Adventures Of A Civil Servant (Part 4)
After a long period of negotiation and uncertainty, I was posted to the UKREP in Brussels at the end of February 1978. This was the job I really wanted. Syd Allman and I were candidates for the same job. In the end they gave me the job and Syd a different job – on Regional Policy. He worked in the next office. My title was First Secretary (Social Affairs). My boss (Counsellor (AS) level) was Gerry Wilson from the Scottish Office, who had taken over from John Rimington, from the Department of Employment, in the previous autumn.
This was a complete new world. As well as living in a different country, I had to get to know the workings of a British Overseas Representation (and the Foreign Office) and of the European institutions. To start with the Representation. The Ambassador was Sir Donald Maitland, an ambassador of the old school, with a fine mind, a strict, but fair, office manager, who ran a ‘tight ship’. His deputy, Bill Nicholl, later Sir William Nicholl, was a very different character [1]. Both were Scots. Bill was very colourful, also with a powerful intellect, but a trenchant wit, which sometimes got him into trouble. Bill was Gerry Wilson’s boss and the senior person I had most to do with.
[1] Sadly, I have just learned that Sir William Nicholl has died recently, while I was writing this chapter (March 2016).
Every Monday morning at 9:15, almost without exception, the Ambassador held a meeting of all diplomatic staff (Second Secretary and above). Attendance was compulsory, as was punctuality. Every other day of the week, I could leave my house in Overijse, about 12 km away, after the rush hour at about 8:55 and arrive at the office well before 9:30, but on Monday mornings I needed to leave at 8:30.
Many of my colleagues at that time went on to greater things. Several went on to be ambassadors, including (Sir) Roderick Braithwaite (Moscow) and (Sir) Christopher Meyer (Washington). (Sir) John Coles went to London as Margaret Thatcher’s Foreign Policy Adviser. He was succeeded in UKREP and later in Margaret Thatcher’s office by Charles Powell later to become Lord Powell. John Mogg was a fellow First Secretary for most of the time I was there. He went on to be a Director-General in the European Commission and later, as Lord Mogg, Chairman of OFGEM (The UK electricity and gas market regulator) and then of the EU Energy Regulators. Some years later, in the mid-80s, there was a major Cabinet row involving Michael Heseltine and Leon Brittan – the ‘Westland Affair’. The civil servants involved included John Mogg and Bernard Ingham, whom I had known when he was Press Officer in the Department of Employment and who was the Prime Minister’s Press Officer at the time of the Westland Affair. Bernard Ingham, too, had an interesting career: Barbara Castle brought him into the Department of Employment and Productivity in 1968 and he ended up as the very influential Spokesman for Mrs Thatcher.
In those days before faxes, emails and mobile phones, communication with London was by telegram and Diplomatic Bag, though we were connected to the internal Whitehall phone network. It was an office rule that a telegram was sent to London, reporting on all Council meetings, including the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER) and Working Groups, on the same day as the meeting. This meant that, in my case, most Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and some Thursdays, I worked until 8:00 pm. As none of us could type, secretaries stayed behind as well to take dictation or copy typing.
The principal function of the office was to represent the United Kingdom at meetings within the framework of the Council of Ministers. In my case this was the Social Questions Working Group. This group met most Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm, with a strict two hour break for lunch. In my innocence, I had expected the Commission representative to be in the chair and the proceedings to be conducted in French.
Gerry Wilson took me to the first meeting and introduced me to the Danish Chairman, Morten Fenger. As it happened he did speak French – his wife was French. Interpretation was available in all the languages of the nine Member States –Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and Italian – though there was a shortage of Danish interpreters. The Council Secretariat team was led by Enzo Chioccioli, an Italian with a very quick and inventive intellect, for whom I developed a strong admiration and later a personal friendship. He and most of his team spoke French at the meetings.
