—huffing a bit but fundamentally friendly; and the French surprisingly friendly. Dinner at home with Jennifer, much disturbed by the appalling bulletins coming in about Tony.

TUESDAY, 15 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Lunch with Henri Simonet,
³⁹
the Belgian ex-Commissioner, at a restaurant near the Basilique. Back for a series of meetings during the afternoon: first a delegation from the Spanish Socialists, headed by Felipe Gonzales,
⁴⁰
an extremely effective, impressive young man, aged only about thirty-four, of humble origin in the south of Spain, and certainly one of the most impressive—though a little frighteningly tough—young leaders whom I had met for some time; then Klaus von Dohnanyi, the excellent European Minister in the
German Foreign Office. Dinner party at home, composed of Dohnanyis, Ruggieros,
⁴¹
Natali and Laura.

WEDNESDAY, 16 FEBRUARY.
Brussels.

Commission day, but a remarkably easy one. Thirteen or fourteen routine items, but I got them all through in two hours. Lunch at home for Duncan Sandys
⁴²
and then back to the office to see David Owen, who had been in Brussels to open the fishery negotiations with the Russians and from whom I particularly wanted to hear just how awful the news was from London. He said he regarded Tony as already morally and mentally dead; it was settled; there was no question; he would probably live only about forty-eight hours; he might live longer but there could be no possibility of recovery. He clearly did not think that he was at all likely to get the Foreign Secretaryship himself, although I would not say that he ruled it out completely.

FRIDAY, 18 FEBRUARY.
Brussels and Rome.

A frenzied morning in the office trying to patch together a statement for the routine general press conference which I had rashly arranged for that day at noon. Rashly because I agreed to do it simply because six weeks had gone by since the previous press conference, and the whole Brussels press corps is addicted to press conferences. The result however was undesirable as I had very little to say, hence the difficulty of preparing a statement. Left for Rome via Geneva at 3.50. Dinner with Crispin and Jennifer when Crispin told us he was going to be married again.

SATURDAY, 19 FEBRUARY.
Rome and the Abruzzi.

I awoke about 6.30, having had a vivid dream about Tony being present and his saying in an absolutely unmistakable, clear, rather
calm voice, ‘No, I'm perfectly all right. I am going to die, but I'm perfectly all right.' Then at about 8 o'clock we had a telephone call from the BBC saying that he had died that morning, curiously enough at almost exactly the same moment that I awoke from my dream about him. I pulled myself together with some difficulty and after about half an hour did a brief recording over the telephone to the BBC in London, which they used for the 8 o'clock news, it then being 8.50 in Rome.

After speaking to Hayden in Brussels, I decided that I ought to write a
Sunday Times
piece. We therefore slightly postponed our departure with Natali so that I got it going and made the telephone arrangements in the hotel. I then wrote the greater part of its 650 words in the hour or so's drive between Rome and L'Aquila. It was a difficult feat of concentration. I had very little idea of what I was going to say when I started and the effect of writing about Tony was to bring the immense closeness of our earlier relationship flooding back into my mind, much more than had hitherto been the case, so that during the rest of that day in the Abruzzi, and indeed during the whole Roman trip and beyond, I found I was much more affected than I had been during the previous week, even though I had already realized that he was dying.

Official lunch in L'Aquila with the prefect, the mayor, the chairman of the regional council, etc. and then to Rocca di Mezzo where Natali lives in a modest but agreeably furnished house about a mile from the centre of this fairly small, almost ski-resort-like town. A large dinner party. Conversation in a mixture of French, English, Italian; certain difficulties of comprehension but not insurmountable. Natali's French is improving a good deal; his wife seems to understand a certain amount of it, and his Roman surgeon brother-in-law, who devoted himself to a lot of highly cynical remarks about Natali's politics and Christian Democratic politics in general, but in a thoroughly agreeable way, spoke very good English. Bed at about 11.30 for what should have been a good night's sleep, but very typically was considerably interrupted by the noise of the police cars changing over outside. Policemen up in the middle of the night to provide guards for politicians behave equally noisily over the whole of Europe. They do not see why others should sleep if they are awake.

