European Diary, 1977-1981 (69 page)

Schmidt got increasingly impatient and bored throughout the proceedings, partly because when Giscard behaves badly Schmidt switches off, rather like a husband who pretends not to notice if his wife gets drunk, and partly because he was frustrated by not being able to make his long quasi-philosophical
tours d'horizon
.

Carter was subdued, spoke very quietly, not a great deal, but when he had to speak did so quite effectively and did not seem jumpy or on edge: diminished but not neurotic was how I would describe the general impression he made. Ohira, partly but only partly for language reasons, was an appalling chairman. The Japanese just don't think in terms of the normal discussion meetings of which we are so fond, they don't like rambling around the intellectual horizons themselves and probably don't therefore see why anyone else should do it; and they may be right. However, his chairmanship was sufficiently bad that I think even he noticed it, and indeed at the end he apologized, as the translator put it, ‘for my inadvertent chairmanship'.

One advantage of his ‘inadvertent chairmanship' was that the sessions were mercifully short. We were back in the hotel by 6.30, despite the fact that I had been held up for a few minutes by having to walk out to her car with my new friend Mrs Thatcher, who asked if I was leaving and hoped we could leave together in order to protect her I think from being surrounded by the press to whom, quite sensibly, she didn't want to give ‘on the hoof' conferences. She had done quite well during the afternoon, though she was expressing considerable impatience with the form of the meeting and, in particular, with Giscard's performance.

Then we had the Emperor's dinner at the Imperial Palace. Here again, so far as I was concerned, there was Giscard-ordained segregation. In other words the heads of government were received by the Emperor and the other members of the Royal Family in one room and then came and joined the Foreign Ministers, the Finance Ministers and me after about twenty minutes. However, whether accidentally or not, the Emperor frustrated this by sending the Court Chamberlain to bring me up to him and I had a good ten minutes of imperial conversation before we went into dinner. As in 1977, I quite enjoyed talking to him. It is done through an interpreter but it is about quite serious subjects, about Japan in a sort of socio-geographical sense, and he is serious, well-informed and reasonably easy.

I also had a rather good
place à table
at dinner, between the wife of the Emperor's younger brother, who looked rather younger than she could have been as she had stayed at Buckingham Palace under King George V on her honeymoon in 1931, and a former Prime Minister, who was curiously interested in what one might call English Gaitskellian politics, had known Hugh well and indeed Tony Crosland also.

FRIDAY, 29 JUNE.
Tokyo
.

A morning session from 9.50 until 12.10 once again mainly negotiations on the communiqué and particularly on the energy parts of it. Then an hour's pause before lunch, during which I asked François-Poncet to come and see me, because I had been worried by a development at the end of the morning in which Carter led Schmidt off into the idea of putting in some denunciatory stuff
about OPEC in the communiqué. While not against denouncing OPEC, I wasn't keen for us all to get hooked on a Carter line hoist largely for internal American political reasons (as subsequently emerged very clearly) and to have it done rather hot-headedly -and Schmidt was certainly in a hot-headed mood by this time—in a heads of government drafting session, which is never a good recipe for good sense.

A final afternoon session for an hour and a half. The difficulty at this stage was that Andreotti was insisting very firmly and pertinaciously that the Italians would only accept a country target (rather like the Japanese who were in the same position) if it was made so loose as to be almost meaningless. In other words, he wanted a footnote saying that it was all to be seen within the context of the Community target. In the circumstances Mrs Thatcher came in and said wasn't it much better if we just all jointly stuck to the Community target, and I supported her on this. It would in fact have suited Schmidt much better too, but he was leaning back. Then Giscard intervened, very bad-temperedly; whether against Mrs Thatcher or me, or both of us, was not absolutely clear saying, ‘No, this is an intolerable going back on what we had decided hitherto,' etc. He then moved round the table to talk to Andreotti. I had a draft to offer and, irritated by Giscard, firmly refused to go on talking until he had gone back to his place and was prepared to listen. Mrs Thatcher was much shocked by his display of bad manners and bad temper, I less so.

Ohira announced that at the press conference there would be no questions but statements from everybody, including me. So I had progressed from sitting at the press conference with no microphone in London, to sitting silent at the press conference with a microphone in Bonn, to sitting at the press conference with a microphone and being allowed to make a statement at Tokyo!

