European Diary, 1977-1981 Part 6

Left for Luxembourg by car about 7.40. The first perfect autumn morning; mist in the valley of the Meuse at Namur, but brilliant suns.h.i.+ne most of the way. Budget debate all day in the Parliament. After the speech of Eyskens, the Belgian Budget Minister, which was competent and wisely low key, Tugendhat spoke extremely effectively, staking out our strong line of conflict with the Council, and was very well received by the Parliament.

I took Ted Heath, who was paying a visit to prepare for his great Europe lecture at the Conservative Conference, to lunch at a restaurant about four miles out and found him on quite good form, very willing to listen and inform himself, and favourably disposed towards monetary union. Then back for the continuation of the debate. I spoke for about twenty-five minutes, and this again, like Tugendhat's speech, was regarded as effective. Eyskens wound up in a slightly battered but skilful way at the end. I gave a dinner for the Liberal Group.

WEDNESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER. Luxembourg and Brussels.

Breakfast with Simonet and Colombo at the curiously Was.h.i.+ngton-style house of the Belgian Amba.s.sador to Luxembourg. This was exclusively concerned with the boring old issue of the Parliament's new offices in Brussels, a subject in which I am determined to avoid the Commission getting deeply involved. Back to Brussels by TEE over lunch.

Dined with General Haig and a largish party at Mons. The party was princ.i.p.ally for the new US Amba.s.sador to NATO, Tapley Bennett, whose wife I sat next to and found intelligent and agreeable. I was not quite so sure about him. He made a markedly bad speech in reply to the General's almost equally bad one after dinner. It is curious that Americans should be so addicted to these little after-dinner speeches mentioning and welcoming all the guests when they are so bad at it. However, my impression of Haig as being an effective man with a modest manner even if vaulting ambitions, remained unimpaired by the evening.

THURSDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

Lunched with COREPER. A slightly awkward issue surfaced: whether the Council presidency (i.e. for the moment the Belgians, next the Danes) should be represented as well as us at the official follow-up talks to the London Summit which Crispin attends for us. There also sadly emerged the certainty that we cannot take JET at the September Council owing to the post-kidnapping paralysis of the German Government. I spoke to Dohnanyi on the telephone in Bonn and got him to promise that the matter would be dealt with at the Belgian 'Schloss Gymnich'-type meeting in early October, or, at the very latest, at the October Council itself.

Speech in the evening to the British Labour Group in Brussels. It was the sort of semi-informal speech to a Fabian group or a Labour Party dinner or a university Labour Club, which I had done constantly over thirty years, but at which I have got rather out of practice in the last year. I found it highly enjoyable and rather stimulating. It was a pleasure to speak leaning against a table and without a text, rather than to make the much more formal statements with translation, to which I have recently become used.

FRIDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER. Brussels and La Roche-en -Ardennes.

The day of my ninth and last official introductory visit, but as it was to Belgium not much travel was involved. We began with a Laeken luncheon with the King and Queen, also the Tindemans', the Simonets, various Court officials, etc. The lunch enjoyable, the King as nice as ever, and the Queen, whom I had hardly previously talked to and between whom and Mme Simonet I sat, was also agreeable: rather good-looking in a sad sort of way, quite interesting, even better English than the King, who goes off into French fairly quickly, which she doesn't.

Then a fairly serious discussion for almost two hours in Tindemans's office which was constructive, except getting rather snarled up at the end on the question of (Council) presidency representation at the Summit follow-up official meeting. Simonet was being rather wild, in favour of rus.h.i.+ng at this in an ill-considered manner, and was supported by Van der Meulen, but Tindemans in the middle was a great deal more sensible and balanced, and saw possible consequences far more clearly. Eventually Tindemans got his (and our) way on this.185 Finally a reception in the Parliament building given by the Presidents of the two Chambers. Then drove to the Hotel-Restaurant de l'Air Pur a few miles beyond La Roche-en-Ardennes, for our Commission strategy weekend.

SAt.u.r.dAY, 17 SEPTEMBER. La Roche-en-Ardennes.

Morning session on the inst.i.tutional aspects of enlargement. First, the question of how we would deal with a member state, old or new, in which democracy was overthrown (this issue is clearly made much more actual by the three applicant members, none of whom only five years ago was under any sort of democratic regime). Then there was a good deal of discussion about the size and shape of the Commission itself, most but not all thinking that seventeen would be far too large.

Afternoon session on Mediterranean problems, with particular reference to enlargement. Gundelach very good indeed; Natali not at all bad. After them the discussion began to get all over the place. However, we managed to steer well away from illusions about ma.s.sive industrialization of the Mediterranean or any commitment to deal with its agricultural problems by price support. It is vital not to transpose the price support system, with all the excesses which flow from it in northern agriculture, into the Mediterranean.

Very enjoyable dinner talk with Brunner, who can be an extremely engaging conversationalist; he has a remarkable range of knowledge about English politicians, both of the present day and the late nineteenth century. He is much better on such subjects than when dealing with energy. Perhaps I ought to find another portfolio for him.

SUNDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER. La Roche-en-Ardennes and Brussels.

The morning session was extremely important for me as it would determine whether I could carry the Commission with me on monetary union. Ortoli opened in a slightly worried, defensive mood, because of my having put round my paper on the need for an urgent re-launch of the idea of monetary union; I thought he was more worried than offended, but you can never be quite sure. I then spoke for about twenty minutes, and we had a good discussion which came to a fairly natural end about lunchtime, there being general support, with the exception only I think of Haferkamp, who is by far the most conservative member of the Commission, and of Burke who, for some extraordinary reason, got excited about the difficulty of countries giving up monetary sovereignty, which is an odd view for an Irishman, as of course they have never had it, always being tins on the tail of the Bank of England.186 But apart from those two, and Ortoli moving slowly and reluctantly, but moving, there was strong general support for our launching the wider idea and proclaiming the need for an early leap forward. Davignon and Gundelach and, indeed, Brunner and Vredeling were all I thought particularly good in the discussion. So was Tugendhat, as he had been throughout the two days. At the end we all thought we had had a good weekend, and broke up buoyantly with agreeable drinks outside in strong suns.h.i.+ne.

TUESDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

Foreign Affairs Council at 10 o'clock. A good discussion on the Spanish application, with the French bewilderingly having decided to withdraw the reservation they were going to put up. However, they were awkward about Commission representation on INFCEP. Guiringaud was not there, but a rather tawdry-looking champagne merchant called Taittinger, who is Under-Secretary at the Quai, put up French objections unsustained by any possible argument. I spoke, I hoped and thought, rather firmly-and this matter ended up by Taittinger saying he would have to get further instructions, which by the afternoon he got and more or less withdrew.

At the ministers' lunch I gave a long exposeof what we had done at La Roche, and they seemed quite interested. Then the French rounded off their bad day by coming under powerful gunfire from Gundelach and Cheysson, both of whom spoke extremely well, over our negotiating position in the International Sugar Conference.187 They were completely isolated.

WEDNESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

Jennifer went to Bremen to launch a huge s.h.i.+p. Commission meeting all day, adjourning at 6.15. This gave me time to give a little further thought to our 7 o'clock meeting with Bob Strauss, the US Special Trade Representative. The meeting, however, did not demand much thought for Strauss was still at a high level of generality, agreeable as usual, full of bantering conversation, telling us a bit about what was going on in Was.h.i.+ngton, how anxious he was to make some progress, to produce something he could sell to the public, but showing no desire to get down to any details, or indeed to be awkward, as we thought at this stage he might be.

THURSDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

Commission lunch for Strauss and his party, who had been meeting with Haferkamp, Gundelach and Davignon during the morning. Over lunch there was general conversation followed by a brief exchange of complimentary speeches. Strauss was interesting on a number of points. He had spent most of the night on the telephone to Was.h.i.+ngton resisting becoming Director of the Budget in succession to Lance, who had just resigned. Who were the important senators? Russell Long (Mississippi) he placed almost at the top of the list. How were the various Cabinet officers doing? Blumenthal not very well, though an able man. Then the draft communique was brought in and we worked on this for a short time and got agreement without too much difficulty on the basis of the so-called Swiss formula, with a tacit understanding that we should try and go for tariff cuts of about 40 per cent, minus perhaps 5 per cent, worked out on the basis of this formulabut the understanding not at this stage to be published.

MONDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER. London.

Dinner at the Annans, with only the Rothschilds188 there besides us. An extremely agreeable evening; a great bas.h.i.+ng around with Victor, a mixture of literary, political, gossipy conversation.

TUESDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER. London and Brussels.

At 6.30 I saw Howard,189 the new Australian Minister of External Trade, who was perfectly nice but inexperienced. He had clearly been sent by the egregious Fraser with an extremely rough but foolish negotiating brief. It meant that they were trying to go back on the plan we had laboriously agreed to in June for having a general review of trading matters at official level, but not ministerial talks and not with a view to the conclusion of a bilateral agreement at this stage. As a result of this he had stubbornly refused the evening before to allow talks to take place between officials on the agreed basis. The object of my meeting was to get him to change his mind on this, which I did, but not without the chilliness and roughness which seems, far more than with any other government, to be involved in dealing with the Australians at the present time.

WEDNESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

Leo Pliatzky, now Permanent Secretary to the Department of Trade, to lunch rue de Praetere. A little preliminary conversation about trade matters, and then a fascinating conversation about the past with him. He had been a close friend, not so much at Oxford as in post-Oxford days, in the late forties and early fifties, but I had seen him hardly at all since I left the Treasury. He had quite a lot of interesting things to say. He was deeply critical of almost everybody within sight, or indeed out of sight: Douglas Allen,190 who had lost his cutting edge since he went to the non-job of being head of the Civil Service; Denis Healey, who had certainly been a very bad Chancellor of the Exchequer in the early days and was not all that good now; Joel Barnett,191 who was ineffective as a Chief Secretary, etc. However, Leo's mixture of p.r.i.c.kly charm and angular honesty meant that this did not create a disobliging atmosphere.

