European Diary, 1977-1981

By Roy Jenkins

First published in 1989, this diary provides the background to two vital issues: our relations with the European Community and the state of politics in Britain. Few people are better qualified to know how we arrived where we are than Roy Jenkins. During the period of this diary he was President of the European Commission.

The diary provides a picture of the day-to-day life of the head of an international organization, of the conflicting pressures and grinding routine, of the importance of personal relationships with world leaders such as Helmut Schmidt, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt, Jean Monnet and Jimmy Carter.

In addition to the political chronicle we have frank and sometimes unguarded revelations about the author, his tastes and preoccupations, from which emerges a man more imbued with public passion, more eccentric and with a more varied private life than many readers may expect. His subtle perception of people is revealed in brilliant portraits of, for example, Schmidt, pessimistic, streaked with melancholy, indiscreet and yet notably constructive, and Giscard d'Estaing, highly intelligent but with pretentions that sometimes make him faintly ludicrous.

For those concerned with the way the world is developing and the impact of a civilized and essentially private personality on public events, European Diary is compulsory reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448201976

Roy Jenkins

Roy Jenkins was the author of many books, including Churchill and Gladstone, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography. Active in British politics for half a century, he entered the House of Commons in 1948 and subsequently served as Minister of Aviation, Home Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer; he was also the President of the European Commission and Chancellor of Oxford University. In 1987 he took his seat in the House of Lords. He died in January 2003. In addition to his extraordinary political career he was a highly acclaimed historian and biographer. Among his many works, Gladstone and Churchill are regarded as his masterpieces.

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EUROPEAN DIARY

1977–1981

ROY JENKINS

Contents

Preface

Sketchmap of Brussels

The Commission

The Cabinet

Introduction

1977

1978

1979

1980

Epilogue

APPENDIX 1 Allocation of Portfolios, 4–7 January 1977

APPENDIX 2 Presidents, Ambassadors, Governments

Sketchmap of Brussels

Preface

The four years covered by this book are the only period of my life for which I have kept a narrative diary. I have fairly careful engagement diaries for the past forty years and from 1964 substantial chunks of unworked memoir raw material, dictated close to the event. But I had never previously (nor have I since) attempted a descriptive outline of each day in the calendar. However I decided that the Brussels years were likely to be a sharply isolated segment of my life, and that I might mark them by attempting this new exercise.

I found it fairly burdensome, for I am naturally a slow (and I like to think meticulous) manuscript writer and not a fluent dictater; and a slowly written manuscript diary was clearly not compatible with the scale of the task and the pattern of life which I was recording. However, I kept it up to the end, but was glad when it was done.

I dictated to a machine, sometimes within forty-eight hours of the events, but more typically a week or so later. When there was this sort of gap I worked from a detailed schedule of engagements. The tapes were then typed up and corrected by me during my next period of semi-leisure.

The result was a typescript of six hundred thousand words. About a quarter of these owed their existence to nothing more than the periphrasis of dictated work, and required pruning for any purpose. That left a total still more than twice as long as was convenient for one-volume publication. So I undertook a further two stages of stripping away. First I cut what was of least interest to me. And then, a more painful process, I cut what seemed to me and others to be of least interest to the likely reader.

The second stage involved sacrificing the principle of a separate entry for each day of the year and this to some extent diminished the ‘pattern of life’ aspect of the picture. Nevertheless, I have retained a good deal of material which is of interest for illustrating this rather than because the incident itself was in any way crucial; and I have also kept in mind my own tendency when reading other people’s diaries to find that it is often the trivial which is most interesting.

If there has been a bias in the cutting it has been against the minutiae of Commission business and in favour of the broader issues of Europe, of clashes with or between governments, and, in 1979 and 1980, of political developments in Britain. As a result, although the book is bounded by my Brussels years, it would be wrong to describe it as a Brussels Diary. A good two-thirds of the action takes place outside that city.

There remains the question of cuts that I have made for reasons other than those of space. I have exercised some but not much censorship. I have cut out a number of unfriendly comments about individuals of relatively little note. If the degree of pain caused to the person concerned was likely to exceed the interest aroused in others that seemed to me a good reason for excision. The more important the person, the less discreet I have been. Thus Giscard and Schmidt are almost entirely unprotected by any afterthoughts. I took the view that they, and others near to their eminence, could look after themselves.

So it could be argued that to be the subject of sharp comment is a tribute. I hope that some of those involved will recognize the compliment to their self-confidence, or will at least look at the picture of themselves in the round. In a four-year relationship even with fundamentally respected collaborators, there are bound to be moments of irritation, and any accurate moving picture of events is bound to reflect them. I have also cut some comments recorded from the mouths of others, particularly where I thought the remarks might cause them embarrassment in offices they continue to hold.

So for a variety of reasons I have greatly shortened the text, and any shortening of course is bound to be selective. But have I doctored it? I obviously do not think so. I have tidied up a good deal, but I have never consciously changed the sense, I have resisted (with some difficulty) esprit d’escalier, and where I have added, mainly but not exclusively in footnotes, it has been for purposes of clarity. The only exception has been where, seeking economy in words, I have suddenly seen that a new linking sentence could get one from A to B in fifteen words rather than five hundred.

I do not therefore claim complete textual integrity, as opposed to integrity of substance. But the original text exists, can be published in due course if anyone so desires, and is available in the meantime for inspection by anyone who feels they might have been maligned by ex post judgements.

My last comment is that editing a volume of diaries has proved an immensely more time-consuming process than writing an original book. It is the equivalent of altering an existing house as opposed to building a new one, and causes a good deal more trouble to the neighbours as well.