The other countries were represented as follows. Jean Gillet was the Belgian. Otto Dibelius was the German. His grandfather, also called Otto Dibelius, was a senior Lutheran bishop, who had had a delicate and difficult relationship with Hitler during the war. Otto’s father had had a good war: he was sent to Norway at the beginning and stayed there until the end. Otto’s assistant was Dieter Kaschke, with whom I became good friends outside the office, along with his wife Birgit. They came back to Brussels in the nineties and we are still in contact with them. Birgit is an interesting character: she speaks English and French very quickly and with considerable fluency, but tends to forget which language she is supposed to be speaking. So, she would ring us up and speak to me in French and then ask to speak to Jennifer and rattle on in German to her, even though she knew Jennifer didn’t speak German.
The French representative was Maurice Ramond. Though a product of a Grande Ecole, Maurice was not a typical smooth French diplomat, which is probably why I liked him. He had strong Gaullist convictions, which he summarised for me as being a sense of order and tradition with a strong social conscience. In meetings, we were often arguing against each other, but outside the meetings we were good colleagues, as indeed were all members of the group. We still exchange letters once a year and we went to see him last time we were in Paris.
Ireland was represented by Pascal Leonard. I had quite a lot of dealings with him, because, with our common history and language, we often faced common challenges in relation to Commission proposals. The Italian team was led by Signor Cristofanelli, a very senior diplomat with an aristocratic pedigree. There were two other members of his team, who came to the group meetings. I can’t now remember the name of the number two at the beginning, but some years later, it was a young diplomat called di Medici – his wife insisted that the emphasis was on the ‘e’. He had previously been Italian Consul in one of the German speaking Swiss cantons. He did not like the Swiss, whom he described as ‘a nation of policemen’. It was only the junior Italian representative Signor di Stefano, who came from the Ministry of Labour. He complained to me during the British Presidency that I didn’t let him speak very much. That was probably true, because he had a tendency to talk for a long time without saying very much.
The Luxembourg representative was Monsieur Schintgen. He was also the senior civil servant in the Luxembourg Ministry of Labour and so he did not attend all the meetings. On one occasion, some years later – probably during the UK Presidency in 1981 – I tried to telephone him in his office. The telephone operator said that M. Schintgen was out and that he, the telephone operator, was the only person in the office. I reflected at that time how much easier Schintgen’s job was than mine. Typically in the UK we had to consult three or four Ministries and two or three Branches of the Department of Employment before establishing our negotiating position. M. Schintgen, on the other hand, only had to consult his Minister, Jacques Santer, who was also Minister of Finance, and possibly the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I met Jacques Santer in London in 1981. He was a very nice man, who later became President of the European Commission.
The Dutch representative was Erik van Traa. He was the doyen, the senior member of the group and, because of that and his strong personality, very influential. He was also somewhat eccentric. He always spoke (bad) French in the group meetings. He organised regular lunches for the members of the group – at the Auberge Fleurie, an old-fashioned French-Belgian restaurant about 300 metres from the Council building – and gave a lavish buffet at his apartment once a year in May or June. On at least two occasions it was very hot, with the thermometer on a nearby building registering 34 degrees at 8:00 pm. I kept in touch with Erik and went to see him in 2005 in Athens, to where he had retired, but received a message the following year to say that he had died.
The function of the Social Questions Working Group was to prepare legislation and other documents for the Labour and Social Affairs Council of Ministers, on which the UK was represented by a Minister from the Department of Employment. As the Labour Government in those days did not attach much importance to European matters, the UK was usually represented by John Grant, who was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (PUSS) in the Department of Employment under Michael Foot and later Albert Booth.
The procedure was that the Commission made a proposal for legislation, typically for a Council Directive, which, when adopted by the Council of Ministers, was legally binding in all Member States. This proposal was sent at the same time to the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and a body called the Economic and Social Committee, consisting of representatives of employers and workers. The latter two bodies were asked for their Opinions, but, in those days, it was the Council of Ministers alone who took the final decision, generally only paying lip service to the Opinions of the other two bodies. So, the Social Questions Working Group was a very powerful body. We debated the Commission’s proposals line by line and word by word. The unstated aim was to reach agreement on the main body of the text, leaving half a dozen items for agreement at a higher level.