Clearly Leo himself, though fighting through great vicissitudes of ill-health, motor-car accidents, losing an eye, having lost his wife, G.o.d knows what else, had played a decisive part in getting control over public expenditure when he was Second Permanent Secretary in the Treasury charged with this side of things. He had relied not so much on cash limits, though he thought these were important, but even more on a formula which he had evolved with John Hunt,192 by which in Cabinet committees Treasury ministers should not be allowed to be overruled, whatever the majority, without an obligation to go to Cabinet resting upon the minister who wanted to spend, not upon the Treasury; and that if there was no agreement, this immediately unlatched a process by which the exact state of the contingency reserve had to be reviewed and placed before the Cabinet. This he thought made a great difference.

He was also interesting, though unforgiving even in retrospect, about Tony Crosland, who had at times been a still closer friend of Leo's than I was. He had known him very well up to some time in the early 1960s. But, like a lot of people, Leo had been deeply offended by Tony on a personal basis, and then subsequently, perhaps partly because of this but I don't think princ.i.p.ally so, thought that Tony had an appalling responsibility for public expenditure accelerating out of control during the early days of the 1974 Labour Government, mainly because he had always provided the most sophisticated arguments in favour of an open hand at the till. It was in his view a real example of trahison des clercs. Leo is still as always very much his own man, rather like a senior Graham Avery, with great intellectual self-confidence, in some ways also not unlike the maligned Douglas Allen, but with substantial differences too.

THURSDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

Worked at home on the highly complicated subject of the effect on agriculture of the transfer to the European unit of account, preliminary to an hour-long meeting with Gundelach, in which he explained to me why he did not want to make a move on this for several months. Quite a convincing explanation: the intellectual case was overwhelmingly against him and he had the good sense to admit this and said his reluctance was based purely on a judgement of how the various personalities would react; a good example of how to present a difficult case, and he moved my mind somewhat.

I had Sigrist,193 the German Permanent Representative, to lunch, partly because I felt a little out of touch with the German scene. Good, rather serious, conversation. First, without great shafts of penetrating light, but highly intelligently, he described why the Germans reacted so much to the terrorist threat and the effect on various German alignments and the position of the different parties at this stage. Then a routine exchange about JET and Article 131, and then at the end my expounding to him some of my ideas on economic and monetary union. I wonder how he will report back.

FRIDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER. Brussels.

A visit from Bill Rodgers, who gave me an advance copy of the public letter which Callaghan had written to the Labour Party on the eve of its annual conference. On balance quite a good letter, very firm on rejecting any possibility of British withdrawal from the Community and recognizing how damaging the continuing speculation about this was both to the Labour Party and Britain's position in Europe; presenting some good arguments against this, but also concentrating far too much on wanting a loose Community with an absolute ceiling to any significant powers for the Parliament, and welcoming, as it is right to welcome for other reasons, the prospect of enlargement on the basis that it would make a loose Community more certaina very silly view indeed, this. Not too unreasonable a slant on reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, and quite constructive, though very vague, about energy policy.

I saw an agitated Tugendhat at 4.30, who was greatly upset, and with some reason, to discover that, without consultation with him, Gundelach had apparently announced that export sales of Community b.u.t.ter, with rest.i.tution, i.e. with huge budgetary costs and the likelihood of extremely adverse public reaction, in Britain at any rate, were likely to be 150,000 tons for the year, not 105,000 tons as had previously been thought. Gundelach was in Paris so there was nothing to do except await his explanations.

MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER. Brussels.

Mario Soares, Prime Minister of Portugal, from 11.00 until 12.00. Soares on this occasion more realistic, more self-confident, more impressive than when I had seen him in March. A quite good conversation (in French) with him. He seemed reasonably satisfied with the way the application was being handled and gave a mixed picture of the Portuguese economy.

I pointed out to him the difficulty raised by the Callaghan letter, in which Callaghan got very close to saying that one of the great advantages of enlargement was that it would inevitably mean a looser, less effective, less supranational Community; and that Soares ought to be aware of this because if he aligned himself with this it would inevitably cause an ideological split amongst those who wanted his accession to the Community. He reacted immediately, saying it certainly was not his view at all; the last thing he wanted was to dilute the Community by coming in. He convinced me that he was not just talking for the book by coining the good aphorism that he was not going to take the trouble of resigning from EFTA (the European Free Trade a.s.sociation) in order to join what was no more than a glorified EFTA. What he wanted to join was a real political Community with a momentum towards economic and political union.

Crispin back from Was.h.i.+ngton with the news that the next Summit is not to be until after the Danish presidency is out of the way, and therefore under the German presidency. Thus the big countries will rather skilfully obviate the problem of what they would do with a small country holding the presidency. He also reported on Strauss's feeling following his visit to us, which apparently amounted to his thinking that we had slightly taken the pants off him and that he had given us more than we had given him; but this may be a ploy.