The long-suffering neighbours in this case have been Diana Fortescue, my research assistant, who, with the help of the libraries of Chatham House, the French, German, Italian, American, Japanese, Greek and Belgian embassies, as well as those of the House of Lords and House of Commons, has done an immense work on footnotes and references, and Lord Bonham-Carter and Miss Alison Wade, my Collins editors. Sir Crispin Tickell and Mr Hayden Phillips provided a perspective on Brussels, and Sir Christopher Audland and Mr Michael Emerson assisted on several more recondite points of Community lore. The original texts were typed by Mrs Bess Church and Miss Patricia Smallbone, the reduced version (with great speed) by Miss Monica Harkin and the footnotes by Mrs Xandra O’Bryan Tear.

ROY JENKINS

East Hendred, April 1988

Introduction

From the late 1950s onwards a commitment to European unity, and to Britain’s participation in it, became my most dominating political purpose. It provoked my first withdrawal from the Opposition front bench in 1962, although from a post so minor that hardly anyone noticed, and my only political quarrel with Hugh Gaitskell in that same last year of his life.

In 1964–701 was much occupied with the day-to-day business of being a minister, but I think that from Aviation to the Home Office to the Treasury I managed to remain reasonably faithful to Europe within my own Departments as well as, of course, enthusiastically supporting Harold Wilson’s conversion and the consequent lodging of Britain’s second application to join the European Economic Community in 1967.

When the exigencies of the party game led him to change his position again in 1971 I considered this second switch to be neither good politics nor good sense and had no hesitation in leading sixty-eight Labour MPs into the ‘yes’ lobby on the principle of joining. And six months later, when it had become clear that the majority of the Labour leadership attached more importance to the short-term embarrassment of the Government than to either the long-term orientation of Britain or to their own reputation for consistency, I resigned again from the Opposition front bench. This time I at least attracted more notice, for I had progressed from being number three spokesman on economic affairs to being deputy leader of the party and shadow Chancellor.

I did not see this resignation at the time as a decisive separation. I thought that I would probably be back in full communion within a few years. In retrospect however these 1971–2 events obviously marked the beginning not merely of my separation from the Labour Party but also of a disenchantment with the mould which two-party politics had assumed by the early 1970s. I reluctantly went back into government in 1974, but nothing fully engaged my general political enthusiasm until the European referendum of the spring of 1975. In that campaign I was President of the Britain in Europe organization, with Willie Whitelaw and Jo Grimond as the principal vice-presidents, and achieved the most satisfactory national election result in which I have ever significantly participated.

By early 1976, when the question of my becoming President of the European Commission first arose, it could therefore be said that my general European credentials were fairly good. But they were very general. My conviction was complete, but my experience was negligible. The only ministerial portfolio which I held after Britain’s entry in 1973 was that of the Home Department, which, as its name implied and its ethos confirmed, was about as far removed from the business of the Community as any within the compass of the British Government.

I participated in no Councils of Ministers. I liked to say, only half as a joke, that I kept my European faith burning bright by never visiting Brussels. And this was almost startlingly true. France, Italy, Germany I knew fairly well. But the embryonic capital of Europe I had visited on only four occasions between 1945 and the date of my appointment as the head of its administration. I was an enthusiast for the grandes lignes of Europe but an amateur within the complexities of its signalling system.

Until January 1976 I had no thought of penetrating these complexities. I regarded myself as a buttress rather than a pillar of the church of European unity. I would support it passionately from the outside when called upon to do so. But the rouages were not for me. I remembered my dismay one evening in the spring of 1972 when George Thomson told me that he had accepted an invitation to go to Brussels as a Commissioner in the following January. I thought our joint role was to save the Labour Party from extremism and Britain from insularity. But we should accomplish these tasks without getting mixed up in issuing directives or administering regulations. Success in domestic politics was the way to achieve international goals.

By early 1976, however, this devotion to national politics had considerably but surreptitiously eroded itself. The pleasures of membership of a Government with the general outlook and policy of which I was fairly steadily out of sympathy were distinctly limited. The Home Office was perhaps the best department from which to be the licensed leader of an internal opposition, and my prerogatives there as a senior minister were not infringed upon by the easy-going regime of the second Wilson premiership. But it was a job which I had done before when I was forty-five not fifty-five, and a réchauffé helping did not keep the blood racing. Furthermore, I was increasingly interested in foreign rather than domestic issues (which made the Home Office a bit of a cage), and increasingly impatient of Britain’s addiction to believing it always knew best even though its recipes ended only too frequently in it doing worst.

This was the background against which I went to see the Prime Minister for an hour’s routine tour d’horizon in the early evening of Thursday, 22 January. The position was complicated, although not on the surface, by the facts that he had come to a settled resolve to remain in office for only another two months, and that I had been given the strongest possible ‘tip-off’ of this, from an impeccable source, on the day after Christmas. But he was not I think aware of my knowledge which, despite the quality of the source, was well short of amounting to a certainty in my mind, and the subject was not open to discussion between us.

In the course of the discussion Harold Wilson raised, but not very strenuously, the future presidency of the European Commission, in which a change was due at the beginning of 1977. There was a predisposition in favour of a British candidate, he said, but it was not sufficiently strong that the British Government could nominate whomever they liked. Giscard d’Estaing and Schmidt had apparently reacted unfavourably for some reason or other to the suggestion of Christopher Soames, who was currently one of the five vice-presidents of the Commission. They had more or less said, half paraphrasing Henry Ford, that the British could confidently put forward any candidate they liked, provided it was Heath or Jenkins. I am not sure whether or not Wilson consulted Heath. In any event, he offered the job to me, saying that I ought certainly to have the refusal, but that he rather assumed that I would not want to go, and indeed hoped that this would be so.

I reacted at the time in accordance both with his expectation and with the settled groove of my thought over the past several years. I thanked him, but reached for an old gramophone record and said that I was resolved to remain in British politics. Over the next few days I became increasingly doubtful of the wisdom of this reply. Brussels would certainly be an escape from the nutshell of British politics. It would be an opportunity to do something quite new for me and in which I believed much more strongly than in the economic policy of Mr Healey, the trade union policy of Mr Foot, or even the foreign policy of Mr Callaghan. There might also be the chance to help Europe regain the momentum which it had signally lost since the oil shock at the end of 1973.