Normally, the Labour and Social Affairs Council met towards the end of each six-month Presidency[3]. (In those days, each Member State held the Presidency of the Council of Ministers for six months in strict alphabetical order of the name of the country in its own language. Representatives of that country chaired all the meetings within the framework of the Council of Ministers.) So, around the middle of May and November, the Social Questions Working Group sent a report to the COREPER. There were in fact two COREPERs. The first was attended by Ambassadors, in our case by Sir Donald Maitland, and dealt with Foreign Affairs, External Trade and all matters concerned with relations with countries who were not members of the European Economic Community (EEC). The second COREPER dealt with matters relating to the internal market and was attended by the Deputy Permanent Representatives, in our case by Bill Nicholl. Each format of COREPER usually met for a whole day every week, the Ambassadors on a Wednesday and the Deputies on a Thursday. Both these meetings always had long agendas and often went on late into the evening. In my case the item was called “Preparation for the Labour and Social Affairs Council”. When our item was due to be debated, Gerry Wilson and I were summoned by Bill Nicholl’s assistant, Nicole Mingins, to go over to the Council building to sit alongside Bill and advise him during the discussion – having previously given him a written and oral briefing. COREPER would typically reach agreement on two or three points on each item under discussion, leaving the most difficult points for discussion by the ministers. Sometimes either the Working Group or COREPER would reach complete agreement on an item, in which case it would go to the Council of Ministers as an ‘A’ point, that is an item which would be formally adopted without further discussion. As, in accordance with the Treaties, all meetings of the Council of Ministers had equal status, these ‘A’ points did not necessarily have to wait for the Labour and Social Affairs Council for adoption, though they usually did – the Minister in the Presidency concerned was usually keen to chalk up a ‘success’ and to have his name on the relevant legal instrument.
[3] The title of the meeting had traditionally been the “Social Affairs” Council. John Grant boasted that, before my time, he had got the title changed to “Labour and Social Affairs”. Under pressure from the Conservatives, the title was changed later to “Employment and Social Affairs”.
For three months of the year, including June, all meetings of the Council of Ministers were held in Luxembourg. So, in June 1978 I went to Luxembourg for my first meeting of the Council of Labour and Social Affairs. I don’t remember much about that particular meeting, but the set-up was the same for all these meetings. Each Member State was allowed to have nine representatives for each item. Typically, these would be the Minister, Bill Nicholl, a Deputy Secretary from the Department of Employment (DE), the Assistant Secretary from DE responsible for EEC Coordination, Gerry Wilson, me, and the relevant experts from the Ministry. The Minister’s Private Secretary usually tried to come, but we tried to discourage them, as it was ‘our job’ to look after the Ministers when they were in Brussels or Luxembourg.
Looking after Ministers, Parliamentarians and other senior officials was an important part of the job. The Foreign Office ‘charged’ the Department of Employment when they provided a car and driver for one of their Ministers. This was said to be quite expensive, when they were to be picked up at the airport late at night. I was therefore ‘encouraged’ to meet them myself. Accordingly, early in my stay, I went to the airport late one evening to meet the Chairman of the Manpower Services Commission at Brussels airport at Zaventem. He expressed his gratitude to me for turning out and I duly drove him to his hotel without incident.
A week or two later the PUSS, John Grant, arrived on the same plane. He was miffed that a proper driver hadn’t been sent to meet him and was even more upset, when I took a wrong turning off the ring road and took a road that I did not know (the N2) into Brussels. A year or so before, John Rimington had upset John Grant, by insisting on driving him to Luxembourg for a Council Meeting. I don’t recall what went wrong, but something did. Years later in the nineties, when he was no longer a Minister, John Grant came over for a meeting with the Labour and Social Affairs Commissioner, Henk Vredeling. John Morley had organised the meeting, but couldn’t take Mr Grant back to the airport. He asked me to do so. I accepted with some trepidation, but, on this occasion, John Grant was very grateful. He nevertheless told me about the time John Rimington had taken him to Luxembourg. I was pleased to note that he did not talk about the time I had met him at the airport.
