European Diary, 1977-1981 Read online

  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.