Most of the statements were very bad. Probably Mrs Thatcher's was the best, although she rather tailed off. I at least was short. Giscard and Schmidt were both notably bad, Schmidt just seeming bored. Then I did my own press conference (as did the others) from 6.30 to 7.00, with I suppose about 150 pressmen present, as opposed to the thousand or so we had had for the general occasion, and answered a few questions.

We could not helicopt to the airport as it was after dark, so we
were driven out to the old airport about ten miles away, put on a special plane and flown round for forty minutes until we landed at the new airport, a most remarkable performance between what were alleged to be airports for the same city. The JAL plane was in the air at 9.45, and I managed to arrange that on this journey I should not be brought downstairs at Anchorage. Needless to say, however, I awoke at Anchorage where, mysteriously, it was 10.30 in the morning on Friday the 29th, the day on the evening of which we had left Tokyo, and for once the sun was shining.

SATURDAY, 30 JUNE.
Anchorage and East Hendred
.

London at 6.00 in the morning (3 p.m. Japanese time) and East Hendred at 7.15. Began early telephoning of the Little Five: first, Thorn, then van der Klaauw (van Agt being characteristically away on a bicycle tour), then the Taoiseach, Jack Lynch. Later that morning I got Martens, the Belgian Prime Minister, but failed to get the Danes until Monday. I think this is a worthwhile exercise.

Jennifer and I went to lunch with Ann (Fleming) at Sevenhamp-ton where there was a large party composed of, amongst others, Mark Boxer,
⁸
Katie Asquith,
⁹
the Levers, Patrick Trevor-Roper,
¹⁰
etc.

TUESDAY, 3 JULY.
Brussels
.

Saw Tugendhat at 10.30, he anxious to lobby hard for Natali as the parliamentary Commissioner. He was not anxious to do it himself, but would much prefer Natali to Davignon, and argued persuasively, indeed I think decisively, in favour of this course.

After the annual
cabinet
luncheon at rue de Praetère. I returned to the office to see Davignon, having made up my mind over lunch, and to tell him that it was to be Natali and not him, which he took thoroughly well. At 7.45 I was warned that Mrs Thatcher wished to talk to me on the telephone and Crispin came around in order to help deal with that. It was about the UK/Euratom arrangement and, without too much difficulty, I was able to negotiate a satisfactory
settlement with her. She is fairly crisp at negotiating, but perfectly sensible. She also, I think slightly prompted by Woodrow (Wyatt), who had been trying to organize a meal at his house, asked me if I would come to Chequers for a quiet dinner to talk about European Councils, Summits, etc.

WEDNESDAY, 4 JULY.
Brussels
.

I told Natali he was to get the Parliament job, which he accepted with pleasure but not ecstasy. The Commission received it at least as enthusiastically as he did, but even more so the news of our settlement with the British, which was received with almost incredulous pleasure. I telephoned Colombo (President of the Parliament) about the wretched
Cour des Comptes
report, finding him as agreeable as usual but extremely vague as to what ought or ought not to be done about it.

To the Château de la Hulpe, which I had decided upon for the change of presidency dinner (essential to change the scene if you can't change the cast). My speech about the French presidency was based upon a rather elaborate comparison with a bottle of Château Lafite 1897, given me by my Bristol wine merchant, which I had approached with a mixture of respect, apprehension and anticipation. When my son Charles, with whom I had shared it, asked me the next day what I had thought of it, I had said, ‘Very remarkable, but one wouldn't want to drink it every day, would one.' This was received just tolerably by the French, well by the others.

THURSDAY, 5 JULY.
Brussels
.

A visit from the President of Colombia, the impressively named Julio Cesar Turbay. I had a not very satisfactory quarter of an hour with him in my office, mainly because he was interested in trying to draft a communiqué, to which they attached particular importance; we don't normally have them for such meetings. Then a rather more successful Commission meeting with him for one and a quarter hours, and afterwards a very successful lunch, when he proved to be a solid, interesting, agreeable man, who sat back in a most curious way from the table to eat—about two feet away from it—but this was a minor idiosyncrasy.

SATURDAY, 7 JULY.
East Hendred
.

At 10.15 we left for Reading, for an honorary degree ceremony. No speech was required, therefore a restful occasion. The large audience received me with apparent enthusiasm. (Perhaps they hoped I would provide the university with some Community money, but that is an ungrateful thought.) Roger Sherfield was the Chancellor and I enjoyed talking to him at lunch, I had previously and mistakenly thought him unforthcoming.