The last Minister that I drove anywhere was Lynda Chalker, who, at that time was PUSS in the Department of Health and Social Security. She, incidentally, was the most pleasant Minister that I ever had to deal with. She had come over for a meeting of the Council of Ministers and was staying overnight at Bill Nicholl’s house. He asked me if I would pick her up on my way to the office, which I duly did. We were driving on the three lane one-way road round the Cinquantenaire, when a car cut in from the right and I had to swerve to avoid it, which I did.[4] Mrs Chalker congratulated me on my driving and no harm was done. I, however, reflected on what might have happened, if a Government Minister had been hurt, or worse, when I had been driving. I determined there and then never to drive a Minister again.
[4] The Cinqantenaire is a 30 hectare park to the east of the European quarter in Brussels. It was created in 1880 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Belgian independence.
In the summer or early autumn of 1978, a House of Commons Committee decided to visit Brussels on a “fact-finding” mission. There were about ten of them, led by Renée Short. The leading Conservative was Nicholas Winterton. They were expecting a General Election to be called shortly and were all hyper-excited.[5] They were very rude in their dealings with Commission officials. Bill Nicholl invited the group to dinner one evening. He had a “robust debate” with Nicholas Winterton, who was one of the best debaters in the House of Commons. (Many years later, in the early nineties, Nicholas Winterton led a delegation from the House of Commons Committee on health. They were concerned about the Working Time Directive, which the Conservative Government did not like at all. They were expected to be hostile. My boss in the Commission, Hermann van Zonneveld, and I met them. On this occasion, they were very polite and, in any case, Hermann was very good at dealing with hostile questioning.)
[5] Labour was expected to win that election, but, in the end, James Callaghan decided to wait until the following year. Early 1979 saw “the winter of discontent” and was followed by the election of the first Thatcher Government.
When I arrived in Brussels there was a Commission proposal on the table for a Directive providing for the progressive implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security. Although the proposal for a Directive did not apply to the fixing of the pension age, it posed considerable practical difficulties for the British and Irish Governments. In the Working Group and COREPER, we had stuck out for a seven-year implementation period, instead of the normal two years. About every other day before the Council meeting in December 1978, Otto Dibelius, who was then the Chairman of the Working Group, telephoned me to ask me if we had changed our position.
On the evening before the Council meeting, I arranged a meeting in the bar of the Charlemagne Hotel in Brussels between Stan Orme and Charles Haughey. Stan Orme was the Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Security and a former Northern Ireland Minister. Charles Haughey was the Irish Minister for Social Security, an ardent Republican and a future Taoiseach. They knew each other and had previously been on opposite sides of the negotiating table. However, they had a brief, but amicable discussion and swore to stick out together for a seven-year transitional period. At the Council meeting the next day, the German Minister, Herr Ehrenberg, opened the discussion by saying that the main issue was the implementation period. In his view, a two-year was reasonable. What did other Ministers think? Mr Haughey? “That sounds reasonable to me!” he replied. Mr Orme? “That sounds reasonable to me!” was the same reply. As Gerry Wilson was fond of saying: “Collapse of stout party!”[6][7]
[6] That story is true, but I have checked the wording of the Directive (79/7/EEC) and find that the implementation period was six years. I can only assume that Bill Nicoll worked his magic in COREPER and got the period changed to six years.
[7] This was one of Gerry Wilson’s favourite expressions. It referred to the situation where one party took up a strong (and often unrealistic) negotiating position. Instead of trying to negotiate a compromise, the negotiators stuck to their position, but ended up accepting the other party’s proposition.