There was however one major complication. If Harold Wilson was to resign in March there would obviously follow an election for the leadership of the Labour Party and the Prime Ministership. Contrary to the position from, say, 1968 to 1971, it had become rather unlikely that I could win. There was still a clear moderate majority in the parliamentary Labour Party (then the sole electing body), but too many of the cautious members of it had come to feel that I would be insufficiently compromising and might provoke a split. I had certainly not gone out of my way to respect Labour Party shibboleths.

On the other hand, I still had a substantial, gallant and militant body of troops behind me. They had been in training for this battle for years. Probably most of them had come to realize that the time for victory was past. But they nonetheless wished to fight. To have avoided the engagement by slipping off to Brussels would have been intolerable.

I therefore had not to dissimulate but to procrastinate. There was no need for dissimulation because my order of preference was clear. I would have preferred to be Prime Minister of Britain than President of the European Commission. Who would not? As the argument which was supposed to have decided Melbourne was put: ‘It is a damned fine thing to have been, even if it only lasts for two months. It is a thing no Greek or Roman ever was.’ And this was a view of which there was no need to be ashamed in Europe (apart perhaps from the insular irrelevance of the addendum), for in view of the uncertain powers of the Commission President it would have been taken by every French, German and Italian politician, and probably by Dutch, Belgian, Danish and Irish ones as well.

I was however equally clear that if a change of leadership closed up the succession and left me with no domestic opportunity but to soldier on where I was, I would be both more usefully and more interestingly employed in Brussels. I therefore wrote to Harold Wilson four days after our conversation, withdrawing my dismissal of the proposition and endeavouring to preserve my options for as long as possible.

Such attempts to have the best of both worlds are liable to leave one without much of either. However I was lucky in that the strength of my position, such as it was, did not stem primarily from being the candidate of the British Government. In late February I went to Paris for forty-eight hours, nominally for a bilateral visit to Michel Poniatowski, then Minister of the Interior, but in fact at the wish of the President of the Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. In the course of a long interview in the Elysée, Giscard strongly urged me, saying he was speaking on behalf of Helmut Schmidt, the German Chancellor, as well as of himself, to become President of the Commission. I tried to preserve my room for manoeuvre by saying elliptically that there was an election I had to get out of the way first. At first he thought I was telling him of an imminent British general election, but when I steered him away from this he did not press either for clarity or for an immediate decision. One advantage of Harold Wilson’s apparent but deceptive dedication to office was that, even with a hint, no one could conceive of his resigning.

The next day I lunched with Jean Monnet, the founding father of the Community, at Montfort L’Amoury, thirty miles from Paris. He also strongly pressed me to accept the Commission position. Insofar as I was still doubtful, the net could be perceived as closing in oppressively. Insofar as I was increasingly tempted, I was exhilarated by being blessed by the spiritual as well as the temporal authorities of Europe.

Three weeks after that Harold Wilson resigned and the contest began. Nine days later the result of the first ballot was announced. It was broadly as I had expected, although the gap between James Callaghan and me - 84 to 56 - was worse than I had hoped for. Michael Foot led with 90 votes, but this was not of the first relevance because he could manifestly be overhauled by whoever qualified for a run-off against him. The determining factor was therefore the relative positions of Callaghan and myself. The other three candidates–Healey, Benn and Crosland–were all well behind. The last two were compulsorily eliminated, but Healey with 37 votes fought on with characteristic pugnacity for another round, though without improving his position. I could see no point in prolonging the contest into a third (maybe a fourth) slow round. The country needed a new Prime Minister, and from 56 votes it was clearly not going to be me. The barrier between failure and success was not vast. A direct swing of 15 votes from Callaghan to me would have given me the premiership. But it was nevertheless decisive. I withdrew and turned my thoughts, which was not difficult -perhaps too many of them had been there already—to Europe.

There were two hiccups. I had decided following the Giscard meeting that my order of preference was clear. First was to be Prime Minister, provided I did not have to do too much stooping to conquer. Second was to become President of the Commission. Third, but not all that far behind, was to become Foreign Secretary. And a bad fourth was to remain where I was. In drawing up this list I think that I had rather complacently assumed that James Callaghan, both on grounds of seniority and out of gratitude for the early release to him of my 56 votes, would be happy to offer me the Foreign Office.

I was wrong, as clearly emerged when I saw him on 6 April. He was evasive at the time, but his memoirs¹ put his position with convincing frankness: ‘The post of Foreign Secretary had to be filled and in other times Roy Jenkins would have been a natural successor.... But the wounds had not healed since his resignation as deputy leader during the European Community battles, and as he had been the leading protagonist on one side, every action he would have taken as Foreign Secretary would have been regarded with deep suspicion by the anti-Marketeers on our benches.... In any case there was another suitable candidate, in the person of Tony Crosland.’

This had the perverse effect of temporarily upsetting my preference between courses two and three. That however was both short-lived and irrelevant, as the new Prime Minister knew his mind on this issue. His alternative offer of a reversion to the Chancellorship of the Exchequer after ‘six months or so’ did not tempt me. It was, to mix the metaphor, the offer of another réchauffé helping which remained very much in the bush.

In late April the bird in the hand also showed some faint signs of fluttering. Giscard indicated that he was against any early announcement of my presidency. His mind was firm on the substance, he said, but there must be no premature publicity: it might prejudice the position of François-Xavier Ortoli, the incumbent French President. This was strange, in view both of Giscard’s urgent pressure of February and of the fact that he had never previously shown much consideration for Ortoli—nor did he subsequently. It was balanced however by enthusiastic support given publicly from the Italian Government and more privately by Chancellor Schmidt, who did not wish to seem publicly out of step with President Giscard. Thus I had an early taste of a pattern of European attitudes which was to become only too familiar to me over the next few years.