MONDAY, 9 JULY.
Brussels
.

A call from Lamb of the US Mission (Deane Hinton being in Washington). He, we had been warned, was coming in under instructions to ask exactly what we thought the country targets accepted at Tokyo meant, in particular in the case of Germany, and, indeed, whether it included North Sea oil, or whether it was only imports from third countries. Our view was that it was only imports from third countries, but there seemed some confusion between the French and the German positions on this, another indication of the way that Giscard had slightly cocked things up at Tokyo and Schmidt had allowed him to get away with it. However, our line with the United States was perfectly clear. We could only speak on the Community target as a whole. This applied to imports from third countries only, in other words it did not include North Sea oil (any more than their imports included Alaskan oil), but that so far as the individual country targets were concerned, queries on these points should be addressed to the individual governments. This was a perfectly tenable line and one which Lamb both expected and accepted.

TUESDAY, 10 JULY.
Brussels
.

A meeting lasting about an hour with Plaja, Nanteuil and Murphy, the second man in the Irish Permanent Representation (Dillon being away). I decided to have them in as representatives of the present, past and future presidency of COREPER, because there had been several signs of growing morosity on the part of COREPER, several reports of mutterings at meetings about things the
Commission had or hadn't done. Certainly while I had been away in Japan the Commission had made a cock-up of the
agrément
to a new Greek Ambassador and future Permanent Representative, and some people in the Commission—Haferkamp, Natali, Cheysson (a curious mixture)—had been in favour of refusing
agrément
, which we had never done before. The man concerned (Roussos)
¹¹
had apparently been in Brussels under the Colonels, but he had been serving successfully and satisfactorily as Ambassador in London for the past three or four years, and it seemed to me that if Karamanlis was satisfied with his record under the Colonels, there was no reason why we should not be.

THURSDAY, 12 JULY.
Brussels, Cardiff and East Hendred
.

To Cardiff for the UWIST degree day ceremony. A most beautiful morning, quite nice in Brussels and spectacular in England. The drive across the Downs and then on through Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire was as beautiful as anything I had seen for a long time. It was even high tide in the Severn, which seems rare.

Two one-and-a-half-hour degree-giving sessions, interspersed with Principal Trotman-Dickenson's lunch party. Then to the Angel Hotel, where, after a certain amount of sweaty preparation, I did a thirty-minute interview for BBC Wales with Vincent Kane, with whom I had done things in Luxembourg and Strasbourg and think rather good.

To the City Hall for the Welsh Development Corporation dinner, a huge gathering of nearly five hundred. Thirty-five minutes from me (broadcast live by Radio Wales) and then the new Secretary of State for Wales (Nicholas Edwards) made a surprisingly partisan speech, although in quite a good voice.

SATURDAY, 14 JULY.
East Hendred
.

Lunch at Buscot Parsonage with Diana Phipps, who had George Weidenfeld and the Charlie Douglas-Homes.

Drove myself to Chequers (where I hadn't been for several years) for the Thatcher dinner engagement mentioned by her on the
telephone and surprisingly vigorously followed up. I was greeted by Denis Thatcher and led into the medium-sized sitting room on the ground floor, where the Prime Minister and Woodrow (Wyatt) were already deep in conversation. I had no idea who was going to be there, but apparently she had settled for this odd quartet.

Perfectly agreeable general conversation before an early dinner at a small table in the window of the big dining room. Quite a good meal, and interesting enough political conversation. Towards the end of dinner we began to get into the middle of things. Hitherto we had been talking principally about what she thought of Strasbourg and Tokyo, to which the answer was not much: she had thought a lot of Schmidt on both occasions and very little of Giscard, whom she thought petulant, vain and rather ill-mannered. I told her that she had seen him at his worst, certainly at Tokyo, and when all was said and done, although she was right in a lot of her complaints, the good side was substantially greater than she allowed for, for he was highly intelligent, on the whole his policies went in the right direction and on the whole they did so effectively; and that, therefore, one ought (although my instincts were often very much like hers for he could be absolutely maddening) to try to suppress these feelings, and realize there was a good deal to put in the credit balance. It was a pity, though, that he spoilt such a large credit balance by these rather silly—but nonetheless deep—fissures of character. She seemed willing to agree with this.