MONDAY, 21 FEBRUARY.
Rome.

Horrible humid, soggy morning. It felt like Lagos or some tropical capital rather than Rome in the winter. Crispin and I went to the Vatican for a Papal audience, which went on much longer than we expected. At first they had said a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, but in fact it took forty or forty-five minutes. The Pope (Paul VI) was too frail happily to talk French, so he talked in Italian and I replied mostly in English. Unfortunately, this was pretty badly interpreted by a young monsignor from California. It was very much more informal than I had remembered when I previously had an audience with Pius XII over twenty years ago.

The Pope switched about in a rather bewildering way between matters of high generality like his support for the European family of nations to those of almost overprecise detail, like asking me why the Nine at its Political Cooperation meeting in London had decided not to issue the statement on the Middle East, and also implying rather worryingly that he would like to get into several negotiating acts in relation to the Middle East generally and the Palestinian position in particular, and indeed also in relation to the Lebanon. He said that if I ever felt that he could do anything useful would I merely let him know by telephone and he would be prepared to proceed immediately! It was not quite clear in which direction he was prepared to proceed, but clearly the intention was good, and the general impression he made was friendly and agreeable.

He then gave us medals, we had photographs taken, and were conducted out. The ceremonies going in and out are rather splendid, with the Swiss Guards and the Papal Chamberlain still fully in operation. A group of about thirty Mezzogiorno bishops were waiting outside. It was not obvious to me (I had never thought about it previously) what to do when passing through an assembled group of bishops in this way. The best thing seemed to incline one's head gravely first in one direction and then in the other. The impressiveness of my departure was however somewhat reduced when one of them was heard to say in a strong stage whisper, ‘è Callaghan'.

We were conducted round the Sistine Chapel and other bits of the old Papal apartments and then drove to the house of the President of the Senate, where I had a twenty-minute conversation
with Fanfani,
⁴³
who told me that Soares,
⁴⁴
whom he had been seeing the day before, thought that Portugal could be in the Community and participating in direct elections by 1978, which was a fairly surprising and disturbing piece of information, but one not subsequently confirmed by anyone else.

Then on, with Fanfani, to a lunch for various Senate figures of note, but mainly the chairmen of the different specialist commissions who between them added up to a good Italian political cross-section, Christian Democrat, Communist and Socialist. At the end of lunch we had about an hour's general discussion which I had to lead and reply to. Then to see Marcora,
⁴⁵
the Minister of Agriculture. He launched off into a great diatribe against Gundelach's price proposals and the unfair treatment which Italian agriculture had received, but when pressed became a little more reasonable, in particular saying that in Gundelach's position he would not have done anything very different himself.

Next to the Commission's Rome office where I did a short television performance and went round meeting the staff; then across to the Farnesina, the new Foreign Ministry at the bottom of Monte Mario, for, first, a private meeting with Forlani, the Foreign Minister, and then a rather pointless, wider meeting, with about eight of us sitting lined up on either side of a great table, with blotting pads and pencils as though we were about to negotiate a treaty. However, Forlani is a nice man and the informal meeting went thoroughly well, he giving a very firm assurance of Italian support in relation to the Commission's presence at the Summit.

Then back to the Hassler for a hurried change, a ten-minute programme on the main TV chain on the way to dinner, which was a large mixed affair at the Villa Madama, with speeches at the end. In the course of dinner we received from Italian sources the news of David Owen's appointment as Foreign Secretary, which surprised and greatly pleased us. Hotel by about 11.00 having got through quite a heavy day.

TUESDAY, 22 FEBRUARY.
Rome and Brussels.

Jennifer to London, and I went at 10 o'clock to the Palazzo Chigi for an hour's meeting with Andreotti,
⁴⁶
the Prime Minister, whom I always like. He is quick, intelligent, and has a curious air of engaging shiftiness. He looks like an intelligent and quite attractive tortoise. He is very agreeable to talk to, he knows what he wants to talk about, takes the points quickly, easily, in good, well-arranged order. Difficult to say whether he is gloomy or optimistic about the situation. He is so used to living on the edge of a political and economic precipice that he tends to discount gloom, though it doesn't lead him into Healey-like complacency.