The explanation of Giscard’s wobble, I retrospectively think, is that my candidature, launched by him and Schmidt, was being too enthusiastically received by the small countries of the Community. This was because they wanted a politician and not a bureaucrat and found a Briton with European conviction a heady combination. When I visited two or three of them that spring I was treated very much as a President-elect. Giscard’s response was not to change his mind but to try to demonstrate that I was becoming President not by the acclaim of the little ones but by the nomination of France. Up to a point he succeeded.

The issue was however safely out of the way by the end of June, when the European Council, meeting in Luxembourg, conveyed to me an informal (legal formality followed only in December) but public and unanimous invitation to assume the presidency at the beginning of January. Thereafter the majority of my time and the overwhelming part of my interest was devoted to the affairs of Europe. I remained Home Secretary until 10 September, when I left a British Government for the last time, but this was only because it suited the Prime Minister better that way, and a large part of this twilight period was in any event taken up by holiday.

During July a number of Commissioners who were candidates for staying on came to see me in London, and I also began a series of visits to the governments of the member states. Rightly or wrongly, I kept away from Brussels. I decided that if I was to make any impact both upon the bureaucracy (which I thought of as being dedicated but rigid) and upon the tone of Europe, I must arrive only with full powers and not become a familiar figure hanging about in the corridors in the preceding months. I went there only once, in mid-November, mainly to see the house which we had taken, and to visit the Belgian Prime Minister, although we were in no dispute about the excellent Commissioner, Etienne Davignon, whom the Belgians had chosen in consultation with me. This abstinence from Belgium may or may not have given drama to my arrival, but it certainly had the effect, when I eventually plunged into the murk of a Brabant January, of making the ambience of the Berlaymont (the Community office building), the ways of those who lived in and around it, and indeed the whole atmosphere of Brussels, seem almost gothically strange to me.

It was only Belgium as the areopagitica of the Community (and Luxembourg, its subsidiary in this respect) that I eschewed. The other six countries I went to frequently. Over the summer and autumn of 1976 I made twenty visits to their capitals. I also went twice to the United States, mainly on preparatory Community business. And there was a fairly constant procession of visitors -future Commissioners, senior officials, politicians—to see me in London. After I left the Home Office I was established in a modest suite of rooms in the Cabinet Office. Crispin Tickell, whom I chose from a list of strong candidates, came to me as Chef de Cabinet from the Foreign Office in October. Hayden Phillips left the Home Office with me to become Chef Adjoint but disappeared fairly soon on a month’s ‘immersion’ language course in the South of France. I devoted a good deal of time, both over the summer holidays and during the autumn, to improving my French by less baptismal methods. I also spent many hours on the history of the Community and on the structure of the Commission, playing with a variety of plans for its improvement.

The main purpose of my European visits was to discuss who would be my future Commission colleagues with the nominating heads of government. The Tindemans Report on European Union, drawn up by the Belgian Prime Minister at the request of the other governments in 1975, had suggested, inter alia, that the incoming President of the Commission should have a considerable voice in this. Many of the Tindemans proposals wasted on the desert air, but it was difficult for the heads of government to deny this one so quickly after it had been put forward; no firm precedent was established, however, for I believe that neither of my successors, Gaston Thorn and Jacques Delors, has attempted to play much part in this process.

Nor did the relative enthusiasm with which different governments embraced this obligation follow any predictable pattern. The three governments in the Community most opposed to supra-nationalism were the British, the French and the Danish. With the small one of these three there was no issue. The Danish Government and I were both equally eager to renew the appointment of Finn-Olav Gundelach, and quite right we were from every point of view except that of his own health—he died in early 1981. He was one of my two best Commissioners. The British Government was equally but more controversially (with Mrs Thatcher) willing for me to nominate Christopher Tugendhat as the second and Conservative British Commissioner. He turned out to be a very good choice.

What was most surprising was the willingness of the French Government to parley at considerable length and the highest level about their choice. I had two long Elysée meetings with President Giscard, as well as several exchanges of messages, about the issue, which in the French case was tangled. At that stage I was determined to keep Claude Cheysson, the existing and Socialist Development Aid Commissioner, in that portfolio. The French were determined to keep the portfolio but would have preferred it to go to some other Frenchman, perhaps to Ortoli, the retiring President. I was for a time uncertain whether I wanted my predecessor in my Commission. Conventional wisdom advised against. Nor was Ortoli pressing his claims. He was as uncertain as I was. But if he was to be there, I wanted him to have Economic and Monetary Affairs, as did he. So Giscard and I danced around, he occasionally concentrating my mind by suggesting a highly unacceptable candidate, but always stressing that he would not impose Ortoli upon me. Eventually we settled for Ortoli.

By contrast, the governments of the Little Five, other than Denmark, were traditionally the most in favour of supranational-ism and the powers of the Commission. Belgium I have already dealt with. Luxembourg was in a special position in that they had appointed a new Commissioner, Raymond Vouël, to fill a vacancy only a few months previously. He would not have been my choice, but they wanted him to stay on, which he did. There was no argument. Both the Dutch and Irish engaged in lengthy and agreeable discussion and ended up by nominating Commissioners who, while they both had considerable qualities, were not by any stretch of imagination my choice. Nor were their Commission careers entirely successful.

That left the two big traditionally ‘federalist’ European countries, Italy and Germany. The Italian Government was immensely forthcoming. They wanted two new Commissioners, as did I. They wanted them to strike a political balance, one Christian Democrat and one Socialist, and they therefore steered me gently away from one or two non-politicians I had in mind. Eventually they appointed the two they had probably wanted from the beginning, but not before they had brought me also to feel that they were the best choices. And in the course of leading me to their conclusion they gave me a very good familiarization course in Italian politics, encouraging me to discussions with all political parties, Communists included. It was a very elegant performance, and in my view not at all cynical.