WEDNESDAY, 5 OCTOBER. Brussels.

Commission meeting, disrupted but agreeably so by the visit of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard. Out to the airport to meet them at 10.15. It was a surprisingly cold morning, and I stood rather chillily on the tarmac although they arrived on time, she dressed in her typical comfortable Dutch way, he, stripped of his uniforms by Vredeling (although I do not suppose he would have come in one in any event), dressed in one of his rather flash pepper and salt suits. However, he is an intelligent and, I find, likeable man in spite of the Lockheed affair.194 Drove in with both of them to the Berlaymont, it having been made clear by the Dutch authorities that the Prince did not wish, which was the previous plan, to drive with Vredeling and therefore he sat in the front of the car, and the Queen and I sat in the back.

Both of them were very anxious to be agreeable, which I think comes naturally to them. At the Berlaymont they were greeted with flowers for her and a good cheering crowd, mainly of Dutch. They then came up to my room where they expressed great interest in the view, the pictures, everything; the only hiccup being when Umberto, my anglophone Italian huissier, brought the coffee in and she, who hadn't spoken a word of this language to anyone else, suddenly addressed him in Dutch, and asked for some hot water with the coffee. 'Warm wa.s.ser,' she said, or some such words. Poor Umberto was absolutely flummoxed. She presumably a.s.sumed that all people in subordinate positions in Belgium were Dutch-speaking. However, when I told her that he was an anglophone Italian she apologized profusely.

In the Commission meeting various members gave exposes, including notably Ortoli, who was not on the list but spoke with great pa.s.sion and enthusiasm, and much impressed the Queen. She was slow to get going and ask questions and Prince Bernhard performed a very useful role in being ready with one or two quite shrewd ones. Then lunch, lasting until nearly 3.30, with nearly all the members of the Commission and turning towards the end into a rather good general discussion: the Queen, idealistic, perhaps a little naive, but genuinely interested and enquiring; Prince Bernhard quick and intelligent and very agreeable to talk to on a personal plane; and at the end, when I thanked him warmly and privately for having come and said how much he had contributed to the visit, I found him rather moved.

For this successful visit we paid the mild price of not being able to start proper Commission business until 3.30, which meant a wearing five-hour meeting until 8.30. Ortoli was overcome by his oratorical triumph in the morning and indeed another good and striking performance at lunch. On the way back up in the lift, he told me, 'Elle est une dame tres distinguee,' which is not exactly the obvious phrase to use about Queen Juliana. Then when I saw him for an hour the next day and said how splendidly he had spoken the day before and how much he had impressed the Queen, he said sadly, 'Ah, yes, but that was yesterday. I am on much less good form today.'

FRIDAY, 7 OCTOBER. Brussels.

A meeting with four or five Commissioners about the enlargement paper we had promised to the Council. Contrary to my hopes and expectations after La Roche, the draft before us was almost useless, with all the edge of the two previous papers taken away. I recalled across forty years a remark of G. D. H. Cole, who, when somebody had said that a book was very bad, replied that it was not quite as bad as it seemed at first sight; if you only read every other sentence, the text made reasonable sense. This was the case here. However, what the sense was depended whether you started with an even or odd sentence. I announced that Kergorlay195 was to rewrite the whole thing, so that it could at least have the coherence of single authors.h.i.+p, as near as possible to the La Roche form, and try to get it through a special Commission on Tuesday, although I alas would be in j.a.pan.

SAt.u.r.dAY, 8 OCTOBER. Brussels and Villers-le-Temple.

Breakfast rue de Praetere for James Schlesinger, the United States Energy Secretary, with a great party of officials. A rather sticky occasionI hate working breakfasts in any caseand I didn't take greatly to Schlesinger. No doubt he is an able man, but I rather dislike his habit of carrying on a conversation by a series of laconic, not very funny, wisecracks, with too much straining after epigram. It was rather like talking to a less witty Ken Galbraith196 whom one did not know.

To Villiers-le-Temple for the Belgian 'Schloss Gymnich' weekend. This wasn't quite Leeds Castle but it took place at a rather attractive hotel called La Commanderie, converted out of a sort of mixture of priory and barracks for Knights Templars. Everyone, except Guiringaud, was there for lunch. David Owen was asked to begin by giving an account of the British position after the Labour Party Conference, which he did in somewhat complacent terms. I then said I thought the Callaghan letter did mark a step forward, although I could not entirely agree with David's view that it had buried the issue in the Labour Party for ever; it had probably buried it for this Parliament, and possibly the next if the Labour Party won, but by no means necessarily with the Labour Party in opposition.

