European Diary, 1977-1981 (85 page)

SATURDAY, 22 MARCH.
Brussels and Nancy.

Drove to Luxembourg, unfortunately in misty weather over the Ardennes and therefore missed the views. Did a brief tour of the city and then down to Ehnen for lunch alongside the Mosel. Then to Metz and to the cathedral, which I do not recollect ever having seen before. It is quite magnificent, high slightly gaunt nave and spectacular glass, from a whole variety of periods: some medieval, some seventeenth-century, some Chagall. The town is better than I thought, a good medium-large
chef-lieu.
Then to Nancy and stayed in the Grand Hôtel Concorde in the Place Stanislas, which is a sort of very little Crillon. Also, happily, very
petit Crillon
from the point of view of price: only 170 francs for a room, which for a view over one of the three best squares in Europe is not bad.

MONDAY, 24 MARCH.
Brussels.

Plaja came to see me with the fairly amazing news that Cossiga had decided to postpone the European Council (due on the following Monday, 31 March) because his Government crisis meant that he did not have enough time to do the necessary pre-Council diplomacy. At first I was uncertain and thought the decision was unwise, as we seemed to me to be moving up to a satisfactory crisis culmination. On reflection I became a little more open to Cossiga's idea and made no public and very little private criticism of him. What was a mistake, however, was to announce the postponement before agreement to another date had been secured.

Lunch with COREPER in the Charlemagne, where conversation was almost entirely about this. COREPER becomes an increasingly hopeless body, almost guaranteed to seize the wrong end of any stick. Eugenio (Plaja) tries to be a good chairman and is about as good as they could get, but the continual bad exhibition tennis match, as I described it to them, between Butler and Nanteuil, is becoming a great bore for everybody and effectively destroying the institution. An afternoon telephone conversation with Werner, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, where the postponed Council will, I suppose, have to be, owing to April being a month when the Community institutions meet there.

TUESDAY, 25 MARCH.
Brussels, Strasbourg and Brussels.

8.40 plane to Strasbourg. The Parliament was grinding through the agricultural debate introduced by Gundelach the previous evening. I made a rather sharp fifteen-minute speech saying that, apart from the merits of the issue, if the Parliament wanted to be taken seriously it must stick on the course which it had beckoned us down in December. This went down rather well, though some of the French, including
Le Monde,
got agitated against it, but they do that about so many things that one cannot take it too seriously. I gave Klepsch (leader of the Christian Democrat Group) lunch at La Wantzenau. I had intended to go into the town but we were warned that there were such a lot of agricultural demonstrators about that it was arguably unsafe (which I doubted) and certainly a recipe for unpunctuality.

After lunch I tried to have a look at the demonstrators who, it was reported, had burnt the Union Jack. So I think they had, but then for good measure they burnt the Tricolor and seven other flags as well, so it seemed fairly even-handed. Then heard Gundelach's winding up, the quality of which was difficult to judge as it was, exceptionally, in Danish. Avion taxi back to Brussels.

THURSDAY, 27 MARCH.
Brussels and Copenhagen.

Evening plane to Copenhagen. To the Hôtel d'Angleterre, of which Grand Metropolitan seem to be making a great mess. They are changing the terrace, changing the entrance, changing the furniture, and changing it a great deal for the worse. This was previously one of the more attractive hotels in Europe. Changes in ownership rarely do anything to hotels except make them worse.

FRIDAY, 28 MARCH.
Copenhagen and Brussels.

At 11 o'clock to the Christiansborg for a meeting and lunch with the Prime Minister, Anker Jørgensen. When we got there, there was no sign of the little man, and it was a good forty-five minutes before he could be eventually extracted from some party caucus. His private secretaries said that he had just disappeared in the Parliament. However, when he turned up he was agreeable enough, although I think in some ways the BBQ has turned him into the most difficult of all the nine heads of government with whom I deal. This is partly
linguistic, as we talk English, without an interpreter, and he is not wholly at home in it. Lunch started as soon as he arrived. It was a vast smørgasbord, accompanied—I would have thought rather tactlessly as we have various cases pending with the Danes about their discriminating against other Community drinks—by nothing but the most chauvinistic Danish combination of aquavit and Tuborg. However, we survived on that, and with the help of his
Chef de Cabinet
and Crispin managed to make some reasonable progress over lunch and certainly got Jørgensen to accept, which he had not done at Dublin, that something well above the financial mechanism would have to be done for the British, and that a figure of 1000 or 1100 million, while possibly high, was not out of the question.