The following year, shortly before the General Election in May, the Secretary of State for Employment, Albert Booth, came to Brussels for a meeting. I asked him impertinently whether he expected to be Secretary of State after the election. He replied that it depended on three things: first he had to retain his marginal seat of Barrow-in-Furness; second, Labour had to win the election; and thirdly, Jim Callaghan had to reappoint him as Secretary of State. In the event, only the first of those three conditions was satisfied.
After the election, Jim Prior was appointed as Secretary of State for Employment. He came to the Council meeting in Luxembourg in June, accompanied by Lynda Chalker. Unusually, my wife, Jennifer, went to Luxembourg with me on this occasion. On the evening before the meeting, we all went for a meal in a pleasant village on the banks of the Moselle. Jennifer was rewarded for her presence by being chatted up by Jim Prior.
This was the first time I had met Lynda Chalker. She was there because the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) had taken an initiative to extend the Regulation dealing with, inter alia, reciprocal arrangements for health care – the E111 and later European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) – first to self-employed people and then to non-employed people. Lynda Chalker was quickly converted to the cause and became a strong and persistent advocate. This idea had been accepted by the Commission who had made a proposal. While many Member States were amenable to the idea, the proposal broke new ground in that, traditionally, Community labour law applied only to employees. I invited Maurice Ramond and Les Reffell from DHSS to our house in Overijse to discuss this and I think we persuaded Maurice of the logic of our arguments. We had the most difficulty with the Danes, who were obstinate in their opposition. Finally, they confided to me that they were not opposed to the health care arrangements – they said that similar bilateral arrangements were already in place – but they were worried that adoption of this Regulation would imply that the principle of free movement would be extended to everyone, whereas, at that time, it applied only to workers and their dependents. This, in turn, they feared, could give rise to large numbers of Germans settling in Denmark. In the end, a compromise was agreed, but I don’t remember the precise wording.
Another aspect of my job was to cultivate a good relationship with officials in the European Commission, in my case mainly in Directorate-General V (DGV) – the Employment and Social Affairs Directorate-General. This, in itself, had two separate aspects. One was to get to know the people responsible for the work that directly affected the UK, in particular legislative proposals and matters relating to the European Social Fund, which was one of the few areas, where the UK was a net beneficiary from EEC funds. The second was to get to know the British officials, with the narrow objective that they might be helpful to us, and the wider objective of trying to assert a “British” dimension, into what was at that time a French dominated institution.
These issues were to some extent inter-related. Soon after the UK joined the EEC, a British national, Michael Shanks, had been appointed Director-General of DGV. A couple of years later, he was ousted from that post and replaced by Jean Degimbe, a Belgian, who had been chef de cabinet (head of the private office) of an influential French Commissioner. I never got to the bottom of that affair, in which UKREP was also alleged to be implicated. Suffice it to say, that some of the British nationals in the Commission had strong feelings on both sides of the argument. Many of the British officials wanted to have as little as possible to do with UKREP for a variety of reasons. Some felt let down by UKREP in the Shanks affair referred to above. Others felt that they had been let down by UKREP, when they had sought support in their bids for promotion. Others, particularly those who had come from the academic field had no affinity with UK national objectives, while yet others thought it prudent to distance themselves from the UK Government (Labour at that time) which was unenthusiastic about the European project. Two exceptions were John Morley, with whom I had worked in the Department of Employment, along with his colleague, David White, and Dr Bill Hunter, who worked in the Health and Safety Directorate in Luxembourg. I hasten to add that neither of them did anything improper, but we had a good working relationship.
Many Member States, including the UK, had “national experts” seconded to the Commission for a period of up to three years. One such expert, whose name I can’t remember, came from the Northern Ireland Office to work in the European Social Fund. I had lunch with him just before he left and he boasted that he had made £100,000 for the UK during his time in Brussels. He had done this, legitimately, by ensuring that in internal discussions and rules, situations favourable to the UK were given due weight. It had not been the British Government’s intention to replace him, but I argued that it would be foolish not to do so. While I was there, two young men were sent out from the Department of Employment as national experts, one after the other. It so happened that, first minor and then major reforms were carried out during these two periods. On my estimation, the first of these experts was able to increase, legitimately, the UK receipts by millions of pounds, while in the second case it was probably in the tens of million.