I also thought there were grave dangers in at least one sentence of the letter, that which expressed the view that enlargement was to be welcomed as an almost inevitable weakening of the Community. This provoked others, particularly Genscher and Thorn, to complain slightly more strongly along the same lines; Genscher said it was very nice of the British not to ask for another renegotiation, implying strongly that if we had that would have been the end; but also committing himself, which was satisfactory, to a view that on the contrary enlargement must mean a strengthening of the Community. However, there was not tremendous pressure upon David.

There was some complaint about Crispin not having distributed to the Little Five the text of the communique which had been agreed upon, though not for publication, at the Was.h.i.+ngton meeting of Summit 'sherpas', and I defended him vigorously on this, saying that he could not possibly stand out against the unanimous view of the others that there was to be no communication of this, except to the heads of governments represented at the Summit. Inevitably a slightly difficult issue as we are in a way there as the representative of the Little Five, though also, of course, nominally as that of the other four, and if they give us no support for action helpful to the Little Five, it is very difficult for us to know how to strike the balance.

Then a four-hour, more formal session in the afternoon. We opened with an inst.i.tutional discussion on enlargement, and then I did about a twenty-minute expose on monetary union. This was not at all badly received round the table, notably (as one would expect) by Ireland, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, but also by Denmark, Holland and even Genscher for Germany. David Owen was sceptical, but not particularly hostile or indeed particularly informed.

There was a curious flare-up at dinner. We got on to Summitry and the question of future representation, Guiringaud playing this in a relaxed way and also Dohnanyi who had by this time replaced Genscher, partly of course because they knew, as most of the Little Five were beginning to find out, that there was not going to be a Summit during the Danish presidency, but only during the German presidency. This made the question of the representation of the presidency, as opposed to the Commission, fairly academic. On Commission representation, the strong impression which emerged from Guiringaud was that we would not have the same trouble from Giscard next time round. Giscard, he implied, had had enough of the issue.

Then Guiringaud, supported by Dohnanyi, with Forlani giving silent acquiescence, said that he had no objection at all to the communique of the Was.h.i.+ngton official meeting being distributed to the governments of the Little Five. So I said, 'Excellent.' Whereupon David got into a most excited state and said he couldn't possibly agree without, as he foolishly put it, the explicit approval of his Prime Minister who took a great interest in these matters. I said that there was no need for anybody to get excited because I only had one copy with me and therefore could not distribute it immediately; and if David wanted to speak to his Prime Minister, that was clearly a matter for him, though if by chance his Prime Minister wished to stop the distribution, it would then be for me to act on my own judgement and responsibility, which indeed I would do. This was what the Little Five wanted to hear, so it somewhat calmed them down.

I then asked the Five, and particularly Andersen, who had been making a great fuss, to note that Her Majesty's Princ.i.p.al Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs felt unable to take a decision without consulting his Prime Minister, and would they therefore stop blaming my official, even if a peculiarly self-reliant and fairly senior one, for not having taken a decision in Was.h.i.+ngton on his own to go against the otherwise unanimous view of the meeting. I am not quite sure how much David liked this slight teasing, but he had behaved foolishly. He showed no sign of bad temper towards me, indeed specifically asking for a long talk for the next morning.

SUNDAY, 9 OCTOBER. Villers-le-Temple and Brussels.

After the short morning meeting I had an hour's talk with David Owen. We started with the news of Prentice's197 switch to the Conservative Party in the Observer, which had just arrived. But David did not know him as I did. The trouble with Reg is that, while he has many admirable and rare qualities, he is a heavy-footed elephant cras.h.i.+ng through the jungle. He is in a curious way an extremist, not a moderate at all, and he is inconsiderate of other people, which makes him difficult to work with. Still, this is better than being hopelessly tr.i.m.m.i.n.g as so many people are; but I feel sorry for people who supported him closely, like s.h.i.+rley (Williams), and who are still in British politics. David was cheerful but not intolerably euphoric after the Labour Party Conference. He was rather agitated by news of the strongly anti-British briefing on the Callaghan letter which Genscher appeared to have done on leaving the meeting the previous evening.

MONDAY, 10 OCTOBER. Brussels.

The day of departure for j.a.pan. 11.43 TEE from the Gare du Midi to Paris. Dismal day, raining as usual at Mons and across the Somme and indeed into Paris. Took off from Charles de Gaulle at 4 o'clock on a remarkable and indeed memorable flight. During the first three and a half hours, when I worked extremely hard on the j.a.panese briefs, flying on a more easterly route than usual we went over Norway and Finland. Meanwhile it got dark, but with a red rim remaining on the south-western horizon. During dinner it began to get light, on the same day, of course. We had turned westward and were galloping through the time zones in that lat.i.tude. By the end of dinner we had got into a cold grey winter dawn light, a little brighter to the left of the aeroplane, while to the right, over the North Pole, about four hundred miles away, we could see the night sitting like a patch on an eye. We flew in that unchanging dawn for three or four hours, with no cloud, so that we could see a sort of packed ice which looked like ranges of low hills down below us in this curious, haunting, endless half-light.