Back to Brussels in the afternoon and to a special showing in the
salle de presse
of the Granada Television film called
Mrs Thatcher's Billion
on the Dublin Summit, which was remarkably good. Sarah Hogg played Mrs Thatcher in a way almost worthy of Sarah Bernhardt, and although not looking like their principals when not speaking, Schmidt (Martin Schulz) and Giscard (Paul Fabra) were also in different ways brilliantly played. By these three at any rate, it was a very convincing performance. Stephen Milligan played me, accurately in substance, but I thought without style. What, however, was noticeable was that the highly informed, blasé audience of about 150 assembled in the
salle de presse
broke into spontaneous applause when the film was over. It was a remarkable
tour de force.

TUESDAY, 1 APRIL.
Brussels.

A fifteen-minute speech to the Political Committee of the Parliament. The Political Committee is
sur place
a perfectly tolerable body with which to deal, but it seems to produce objectively explosive speeches from me. I made a reference on this occasion to the gap between the British and the others not being in effect more than two weeks' cost of the CAP. Two weeks' cost of the CAP equals a little more than 400 million units of account, therefore my sum was based on the unspoken premise that there was hardly anybody who was not willing to go to 700 million, and I believe the British would settle at 1100 million if not a little less. This was a perfectly accurate statement of the position. What effect it will have I do not quite know.

WEDNESDAY, 2 APRIL.
Brussels and London.

To London after a Commission meeting, and to George Weiden-feld's big and long-planned dinner party for us. A great roll call of the great and good, of the liberal and central at any rate: Annans, Donaldsons, Mosers, Bonham Carters, Rodgers', David Steel, Nigel Ryan,
²⁷
Edna O'Brien, John Gross',
²⁸
Garry Runcimans,
²⁹
George Thomsons, Clarissa Avon (Eden) as a wild card. I can't remember who else, but a large and enjoyable party.

SATURDAY, 5 APRIL.
East Hendred.

No papers, so into Wantage, perhaps mistakenly as it turned out, to buy them. Discovered that the French Government, the Quai in particular, had launched a great onslaught on my Political Committee speech on the previous Tuesday. Quite why was not clear. I suppose all part of their ploy to try and neutralize me in advance of the European Council, feeling that I had opened up the possibility of special measures for Britain last time and believing, because they are incapable, I think, of believing anything else in view of the way they behave themselves, that I am a British agent, which is hardly the case. However, their reaction, though ridiculous and unwarranted, was mildly depressing.

MONDAY, 7 APRIL.
East Hendred.

Gilmours to lunch. It didn't rain, as it usually does when Ian is here. Ian did not have a great deal to say about budgetary questions, though obviously developing a certain optimism. No reaction from him, and therefore presumably no mutterings in the Foreign Office, about my Political Committee speech. On the centre party he was quite interesting and more favourable, I would judge, than when I last talked to him. At one stage he said firmly he thought I would (from my point of view) be right to go ahead, though
obviously there were risks. I think he would probably like to see Heath involved, and said: ‘You and Ted would be a formidable combination.'

TUESDAY, 8 APRIL.
East Hendred.

A large lunch party for the Clive Wilkinsons,
³⁰
Bradleys, Rodgers' and Oakeshotts.
³¹
It all lasted with a lot of conversation until 6.15, which was rather too late, but it was, I think, worthwhile. Tom (Bradley) and Matthew (Oakeshott) absolutely firm and hard in favour of a new party, Bill more forthcoming than I expected, Clive Wilkinson much the least. He clearly won't move and my judgement is that to a greater extent than I had thought the half-cock Colin Phipps publicity has done harm in the West Midlands.

WEDNESDAY, 9 APRIL.
East Hendred.