We were in Brussels at the height of the cold war. The IRA were also very active. The Foreign Office was very keen on security, not to say paranoid. The Representation occupied the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of an ordinary office block. The lift had been built to serve all floors, but the exits from the eighth and ninth floors had been blocked, so that everyone coming into the office had to report to the security desk on the seventh floor. One lunch time an “elderly” secretary came back from lunch and somehow managed to get stuck in the lift on the ninth floor. It was some time before someone on the ninth floor heard her frantic screams and arranged for someone to investigate.
I have already mentioned the assassination of the British Ambassador in The Hague. At about the same time a Belgian businessman was murdered near his home in Brussels. He lived in the same street as Christopher Tugendhat, one of the British EEC Commissioners. It was believed that Mr Tugendhat had been the intended target. After that an armed police guard was put outside the main door of the office block. One lunchtime, the policeman on duty undid the safety catch on his gun and sprayed gunshot round the square. Fortunately no-one was hurt, but the windows of the Queen Victoria pub were shattered.
All the First Secretaries had to do a turn as Duty Officer for a week. This involved going round the office late one evening and once at the weekend to make sure that all the safes were locked and no confidential papers were lying around. It was unusual to find anything, because everyone was conscious that security breaches were not looked on kindly. I went in one weekend, however, when a team of inspectors were over from London. They had been taken over a meeting room, used among other things for briefing journalists, as their office. I went in there and the table was littered with files marked “Confidential”. I didn’t say anything in my report, but went to speak to the Head of Chancery on the Monday morning.
The Duty Officer was also required to be available on call all the time to take emergency calls from London, or elsewhere. One Saturday evening, when I was on duty, we had been invited to a party given by one of the Security Officers. I was given a very frosty reception: Where have you been all day? Security have been ringing you and you didn’t answer your phone. I replied that I had been at home all day. On the Monday morning I was summoned to appear before the Head of Chancery to account for my misdemeanours. Eventually, it transpired that my phone number had been copied wrongly on to the list at the security desk.
Quite often the phone would ring at home, but there was no-one on the line when you answered it. (Sounds familiar these days, but uncommon then!) On at least one occasion our son, Jon, who would have been eight or nine at the time, picked up the phone and shouted: Bog off, you Russians!
The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall
In the summer of 1980, we went as a family on holiday to Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We took the ferry back to Travemünde, in West Germany, which was right on the border with East Germany. We stopped to watch the Trabants driving out of East Germany. (Presumably these belonged to well-connected East Germans who could be “trusted” by the regime to go back after being tainted by western decadence.) I then decided to take a little side road and drive up to the iron curtain. It was real. A normal country road just came to a dead end, or, rather, petered out into dilapidation, before disappearing completely. On the right-hand side of the road was a farmhouse, a few metres from the massive barbed-wire fence which marked the border: it seemed likely that the iron curtain had cut through the farmer’s land. At the side of the dilapidated road, a few metres short of the iron curtain was a big notice which said that this was the Demokratische Deutsche Republik (DDR), with words to the effect that anyone going beyond this point was liable to be shot. Beyond the iron curtain was a two-kilometre wide stretch of cleared barren land. In the middle of this stood a watch-tower, presumably situated there to shoot any East Germans who might try to escape.
During the Dutch Presidency in May or June of 1981, Erik van Traa, the Dutch Counsellor for Social Affairs and doyen of the Social Questions Group, organised a visit of members of the group to Berlin, ostensibly to visit the European Centre for Vocational Education and Training, which was situated there. I don’t remember anything about the training centre, but it was a memorable trip. At that time West Berlin was an enclave in East Germany – the DDR. Before we left I was advised that, if I wanted to visit East Berlin I would need to get permission from the British Governor’s office in Berlin. I telephoned the office and asked if there was any reason why I shouldn’t go to East Berlin. I can still hear the very snooty lady to whom I spoke replying: “There is every reason why you shouldn’t go that weekend, as we are expecting a visit from Mr Brezhnev!”