After a short sleep I awoke to full light, all still the same day, with strong suns.h.i.+ne on the ma.s.sive snow-capped mountains of western Alaska. Then we came into horrible Anchorage in a much less good light. Very soon after take-off from there, the most ghastly shuddering began, and went on for over ten minutes. From the agitated tone of his voice, curiously instructing us not to smoke, I don't think the Air France pilot liked it at all. However, it eventually died away.

TUESDAY, 11 OCTOBER. Tokyo.

Tokyo just before 6.30 p.m. A great line-up on the tarmac of the amba.s.sadors of the Nine, plus representatives of the j.a.panese Government. Some of the Nine had apparently been reluctant to comethe French and, more surprisingly, the Italiansbut they had been brought into line by the Belgian presidency. Drove to the Imperial Hotel with Nis.h.i.+bori, the j.a.panese Amba.s.sador in Brussels, who had come over the day before and accompanied me throughout the visit. I came to find him a nice, increasingly helpful man.

The old Imperial in which I had stayed twelve years ago has completely gone. The Frank Lloyd Wright honeycomb has apparently been moved to some sort of j.a.panese Williamsburg about a hundred miles away, and in its place there is a new, anonymous, but well-appointed building in which we all had rooms surrounded by security guards on the sixteenth floor.

WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER. Tokyo.

Sunny, temperature moving up to about 70. At 8.45 the Foreign Minister came to call on me in the hotel; very considerate on his part to have suggested this in view of the heaviness of my programme, and we had about forty minutes' general exchange of views. I then saw George Howard, who was staying in the hotel, for five minutes, before going to the Imperial Palace for an audience with the Emperor at 11 o'clock. I had been warned that these audiences tended to be sticky as he is difficult to talk to unless one is a great expert on marine biology. I did not find this. The audience went along reasonably smoothly, just the Emperor, an interpreter, me obviously, a sort of Court Chamberlain, who had been Amba.s.sador in London, and one other Court official.

A slightly stilted conversation inevitably, the Emperor having fairly carefully rehea.r.s.ed his subjects-general welcome, importance of j.a.panese/European relations, some request for information about how the Community operated; then a reference to my books, with my responding with a reference to his and saying I understood that he had published fourteen. 'Oh, no, no,' he said. 'I had a certain small hand in them, but I am afraid I don't really write myself; I engage scholars to do it for me.'

Then, ludicrously, about seven minutes on croquet, about which he knew practically nothing, but of which he had been told I was a keen player and about which he therefore politely spoke with a show of interest. I left him about 11.40. He seemed an agreeable, serious-minded man, looking remarkably fit for his seventy-eight years. The palace is modern, built about 1968, but the park and the views on to it from the large windows are rather splendid.

Then to the Foreign Correspondents' Club for an early lunch and a prepared speech to an audience of about three hundred, mainly Americans, Australians and Europeans, but about a third j.a.panese as well. The speech went fairly well, I thought, questions rather less so.

In the afternoon I went to the Parliament building, and started with an interview with the President and his deputy, whom I think I persuaded that their princ.i.p.al European relations should be with the European Parliament rather than with the loose Council of Europe.

The building is in fact 1936, but looks like an earlier example of Pullman-style comfort. I watched a Budget Committee, attended by all the members of the Government who have to sit there all day for about nine hours and make constant replies to a whole range of questions which can be brought up without notice. We heard Prime Minister f.u.kuda, the Secretary of the Cabinet who is a politician, and also the Foreign Minister within a very brief s.p.a.ce. They have no desks in front of them, are completely exposed, and therefore have no opportunity to get on with any work of their own: a most extraordinary arrangement.

At 7 o'clock to the Prime Minister's residence for the central talk of the visit (one and a half hours) and his subsequent dinner. We were about eight strong, the j.a.panese about ten, including the Foreign Minister and one or two others, plus officials. It was all done through interpretation, of course.

f.u.kuda began with a welcome, then went into a description of what had happened in the j.a.panese economy and how he saw the economies of others since the Downing Street Summit, skilfully though perfectly pleasantly putting us on the defensive for having failed to attain our growth targets, whereas the j.a.panese claimed to have done so, and allowed that the Americans were not too bad either. I then did quite a long response, partly with the object of getting out of this defensive corner and partly to raise for their own sake some wider issues about the Third World, about the equal need for a stimulus to the developed economies, and about the change in relations.h.i.+p between employment and the business cycle. What became clear to me was that I could not stop without raising our bilateral complaints, otherwise there might be great difficulty in ever coming to them. This meant that I made about half an hour's statement including the pauses for interpretation, but I think that f.u.kuda was pleased with the wide-ranging approach, and probably took the particular bilateral points better in this context.

The point which he seemed to take in, allegedly for the first time, was that our problem with deep j.a.panese penetration of particular markets was not so much a balance-of-payments problem as an employment problem. On the opening of their market he was reasonably sympathetic, and in particular gave a fairly good response to my suggestion that they should buy the European Airbus,198 which would have a psychological impact, as well as a quant.i.tative impact, on the level of trade.

