European Diary, 1977-1981 Read Free Page A

signs of fluttering. Giscard indicated that he was against any early announcement of my presidency. His mind was firm on the substance, he said, but there must be no premature publicity: it might prejudice the position of François-Xavier Ortoli, the incumbent French President. This was strange, in view both of Giscard’s urgent pressure of February and of the fact that he had never previously shown much consideration for Ortoli—nor did he subsequently. It was balanced however by enthusiastic support given publicly from the Italian Government and more privately by Chancellor Schmidt, who did not wish to seem publicly out of step with President Giscard. Thus I had an early taste of a pattern of European attitudes which was to become only too familiar to me over the next few years.
    The explanation of Giscard’s wobble, I retrospectively think, is that my candidature, launched by him and Schmidt, was being too enthusiastically received by the small countries of the Community. This was because they wanted a politician and not a bureaucrat and found a Briton with European conviction a heady combination. When I visited two or three of them that spring I was treated very much as a President-elect. Giscard’s response was not to change his mind but to try to demonstrate that I was becoming President not by the acclaim of the little ones but by the nomination of France. Up to a point he succeeded.
    The issue was however safely out of the way by the end of June, when the European Council, meeting in Luxembourg, conveyed to me an informal (legal formality followed only in December) but public and unanimous invitation to assume the presidency at the beginning of January. Thereafter the majority of my time and the overwhelming part of my interest was devoted to the affairs of Europe. I remained Home Secretary until 10 September, when I left a British Government for the last time, but this was only because it suited the Prime Minister better that way, and a large part of this twilight period was in any event taken up by holiday.
    During July a number of Commissioners who were candidates for staying on came to see me in London, and I also began a series of visits to the governments of the member states. Rightly or wrongly,I kept away from Brussels. I decided that if I was to make any impact both upon the bureaucracy (which I thought of as being dedicated but rigid) and upon the tone of Europe, I must arrive only with full powers and not become a familiar figure hanging about in the corridors in the preceding months. I went there only once, in mid-November, mainly to see the house which we had taken, and to visit the Belgian Prime Minister, although we were in no dispute about the excellent Commissioner, Etienne Davignon, whom the Belgians had chosen in consultation with me. This abstinence from Belgium may or may not have given drama to my arrival, but it certainly had the effect, when I eventually plunged into the murk of a Brabant January, of making the ambience of the Berlaymont (the Community office building), the ways of those who lived in and around it, and indeed the whole atmosphere of Brussels, seem almost gothically strange to me.
    It was only Belgium as the areopagitica of the Community (and Luxembourg, its subsidiary in this respect) that I eschewed. The other six countries I went to frequently. Over the summer and autumn of 1976 I made twenty visits to their capitals. I also went twice to the United States, mainly on preparatory Community business. And there was a fairly constant procession of visitors -future Commissioners, senior officials, politicians—to see me in London. After I left the Home Office I was established in a modest suite of rooms in the Cabinet Office. Crispin Tickell, whom I chose from a list of strong candidates, came to me as
Chef de Cabinet
from the Foreign Office in October. Hayden Phillips left the Home Office with me to become
Chef Adjoint
but disappeared fairly soon on a