The Germans handled matters less happily. It is one of the paradoxes of Europe that while the Federal Republic has always been a massive and crucial supporter of the European ideal, and indeed of the policies necessary to achieve it, it has never since the end of Hallstein’s day adequately sustained the European institutions. This has shown itself in two ways: first in a German governmental habit, epitomized by Chancellor Schmidt towards the end of the Ortoli presidency, of complaining at large about the Commission; and second, insofar as there was any force in the first point, doing their best to prevent its being corrected by resolutely refusing to appoint first-rate people to Brussels. This applied not merely to their Commissioners (although Ralf Dahrendorf, 1970–4, had been an exception) but also to their Permanent Representatives to the Community. In my experience Germany never exercised an intellectual weight in COREPER (the Committee of Permanent Representatives of the member states) commensurate with either its pre-eminent economic position or with that of the lesser economies of France, Britain or Italy. Nor was its position in the Commission any better.

In part, but only in part, this stemmed from the deep-seated reluctance of post-1945 Germany to play a strong political hand. Much of the stage of modern Europe has been occupied with, on one side, the British and the French, each in their different way, trying to exercise a power somewhat beyond their capacity, and on the other, the Germans trying to push it away like a magnet trying to reject metal. On the reverse side of this coin were the strenuous but unavailing attempts of the Bundesbank to prevent the D-mark becoming a reserve currency—in complete contrast with the British clinging on to the Sterling Area into the 1960s.

Nevertheless there was something more to this German attitude than a simple nolo episcopari. There was an unease with, leading to a certain distaste for, the complicated dance of international hauts fonctionnaires. It was utterly unlike the French attitude, close though the Franco-German partnership was becoming in those years. Whatever its causes, however, this almost shoulder-shrugging indifference on the part of the Germans created a weakening semi-vacuum in the heart of Europe.

It exhibited itself strongly during my consultations with the Bonn Government, and marked the first real setback of that autumn of preparation. This must be seen against the background of my very high expectations of the Germans. I regarded Schmidt (as indeed I still do) as the most constructive statesman of that period, and the one with whom I had the easiest personal relations. I regarded their Government as a model of centre-left internationalist good sense, and likely to be my strongest champions in any battles that lay ahead.

As late as 2 November I was still being encouraged by Schmidt to seek two new German Commissioners. I should have noticed on that visit that a very much more reserved attitude was being taken by other ministers, most notably by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the Foreign Minister and leader of the Free Democrats.

I overestimated the power of the Chancellor. As soon afterwards as 15 November he told me that he could not do it. The political pressures were too great. The FDP insisted on their existing Commissioner being renominated and the trade unions were equally adamant about the long-serving SPD one from their ranks. It was an early lesson to me of the dangers of putting too much ‘trust in princes’, i.e. leaders of governments faced with domestic political difficulties. It was also a classic example of how to get the worst of both worlds. The two German Commissioners (both of whom had considerable and engaging qualities, although the one in my view did not have energy and the other did not have weight) knew that I had tried to replace them and had failed.

Furthermore, it presented me with a severe practical problem. It was my firm view that, with Ortoli in Economic and Monetary Affairs, the Germans must have the other obviously major portfolio of External Relations. This was so both for reasons of balance and because a German was more likely than most to conduct relations with the Americans and the Japanese on the liberal lines which I desired. But I did not believe either of them to be up to the job which Christopher Soames had done with conspicuous success in the Ortoli Commission. I was therefore faced with the dismal prospect that the new Commission, so far from having a new authority with which to relaunch Europe, would look less convincing to the outside world than the previous one had done.

This produced a sharp change of mood six weeks before I was due to go to Brussels. During the preceding four or five months I had been in a higher state of morale than at any time since 1971, if not earlier. Once the decision to go to Brussels had been finally made, I felt both liberated and exhilarated. I realized how ill the shoe of British politics had been fitting me for some years past. I also exaggerated, encouraged by the enthusiasm with which they had greeted my appointment, the extent to which I could persuade the governments to do what I wanted. During the summer and the first half of the autumn most things seemed possible and difficult decisions did not oppress.

No doubt the period of semi-euphoria would in any event have corrected itself as the happy prospect of preparing for an exciting new job gave way to the harsher reality of having within a few weeks to plunge into the complexities of actually doing it. The German experience therefore probably did little more than tear along a perforation which was already there. But that it certainly did. I remember that on 11 November, my birthday as it happened, the Prime Minister, walking through the division lobby with me, had lightly enquired (but not I think as a birthday greeting) whether I was still available to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sterling was crashing, the Government’s economic policy appeared in disarray, and there was a good deal of press and parliamentary speculation about a change from Denis Healey. I would at least have been buying at the bottom of the market. However my mind was fixed on Brussels and I took Callaghan’s suggestion even less seriously than he had made it. The following week after my next visit to Bonn, I might have been tempted to give him a more forthcoming reply.

In reality, of course, I could not possibly have changed direction at that stage. The juddering would have been appalling: my assembled cabinet to be stood down, the Brussels house to be un-rented, my constituency farewells to be unsaid, not to mention the governments of Europe whose every suspicion about the insularity of the British would be confirmed. So I settled down to the last stages of preparation, and in particular to the untying of the knot of portfolio allocation. But it was never quite ‘glad confident morning again’.

The portfolio issue was perplexing. It was crucial to the effective functioning and repute of the new Commission. It also involved relations with twelve individuals, several of them of potential prickliness, with whom I was going to have to spend the next four years; and with the governments of the nine member states, without considerable goodwill from which nothing could be done. Obviously some governments were more important than others, as were some portfolios, of which in any event there were not enough satisfactorily to occupy twelve Commissioners (other than the President). And I did not have anything approaching prime ministerial powers: once appointed, Commissioners had to be lived with as though they were members of a college of cardinals. They certainly could not be sacked by the President. Nor could solutions be imposed upon one without the almost unanimous support of all the others. In practice dispositions had to be negotiated.