There were then about fifty guests to a very good dinner with French food and wine. Short speeches afterwards from f.u.kuda and me; I spoke unprepared and I think this went better as a result. After dinner we were intended to go fairly quickly, but f.u.kuda kept me talking over the coffee, raising new subjects, Euro-Communism, the rigidity of political systems, and his reminiscences of 1930s Europe until about 10.45. The Prime Minister's residence, incidentally, is also a Frank Lloyd Wright building, but again in danger of being pulled down because they do not think it large enough.

THURSDAY, 13 OCTOBER. Tokyo.

I had a pointless early talk with Bo, the ineffective Finance Minister. He seemed ill-informed about international monetary affairs and indeed one of his Under-Secretaries there was manifestly more on the ball. Bo had indicated that they were not worried about the depreciation of the dollar and the appreciation of the yen, whereas this clearly in fact is not the case. Then, for an hour, a rather important meeting with Tanaka, the Minister for International Trade and Industry, at which we went into more detail on bilateral questions.

Then at 11.00 to the Keidanren, the powerful employers' a.s.sociation. A long and reasonably useful meeting with them, with a venerable figure, Doko, aged eighty-two, in the chair. Then a rather less useful lunch (still with them) when it was not quite clear whether there was intended to be continuous working discussion or not. Afternoon press conference of about eighty people, which went not badly, I thought. I was interested to note that the j.a.panese woman interpreter (we kept on changing interpreters, whose quality varied-this one was extremely good) quite regularly took one-third longer than I had taken to translate my replies to questions, despite the fact that she spoke much more quickly than I did, and required no pauses for thought. j.a.panese must be a prolix language.

At 6.15 to the offices of the EEC Mission for our reception. Great excitement amongst our officials, amba.s.sadors, etc., because f.u.kuda decided with some difficulty to get the Diet Committee adjourned and to attend himself for half an hour, bringing half his Cabinet with him. This slightly Soviet-leaders.h.i.+p-like gesture was obviously intended to be a mark of signal favour and friendliness and was certainly forthcoming on his part.

FRIDAY, 14 OCTOBER. Tokyo, Moscow and Brussels.

Our solitary piece of sight-seeing was a drive of about five miles to a shrine, which I had been to in 1965, but is in a nice park. My impression driving round Tokyo was that it appeared much more Westernized that I had remembered it twelve years ago, and also more agreeable, mainly because pollution has completely disappeared. I was struck, not surprisingly, by the sense of prosperity, but also by the American nature of the scene. This cannot be entirely a result of the occupation and subsequent imitation for there are quite a lot of buildings along the main boulevard facing the Imperial Palace of the twenties and thirties, which look very similar to the American buildings of that epoch. But it is not only a question of buildings, it is also a question of general atmosphere-a lot of lean, eager young men, in good, thin, dark business suits, swinging their despatch cases as they hurry to their offices, the traffic also looking American, although no American cars of course; the whole atmosphere not like New York, but more like either Was.h.i.+ngton or Chicago.

I then briefed the amba.s.sadors of the Nine at the hotel and left for the airport in the first rain since our arrival. This time the amba.s.sadors attended at the airport less complainingly, the visit having been thought to go well, the Frenchman particularly going out of his way to be agreeable.

We took off just after 1 o'clock, went northwards across the Sea of j.a.pan, missing China easily, and over the mountains north of Vladivostok. Agreeable lunch, feeling the mission had been accomplished; bad film, some sleep, then across the plains of Siberia as the afternoon wore on: endless flying hour after hour after hour across Siberian wastes, a good deal of cloud but we could occasionally see down to the ground, which was always frozen, for five hundred mile after five hundred mile. When we got west of the Urals, which one hardly noticed because they are pretty low hills, we got into rather worse weather and came into Moscow on a filthy afternoon, landing there after ten hours in the air. A thoroughly disagreeable approach to a disagreeable airport in very low cloud and driving rain which quickly turned into sleet as the temperature was about 30F.

A slight contretemps at Moscow as Crispin had rightly decided that the Russians should be informed that we were pa.s.sing through. They riposted by insisting on sending COMECON to greet us, and COMECON in the shape of three fairly unprepossessing-looking gentlemen-one of whom was known to Denman through trade discussions-insisted on conducting us (although inefficiently in a cold and windy airport bus) to a huge meal which they had prepared in a rather gloomy bas.e.m.e.nt. We were in a bad temper, partly no doubt due to the long flight but also because we do not regard COMECON as our interlocuteur valable, only toyed with the five-course meal-and also made it clear that we were not prepared to engage in any trade discussions of substance. We were therefore reduced to talking about Siberian geography and climatology, and Crispin did particularly well on this.