We flew into West Berlin and my hotel was on the Kurfürstendamm, one of the liveliest streets in what was a very lively city. The hotel was not far from the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, a ruined church that had been left as a reminder of the war. While we were there, we visited all the tourist sites in West Berlin and I was very impressed by the greenness of the city. The Brandenburg Gate and the old Reichstag, which stood on the borders of East and West Berlin were sorry sights. We also went to a Wagner opera, which I didn’t enjoy very much.
As a holder of a British Diplomatic passport, I was expressly forbidden from going across the checkpoint into East Berlin. This was because the United Kingdom Government did not recognise the legitimacy of the incorporation of the Russian sector into the DDR. However, during the course of my stay, I flew in over East Germany. I stood on a hillock and looked over the Berlin Wall into East Berlin. The routes of the West Berlin U-Bahn (Underground railway system) had not been altered since the war; this meant that when I took the train from one part of West Berlin to another, I travelled under part of East Berlin; the train stopped eerily at two or three ghost stations in East Berlin; the doors didn’t open and no-one got in or out. Finally, I went to Checkpoint Charlie and looked through the border into East Berlin.
Some ten or eleven years later, when I was working for the European Commission, I went on a German language course, organised by the Goethe Institute. The enterprising young tutor arranged for a number of us to go to Berlin for a few days – a private trip at our own expense. We travelled by train overnight, changing at Cologne. The journey from Cologne through what was by then the ex-DDR seemed endless. (Curiously, I don’t remember anything about the return journey.) Many changes had occurred in the years between my two visits, though much remained the same.
On the first day we had a meeting with a civic official. He predicted that it would take 25 years to unify the city. At the time, it seemed an awfully long time, but now, over 25 years later, from what I understand, it was probably about right. We visited the sights that I had visited before. But we also went to new ones. I don’t normally rave over museums, but the Pergamon Museum in what had until recently been East Berlin was overwhelming. [8] We also went to Potsdam to the Sanssouci Palace.[9] This was very beautiful. I went back to Checkpoint Charlie and visited a museum there. It was only then that I realised that over 20 million citizens of the USSR had been killed in the Second World War. I also went on a ride in a canal boat around the old Berlin Wall, parts of which were still standing at that time.
[8] The Pergamon Museum was constructed over a period of twenty years, from 1910 to 1930. It houses monumental buildings such as the Pergamon Altar, the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Market Gate of Miletus reconstructed from the ruins found in the Middle East, as well as the Mshatta Facade.
[9] Sanssouci is the summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, in Potsdam, near Berlin. It was built between 1745 and 1747.
King of the Castle: July to December 1981
On 1st July 1981, it was the UK’s turn to have the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. This meant that British ministers and officials chaired all the meetings of the Council, COREPER and Council working groups. In my case this meant that I was to chair the Social Questions Working Group for the next six months. This was a great privilege, but also a daunting prospect. However, since I had passed the Administrative Class competition in 1971, I thought I was good at chairing meetings. At least I could provide a contrast in style to my predecessor, Erik van Traa, who was shrewd and had a strong personality, but was rather lazy. I believed that the secret of chairmanship lay in good preparation and a clear understanding of what was achievable. Accordingly, before each meeting of the Working Group, usually on the Monday, I called a meeting with Enzo Chioccioli and his subordinate responsible for the dossiers under discussion and the responsible Commission officials. We went through the report of the previous meeting and examined the positions of those delegations who had reservations on the various points that we wanted to discuss. We then discussed what possible modifications could be made to the text to accommodate their concerns, without losing the support of those who took a different position.