The central difficulty was that I could not put Ortoli into Economic and Monetary Affairs unless I could first get Wilhelm Haferkamp out of this portfolio which he held in the existing Commission. And if I could not put Ortoli there, where could I put him? Nowhere to his pleasure, except perhaps for External Affairs (and I did not think he was the right man or the right nationality for relations with the Americans), and nowhere at all of any significance except at the price of disrupting one of my other cherished plans: Gundelach for Agriculture, Davignon for Industry and the Internal Market, Cheysson to stay with Development Aid.

Haferkamp was stubbornly resistant to going to Social Affairs. I did not see how I could possibly impose this upon him as the senior Commissioner of the most important country without at least acceding to the wish of the German Government that his junior, Guido Brunner, should have External Affairs. But I thought (and several of those who had been in the Ortoli Commission agreed with me) that Haferkamp was the bigger man of the two. I therefore decided that the only thing to do was a sudden switch of expectation: take the risk of putting Haferkamp into External Affairs, which was only a risk that he would not do much, and all the other major dispositions would fall into place.

This was the position when I assembled the new Commission for twenty-four hours of familiarization and discussion at Ditchley Park in north Oxfordshire on 22 and 23 December. I am not sure that excursion was a total success. It was inconveniently close to Christmas, but there was no other time we could find. It was a summoning of the metropolitan Europeans to the periphery of the empire. The weather was raw and misty, and some at least of the visitors were more struck by the coldness of the bathrooms than by the splendours of Ditchley. Perhaps the most memorable outcome was a Financial Times fantasy by David Watt in which a murder à la Christie (Orient Express) was apparently committed: all twelve had separate but convergent motives for committing the crime. The victim was obviously me.

However there was some useful discussion and considerable but not complete progress was made with portfolios. Haferkamp embraced the prospect of External Affairs with enthusiasm. Ortoli, Gundelach and Davignon were also settled. But quite a lot of loose ends remained to tie up. My fellow Commissioners (all of whom I had met individually before, but never collectively) were a variegated lot (as they should have been), not only as to nationality but also as to background, knowledge and ability. Insofar as there was any obvious division of category between them, it was between the five who had substantial experience of a previous Commission plus Davignon (who knew just as much from his Belgian Foreign Ministry experience) on the one hand, and the seven tyros on the other. The seven of course included the President, of which fact the first six occasionally let it slip that they were fully aware.

Ditchley therefore had the effect of slightly heightening the atmosphere of apprehensive anticipation in which the Christmas holidays would in any event have been passed. The fourth of January, the date of departure, drew inexorably nearer.

1977

The first month or so of 1977 was taken up with initial dispositions—first of Commission portfolios and then of Directors-General, the rough equivalent of Whitehall permanent secretaries—and with the semi-formal establishment of relations with the other Community institutions: the Court of Justice, the Parliament (then nominated from the Parliaments of the member states and not directly elected), the Council of Ministers and its Brussels-resident shadow, the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER).

The allocation of Commission portfolios was much the most difficult of these tasks. Despite the efforts at Ditchley before Christmas there was substantial work on the fitting of pegs into holes still to be done when I arrived in Brussels on 4 January. It was made more difficult by the fact that the rules (two Commissioners for a big country, one for a small one) created more Commissioners than there were proper jobs for them to do. And it had to be completed, unless the new Commission was to start very much on the wrong foot, by the night of 6/7 January.

This led to the first days in Brussels being dominated by bilateral negotiations with individual Commissioners. The story has a certain retrospective interest, but not I think sufficiently so for the reader to be thrown into a long account of these proceedings. I have therefore abstracted it and put it in an appendix which appears at the end of the book. This abstraction may have the effect of making the first days seem undercharged, rather than overcharged as in reality they were.

In mid-February I began a customary round of inaugural visits to the governments of the member states. Such visits typically lasted a day and a half, and I did them over five months in the not entirely haphazard order of Italy, France, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Ireland, Denmark and Britain. The Belgian Government received a non-travelling visit in September.

On the second of these visits—the Paris one—a tiresome and in some ways ludicrous issue of form and prestige which was to dominate much of that spring (and to continue with diminishing reverberations throughout the rest of my presidency) erupted to the surface. In November 1975 President Giscard had inaugurated a series of ‘intimate’ meetings between the leaders of the Western world. He had brought together at Rambouillet the heads of government of the United States, Germany, Britain and Japan, with Italy somewhat reluctantly added almost at the last moment. In June 1976 President Ford had responded almost too quickly by organizing a meeting at Puerto Rico. On this occasion Canada had been added at the request of the Americans. There had also been some movement away from the genuine informality of a country house gathering at Rambouillet towards the international circus trappings of more recent Western Economic Summits.

There was considerable feeling amongst the Little Five of the European Community that Ortoli, my predecessor as President, ought to have been present at Puerto Rico. The gatherings were specifically ‘economic’ and not political or military in their intent. The countries of Western Europe had charged the Community with a significant part of the responsibility for conducting and coordinating their economic policies, particularly but not only in the field of trade relations. In these circumstances it appeared both perverse and divisive for four of them to go off and try to settle matters with the Americans and the Japanese, leaving the coordinating body in the dark and five of the member states of the Community unrepresented.

There had been some suggestion that Ortoli ought simply to have packed his bags and arrived forcefully even if uninvited at the Summit. However no invitation was forthcoming and Ortoli, wisely I think, did not attempt to gate-crash. This issue was left unresolved but with a settled determination on the part of the Little Five, supported with enthusiasm by Italy and with moderate enthusiasm by Germany, that there should be no repetition of the crime.