We were nervous of being left behind when the plane went, as we didn't trust the competence of our hosts, and the organization of Moscow Airport is well known to be chaotic. So when we had been on the ground for one and a half hours we said firmly that we wished to get back on the plane. This they reluctantly accepted, pooh-poohing our bad nerves. Air France greeted us by saying that they had already held the plane for quarter of an hour and could not have done so for more than another five minutes. My impression of Moscow Airport was not favourable. Beautiful clear night over Western Europe, every light from Amsterdam to Paris sparkling beneath us. Charles de Gaulle at 8.35. We had been around the world in exactly 100 hours and 25 minutes. Brussels by midnight.

SUNDAY, 16 OCTOBER. Brussels.

Early evening meeting with Crispin, Hayden and Christopher Audland, and became rather gloomily aware that a great c.o.c.k-up had been made about the enlargement paper in my absence, with Natali in a sullen minority of one, and the rest of them deciding to put in nothing worthwhile to the Council at all, which had been very badly received by COREPER, probably accurately foreshadowing their governments.

MONDAY, 17 OCTOBER. Brussels and Luxembourg.

Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore, and his wife to lunch alone with Jennifer and me. He was mainly concerned to know what the future trade orientation of the Community, protectionist or otherwise, was going to be, and how he should adjust to this. He did not much mind provided he knew, he said. I said I did not see much future for Singapore selling textiles to the Community. He said fine, he would get as fast as he could into financial services and micro-chips. He was very bright and quick as usual; we did not get on to any difficult internal Singapore affairs.

At 2.30 I motored to Luxembourg through a totally splendiferous autumn afternoon and into a joint meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council and the Economic and Financial Council, to deal with two complicated little financial issues. In the intervals of these I did some work with Crispin on the draft statement which had been prepared for me to make in the Council the following morning as a supplement to the enlargement paper and which was clearly of considerable inportance in view of the bad atmosphere which was prevailing and the criticism which had already appeared in Le Monde and one or two other papers about the inadequacy of the Commission contribution. I became gradually aware that the statement as it stood was totally miscast and would do more harm than good. I therefore decided at about 7 o'clock that it had to be rewritten completely, which task, as I had no time, fell on Crispin, who did it brilliantly.

A formal dinner with the Greek negotiators, which happily did not last very long. At 11.00 Crispin produced the redrafted statement, which I worked on until 1.00.

TUESDAY, 18 OCTOBER. Luxembourg and Brussels.

Up at 7.00 for another two hours' work on the redrafted statement, which I delivered as soon as the Council, punctually for once, a.s.sembled at 9.15. It lasted seventeen minutes and, thanks largely to Crispin, went incomparably better than could have been expected. It rather took the wind out of the French and Italian sails, and was supported by nearly everybody else. We were warmly thanked for having made this constructive, clear contribution. It was a very difficult corner happily turned.

A Council working lunch at 1.45, after a restricted working session downstairs in which we tried to deal with JET. No news at that stage, but on the way up to the dining room news came through from Bonn that a settlement (in favour of Culham) had in fact been arrived at between Schmidt and Callaghan which could be endorsed by the Research Council.

Drove back to Brussels and went to a mysterious, hidden-away clinic to see an alleged orthopaedic expert about my ankle which had been revolting against my running habits for about the past ten days. The visit had been arranged through the service medicale of the Commission. It was one of the most ludicrous medical encounters I have ever had in my life. Dr Frere199 was an immensely old man, with a little white hat on his head, who greeted me upstairs in an extremely old-fas.h.i.+oned clinic, accompanied by two other doctors, one, his princ.i.p.al a.s.sistant, a fairly old-looking sixty-Frere himself must have been at least eighty-five-and the other, a rather young-looking twenty-five. The consultations took fifty minutes and led to no result at all, except that Frere managed to make me feel that I must be gravely ill with a mildly sprained ankle, arising from a very obvious cause (jogging).

They made detailed measurements of both ankles, had X-rays taken in incredibly awkward positions. At this stage, with the three doctors peering over me, it was like the scene in Rembrandt's 'Operation', except that happily they did not use any of the rather rusty-looking instruments hanging on the walls. Then they disappeared to consult the photographs, coming back saying that they needed some more X-rays, then coming and saying that there was little to be seen, then Frere saying what he was rather worried about was that the pain didn't seem sufficient for the swelling! Then a suggestion that I must have a whole series of blood tests, urine tests, kidney tests, everything else you could think of and come back in a week. It was a farcical example of the combination of lack of common sense and slight racketeering of expensive Belgian medicine. After this ludicrous performance I decided to sign off from them and have it fixed if I could in London or at Wantage. Home to rue de Praetere, where Ann Fleming had arrived to stay.

THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER. Brussels and Belfast.

Avion taxi to Belfast. The beautiful October disappeared on the way. Drove to Hillsborough, the old Governor-General's residence, and now the Government guest house, lunched with Concannon, Minister of State, Mason200 being kept in London for a Cabinet meeting, and a rather good gathering of twenty-four official and unofficial Northern Irishmen. Then helicopted, in great discomfort, to Stormont. Then to a rather rundown hotel near at hand, where I did three television interviews, one radio interview and a press conference. Dinner speech to a British Inst.i.tute of Management gathering.