In the evening I had two hours with a young man called Pimlott, who is writing a life of Hugh Dalton, and found him very good. He is a lecturer or research fellow at LSE and seems to understand Dalton very well, and I think should produce a serious, but also penetrating book about him.
³²

SUNDAY, 13 APRIL.
Dorset and East Hendred.

Returned from Dorset (where we had stayed two nights with Fred and Simone Warner) on a perfect morning via Salisbury, where we made a brief visit to the cathedral, and found it as usual cold, detached, perfect, but too much of a ship and too little of a shrine.

David Steel to dine and stay. Again, a satisfactory talk. I like him very much personally, found him as good and firm and committed as ever, no complaints on either side. He said that he had quite a difficult hurdle to clear in the shape of a Liberal gathering at Worcester in May, which would be less favourable to him than the Assembly in some way or other, but was fairly confident that he could get over it. Considerable commitment on both sides.

MONDAY, 14 APRIL.
East Hendred and Brussels.

Returned to Brussels by a plane which was two and a half hours late, by far the worst delay I have had for months. Arrived rue de Praetère slightly disorganized and more than slightly bad-tempered nearly an hour late for a lunch which I was giving for the Portuguese Ambassador, plus six others.

In the afternoon I had a request from the Israeli Ambassador for a visit, no doubt intended to balance the fact that he had heard I had seen some Arab ambassador. He is a disagreeable man, quite apart from my disapproval of Begin's policy, and it was not a rewarding conversation from either of our points of view. Then I saw Nanteuil at his request for him to present the French position in relation to the European Council, which although hard in some ways did not seem to me quite as impossible as I had expected. I rather disconcerted him by thanking him at the end, whereas he obviously expected me to be more shocked by what he had said, and consequently seemed rather thrown.

TUESDAY, 15 APRIL.
Brussels and Strasbourg.

Strasbourg by the early train for a Commission meeting at noon to discuss preparations for the Foreign Affairs Council next week, which is rather tortuously to prepare for the European Council. Found them as usual before a difficult European Council in a rather bad, edgy, disorganized frame of mind, and therefore decided I had to set about having a series of bilateral meetings.

Stevy Davignon to dinner. I found him less inspiriting, less ingenious, more downbeat than usual. I got from him the information that he had decided to stay on in the next Commission even though he clearly had moved to a position of assuming that I was not staying on, which was different from what he had last urged on me in Strasbourg a few months ago. He was full of hesitations and doubts about what we should do on the BBQ, and falling back on asseverations that the Commission must take its responsibilities and act firmly or it would lose its reputation: must show nerve, coherence, delicacy, a whole series of phrases to which in the context I found it difficult to attach much meaning. Altogether it was Stevy far from his best, and I returned slightly dispirited,
particularly as he was urging me to have a whole series of other dinners in order to bring into line the other ‘Horsemen' who he said were rather disaffected by not having been consulted.

WEDNESDAY, 16 APRIL.
Strasbourg.

I made a speech in the institutional debate in the morning, and lunched with Colombo, who, thank God, has replaced Ruffini as Italian Foreign Minister.

I decided that I ought to cancel my dinner with the Seligmans and the Warners in order to massage Ortoli, and took him to a restaurant. Happily I found him on extremely agreeable form, but with nothing to say about any issue of business before us. However, two hours of literary, reminiscent, personal conversation in French was not unamusing, and no doubt the occasion was vaguely useful.

THURSDAY, 17 APRIL.
Strasbourg and Hanover.

Pointless Commission from 11 to 11.30, which the others had been very keen on on the Tuesday, but at which it turned out there was nothing to discuss, and then 1.30–3.00 luncheon with the other three ‘horsemen' at Zimmer at La Wantzenau, which I deliberately chose because, with a
prix-fixe
menu, it is the cheapest of the ‘good' restaurants and I am fairly tired of paying for them! Perfectly agreeable again, a certain amount of business discussed reasonably and amicably, but again no tremendous point.

Then by avion taxi to Hanover for a twenty-four-hour visit to the Nieder-Sachsen
land
government. Albrecht,
³³
the Minister-President, I found young, quick and agreeable, without quite seeing him as a Christian Democrat Chancellor of Germany, which is what he much wants to be. Walther-Leisler Kiep, attractive and intelligent, was by far the best of his ministers.