A repetition of the Summit itself was however by then inevitable, and by the time that I took office one had been firmly arranged for London in May 1977. The only question at issue was therefore whether or not I would be present. Ortoli’s absence had unfairly been seen as a blow to his prestige and to that of the Commission. Part of the role I was expected to perform was to restore this prestige. My credibility as an effective new President was therefore somewhat at stake.

But there was more to it than the questions of pride or position. The Little Five regarded my own determination to get there as an essential test of whether I was to be a true spokesman of the Community as a whole or a lackey of the big countries, from one of which I came and by another of which my appointment had been initiated. Almost independently of my own views, I therefore had no choice but to fight for a place at the London meeting. And when Giscard at the conclusion of our Elysée discussion on 28 February announced with silken politeness that he was equally resolved the other way, a battle between us became unavoidable. While it was being fought it was, like most battles, disagreeable. The outcome however was reasonably satisfactory, particularly as the ground gained was never subsequently lost. But the price paid was a long-term deterioration in the relationship between Giscard and me (interrupted only by a brief and cautious second honeymoon in the summer of 1978), which probably mattered more to me than it did to him.

At the time I could see no merit in his position. At best it could be explained, but not excused, by political difficulties with the Gaullist wing of his coalition. In retrospect however I can see a little more in his case. He had successfully initiated a new forum for Western leaders to talk to each other in semi-spontaneous intimacy. It was a formula which he and his friend Schmidt particularly liked, because they were the best at it. Already he had been forced to admit first Italy and then Canada. Now there was me. Furthermore the Americans, with their need for back-up, were already making the meetings more bureaucratic, and the Commission was famous for bureaucracy. Where was it going to stop? The Australians were already knocking at the door; and was the Prime Minister of one of the Little Five, when his country held the presidency of the European Council, also to be admitted?

However Giscard’s status-conscious and schematic mind did not see things in these quantitative and practical terms, which might have appealed to Schmidt. Instead he raised theoretical issues in a de haut en bas way. In his long letter to me of 22 March (see page 74 infra) he based his attitude on the syllogism that the Summit was a meeting of sovereign governments, and that as the Commission was not a sovereign government it manifestly could not participate. This had the advantage of appealing to the British, who react to the word ‘sovereignty’ with all the predictability of one of Pavlov’s dogs, but the disadvantage (from his point of view) of repelling the others, including the Germans, because it struck at the heart of Community doctrine.

Despite my partial Summit victory (but with the circumstances of the Downing Street meetings on 6–8 May hardly enabling me to feel that I was taking part in a triumphal parade), the summer of 1977 was for me a period of low morale. Apart from anything else the Belgian weather that year did not lift the spirits. One of the advantages of my large room at the top of the Berlaymont was that a great deal of sky was visible from its windows. One of the disadvantages of that Brussels summer was that the sky was hardly ever even partially blue. There were seventeen consecutive days in June during which the sun never appeared.

At a more serious level I did not feel that I had so far found a theme around which I could hope to move Europe forward. My first European Council in Rome in March had been dominated by the peripheral issue of representation at the Summit. My second European Council in London in late June was perhaps the most negative of the twelve that I attended. Schmidt and Giscard were firmly in control of Europe, but for the moment had no direction in which they wished to take it. They were rather hostile to Callaghan, whom they saw as semi-detached towards Europe, too attached to the unesteemed President Carter, and running an ineffective economy to boot. Towards Italy and the Little Five they were in a rather sullen phase. The Franco-German axis was working internally well, but, temporarily, it was doing no good for Europe.

In these circumstances, which were also unfavourable to Commission initiatives, I cast around for ideas and pondered the advice which Jean Monnet had given, both publicly and privately. On at least two occasions his ideas had been spectacularly successful in gaining the initiative, and on the second occasion he had done it by rebounding from setback and switching from one blocked avenue to another which was more open. The successful inauguration of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951 had been followed by the juddering halt to the plan for a European Defence Community in 1954. By the following year the Messina Conference was meeting to plan the Economic Community and by 1957 the Treaty of Rome was signed. The lesson he taught me was always to advance along the line of least resistance provided that it led in approximately the right direction.

It was against this background that, during July, I came firmly to the view that the best axis of advance for the Community in the circumstances of 1977 lay in re-proclaiming the goal of monetary union. This was a bold but not an original step. At least since the Werner Report of 1971 (named after the Prime Minister of Luxembourg) ‘economic and monetary union’ had been a proclaimed early objective of the Community. But no obvious progress towards it had been made, and in a curious way the Janus-like title had the effect of making rapid advance seem less likely. If economic convergence and monetary integration were never to move more than a short step ahead of each other, there was no place for three-league boots.

I decided that there was a better chance of advance by qualitative leap than by cautious shuffle. And such a leap was desirable both to get the blood of the Community coursing again after the relative stagnation of the mid-1970s and on its own merits—because it could move Europe to a more favourable bank of the stream. The era of violent currency fluctuations, which had set in with the effective end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, had coincided with the worsening of Europe’s relative economic performance. In the 1960s, with fixed rates, the Europe of the Six had performed excellently, at least as well as America or Japan. In the mid-1970s, with oscillating exchange rates, it had performed dismally. Nor was this surprising. For the other two main economies the fluctuations had been external, affecting only trading relationships across oceans. For the Community they had been viscerally internal, with the French franc and the D-mark diverging from each other at least as much as either had done from the dollar or the yen.

The key dates for the promulgation of the ideas were: 2 August, when I discussed them at a day-long meeting of my cabinet, held at my house at East Hendred; 17–18 September, when I discussed them at a Commission strategy weekend held at an hotel in the Ardennes; 8–9 October, when I presented them to the regular six-monthly meeting of Foreign Ministers, at another hotel in the Belgian countryside; 27 October, when I launched them on the public in a Monnet Memorial Lecture to the European University Institute in Florence; 5–6 December, when I expounded them to the heads of government at a European Council in Brussels; and 8 December, when I chose Bonn as the most appropriate capital in which to try to refute such sceptical comment as had been forthcoming.

