European Diary, 1977-1981 (5 page)

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 Thomson
¹
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 good light, but the Aerogolf managed to destroy the effect of the light by having tinted windows. At 10.45 I went to the European Parliament building to call on Georges Spénale, the French Socialist deputy for the Tarn
²
and President of the Parliament. Then I made a courtesy call on Kutscher,
³
the President of the European Court, before the formal ceremony of taking the oath of office at 11.30. During this call he gave me his speech which was a speech of
substance with happily a reference to President Madison which I was able to use as a peg to work in the rather good quotations from Chief Justice Marshall with which Anthony Lester
⁴
had provided me.

The Justices and I all assembled in an ante-room where they put on their impressive purple robes, which are a mixture of those used by the Hague Court and those used by the German Federal Court at Karlsruhe. A few moments later we went into the main building before an audience of about two hundred people. Kutscher, an agreeable and impressive man, made his speech seated from the bench and I then made a response of about eight minutes, and the content, particularly the Lester parts, was clearly welcome to the Justices who responded appropriately.

We then took the oaths of office. I saw in some newspaper a criticism that I had read mine in English and not in French. As, however, it was presented to me in English, as I would have wished, I had little choice, and I do not think that I could have been unduly faulted on grounds of insularity as Burke chose to read his in Erse, and Vredeling in Dutch. Kutscher then gave us a very good lunch, though I was not greatly able to appreciate it owing to my concentration on the speech for the afternoon to the European Parliament.

The Parliament met remarkably punctually by European standards and I was on my feet at six minutes past three. The speech lasted exactly thirty-two minutes, only two minutes longer than I had been advised was the optimum. I had put a lot of effort into it and it went reasonably well. At the end there was a good deal of applause, though not I thought overwhelming, but I was told subsequently by Noël that the Parliament was not much given to applause and that I could regard the speech as
une grande réussite,
which was at least polite. The press was also satisfactory. Later that evening I had a thirty-five-minute television panel interview with six journalists from a variety of European countries and which was sent out by a television network in each of the member countries. I was exhausted by this time, and even the English words were not coming easily to me, let alone the French ones at the end.

WEDNESDAY,, 12 JANUARY.
Luxembourg and Brussels

We had a fairly formal meeting of the Commission in the Kirchberg (Commission office in Luxembourg) at 9.00 before the sitting of Parliament at 10.00.

In the Parliament there were questions to the Council of Ministers
⁵
which were answered very well by Crosland
⁶
and then questions to the Commission, one of which was for me. I then listened to Crosland's speech, which was too long–forty-five minutes–cautious in tone, but extremely interesting in analysis and on the whole well received, though not exactly with positive enthusiasm. Then a lunch in honour of the Commission given by the President of the European Parliament. I was sitting opposite Spénale across a narrow table. He had Crosland on one side of him, Ortoli on the other side, and I had Kutscher on my left-hand side so that we were four Presidents
carrés.
It was a beautiful day, with a sparkling view to the wide horizons of the surrounding snow-covered countryside. Not much political conversation: it was mostly a mixture of geography and culture, with Ortoli becoming tremendously animated, agreeable and informed about the monuments of south-west France and indeed of Italy. Brief speeches at the end of the lunch.

Seven o'clock reception for me given by the Socialist Group under the presidency of Fellermaier.
⁷
TEE to Brussels, dining in the Swiss restaurant car which had started from Zurich. Home at 10.45, back out of the snow and glittering sun of Luxembourg into the murk of Brussels.

THURSDAY, 13 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Lunch at the adjacent Charlemagne (Council of Ministers) building with the members of COREPER (the ambassadors or permanent representatives of the member countries). I made a few introductory remarks. The discussion was a good tutorial for me which lasted until well after 3 o'clock.

By that afternoon, back at the office, I was applying myself determinedly to the allocations of director-generalships. These have to be balanced almost as carefully as Commission portfolios.

FRIDAY, 14 JANUARY.
Brussels.

A series of meetings with Commissioners during the morning, culminating with Ortoli from 12.00. A very typical Ortoli interview. I went to see him rather than vice versa, because I had been told that his room had much the best furniture in the building, and for redoing mine I wanted to see it. He was pleased with this, so we started well. I then asked him his general views about economic and monetary policy and he replied characteristically, requiring a little time to get going and then speaking with great lucidity and analytical precision, but the analysis leading to no remedies. There is a certain French intellectual view that once you have analysed a problem you have done as much as anyone can expect you to do about it.

Commission meeting for two and a half hours in the afternoon. We disposed of a good deal of business, including some reports from Haferkamp on the external scene and on the prospects for Vice-President Mondale's
⁸
visit. Then we dealt with Gundelach's fish, on which he made a very good presentation, and there was no great difficulty in getting it through as he wished.

Then Cheysson to see me to describe the meeting which he had had with Giscard
⁹
that morning at the Elysée. Giscard, he said, had not been in a very good mood, not surprisingly in view of his press
conference (difficult because of the Daoud
¹⁰
affair) looming up for Monday. Nonetheless Cheysson said he had two pieces of rather good news from him, though they cannot have been very good for I forget what they were.

They were outweighed by his piece of bad news, which was that the French Government would oppose Commission representation at the Carter-convened Summit, whenever that took place. He said that Giscard himself was rather in favour of such representation, but that Barre
¹¹
was firmly against, not on personal but on institutional grounds, and that Giscard, being now in a weak position and also, he added, rather a weak man, whereas Barre was a stronger man, would probably give way to him, though whether Giscard would hold this position would depend upon how strongly the other members of the Community made contrary representations.

Cheyssons and Tinés
¹²
and Roger Beetham and Laura to dine, rue de Praetère.

SATURDAY, 15 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Three hours of solid paper work until 1 o'clock. We had intended to lunch in the country, but the weather was so awful that there seemed no point in driving through the sodden suburban battlegrounds of Brussels. So we went to Bernard, a fish restaurant above a serious fish shop near the Porte de Namur. A cinema in the afternoon, for the first time for several years.

MONDAY, 17 JANUARY.
Brussels.

Jennifer and I had Garret Fitzgerald,
¹³
the Irish Foreign Minister, to dinner. The main object was to repair relations which might have
been breached by the trouble in the Irish press about Burke's portfolio, though Fitzgerald is no great partisan of Burke's, and also to discuss the Irish director-generalship. No problem about relations.