I did not end the year with any lively expectation that early 1978 was going to see the governments launching themselves on the qualitative leap. But the sustained advocacy of it had given my presidency a theme and a focus which had been lacking before the summer holidays.

There was one other feature of that autumn which is perhaps worth recalling by way of background. From early September to mid-November the German Government was thrown into a state of total disarray and semi-paralysis by terrorist attacks within the country.

TUESDAY, 4 JANUARY 1977. London and Brussels.

The long-awaited day of departure for Brussels: awaited recently more with trepidation than with eager anticipation. Jennifer and I were met at Zaventem airport by the Chiefs of Protocol of the Commission and of the Belgian Government, as well as by my cabinet and a lot of photographers. Drove to the house we had rented, 10 rue de Praetère. It looked better than I had expected, although a bit dark, and had made vast progress since I had seen it in November. At 1.30 I gave a lunch in the Auberge Fleurie, a little restaurant near the Berlaymont, for my cabinet and other members of the staff. I think we had a total of thirteen—one being missing -which seemed at first sight unfortunate, but I then recalled that the Commission in any case was thirteen, and met on the thirteenth floor, so that one had better get used to that number.

After lunch I went briefly to my temporary, unattractive office in the rue de la Loi and then back to the house to begin a series of ‘portfolio’ interviews.

WEDNESDAY, 5 JANUARY. Brussels.

George Thomson¹ to lunch, whom as always it was a pleasure to see. He seemed to me in surprisingly good form. It was his last day in Brussels; he would like to have stayed; and he did not know what he was going to do when he got back to London. But he was pleased with his peerage and I think was boat-happy. The prospect of freedom in England was outweighing any Brussels tugs at his heart strings.

THURSDAY, 6 JANUARY. Brussels.

The cliff-face day. The day of inauguration, the first day in the Berlaymont, the first day as President. A day to some extent of ceremonial speeches, of public appearances, but also a day in which I had to get the portfolios disposed of, unless we were to start with a major setback.

A semi-ceremonial arrival at 9.45, greeted by the Chief of Protocol and a vast horde of photographers and conducted up to my room where Ortoli was waiting officially to hand over. Again a great series of photographs.

After lunch I went straight into the formal proceedings. After recording for television a ninety-second extract from my opening statement I went into the Commission meeting room to preside for the first time. My first impression was of an agreeable enough room, a round table, with fourteen places around it, one for each of the Commissioners and for Noël, the Secretary-General, room perhaps for about another twenty people to sit behind, and then at either end the glass windows of the interpretation facilities, which are superb in the Commission.

First, I had to walk round the table shaking hands with every Commissioner, and giving television cameras of their various nationalities time to take shots. The cameras then withdrew and I made a twelve-minute exhortatory statement to the Commission. After that we disposed without difficulty of some fairly formal business and then came on to the question of the allocation of portfolios. Apart from saying that I much hoped to be able to find adequate jobs for everyone and that it was vital that we reached decisions that day, I did not attempt to go into any detail and merely suggested, as was expected, an adjournment which I hoped might not be for more than a few hours for bilateral consultations. The Secretary-General announced that he had arranged for a buffet supper, and I said that no doubt was reasonably encouraging but I very much hoped that he had not also thought it necessary to provide for a buffet breakfast, a remark which would have seemed a little too near the bone to be even mildly amusing ten or twelve hours later.

We eventually got an agreed, unanimous, though painfully arrived at solution by just before 5.30 in the morning. I then went down and met the press: a packed press conference of I should think two hundred, which lasted from 5.40 to 6.10. The atmosphere when we came into the room was a mixture of the fetid and the sullen. The press had been kept waiting all night without a great deal of information, though most of them knew the main cause of our hold-up. The bar had apparently been shut since about 2.30, so they were not so much drunk, as I had been warned they would be by Cheysson, as rather hung-over and bad-tempered, which was worse. However, during the half-hour’s conference, the atmosphere improved quite a bit. That over, I went back to the thirteenth floor and did five television interviews for a variety of European networks.

FRIDAY, 7 JANUARY. Brussels.

Crispin, Michael Jenkins, Celia Beale and I went to the Amigo Hotel for a large bacon and eggs breakfast between 7.00 and 8.00. That was undoubtedly by far the best hour which I had had in Brussels so far. Then home to rue de Praetère, tolerably satisfied. And the satisfaction proved not altogether misplaced, for the fact of having got agreement far outweighed any illogicalities and loose ends, and the press generally, despite some sour briefing from Brunner and Burke, was not unsatisfactory.

I slept for half the morning and then went to lunch with Jennifer at a small restaurant at Uccle.

MONDAY, 10 JANUARY. Brussels and Luxembourg.

This was essentially a day for the final preparation of my speech to the Parliament at Luxembourg; the speech had been basically written out by me over Christmas at East Hendred, but it needed titillating in the context of the moment. Received the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Cardinale, as doyen of the Diplomatic Corps, and then had an hour’s meeting with the Directors-General we had inherited from the old Commission. 4.27 TEE (Trans European Express) from the Gare du Quartier Léopold to Luxembourg.

On the journey the weather for the first time since our arrival began to improve. As we pulled out of Brussels there was a clear sky with some snow on the ground, and we travelled, working hard on the speech the whole way, through a dramatic sunset and then up through the Ardennes with heavy snow and to Luxembourg just after 6.30. I had the speech complete by the time we arrived and went straight to the unsatisfactory Aerogolf Hotel; unsatisfactory because the food was indifferent, the service slow, and the windows would not open, a typical new hotel.

TUESDAY, 11 JANUARY. Luxembourg.

An agreeable morning with deep and hard freezing snow and a