A new Commission had taken office in January 1981. Gaston Thorn had replaced Roy Jenkins as President. Ivor Richard, QC, a Welsh barrister and Labour party nominee, had replaced Henk Vredeling as Commissioner for Employment and Social Affairs. Mr Vredeling had been Commissioner for many years and so most of the proposals for legislation he had put forward had been either adopted or put on the backburner. By July, Ivor Richard had not had time to put forward any proposals of his own. Consequently, the menu that was at my disposal consisted of a complicated amendment to the Regulation (1408/71) dealing with social security coordination; a Directive on the protection of workers against exposure to lead at work; and a similar Directive about exposure to asbestos. Erik van Traa had not managed to get agreement on the social security amendment and, as far as I can remember, neither did I.
The asbestos proposal had not been discussed in the Working Group before. I arranged a number of meetings on it and reasonable progress was made. But it was unlikely that there would be time to reach agreement during the British Presidency. This may appear dilatory, but the timing was as follows. Although, it was a six-month Presidency, in reality, less than four months were available for discussion in the Working Group. Everything closed down for four weeks in August (I was heavily criticised by van Traa and others for arranging a meeting early in September!) and the Council meeting was held in early December, with COREPER before that. It was the practice to allow at least three weeks between each meeting on the same dossier: this just about gave enough time for the Council Secretariat to prepare their report, have it translated into the other five languages and circulate it to the capitals, where officials could consider the report, react to any compromises that had been proposed and decide whether they wished to change their negotiating positions.
So, the main item on my agenda was the lead directive. The debate centred on the amount of lead that workers could have in their blood and still be safe. The figures discussed ranged from 45 micrograms to 60. (I don’t remember now what the other factor was.) The Italians, who were led by a very nice man from a research institute, wanted the figure to be set at 45, in order to put pressure on the Italian Government. At the other end of the scale, not for the first time, were the Brits. Their situation was complicated because they had just produced domestic legislation, which had been agreed after a long period of domestic consultation and negotiation.
As was usually the case, I managed to reduce the areas of disagreement to half a dozen key points. I produced a draft compromise, which I managed to “sell” to Gerry Wilson and Enzo Chioccioli. The timing was crucial: if it was made available too soon, the delegations would have time to unpick it; if it was too late, they would simply say that they needed time to study it. In the event, I think we probably got the timing about right and the proposal was on the agenda of the Council of Ministers, chaired by Norman Tebbit. The plan was that there would be a brief Council meeting and then I would be sent off to chair an extraordinary meeting of the Working Group. At that meeting, after a long unproductive discussion, I came up with a new compromise – an adrenalin rush. This new compromise was agreed by all members of the Working Group and we broke for lunch thinking we had agreement.
During the lunch break, however, the Germans let it be known that they could not agree. When the Council Meeting resumed, I was again sent off to chair another meeting of the Working Group. This meeting had not been planned and we spent some time finding an available room and then interpreters. We eventually had some desultory discussions, before we heard that it was snowing in London; Mr Tebbit needed to get back and the Council meeting had already finished. Before that, Mr Tebbit had worked hard to get agreement, but the Germans were adamant and it would not have made any difference if we had stayed all night.
At COREPER the following week, we put forward a further compromise, but no agreement was reached. However, the wording of the Directive (82/605/EEC) adopted the following year under the Belgian Presidency was almost identical to that we had proposed in COREPER.
Towards the end of November, I had got very frustrated by the lack of result for my hard work. I decided to take up painting. Jennifer bought me some painting material for Christmas and I painted my first picture, with some help from my mother, in Skegness shortly afterwards. (My son, Jon, still has this picture, which is one of the best I ever did!)
I did have some small successes during my period as Chairman of the Working Group. I was very pleased to get adopted a Regulation implementing the extension of social security arrangements to self-employed workers. This was a very long and complicated Regulation, which was necessary to apply the agreement some years earlier. It had been drawn up following lengthy discussions in a Commission Working Group (called the Administrative Commission). Only about three people in the world understood it and I was not one of them. It was very important for the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS). With some pressure from me and more from DHSS, the Commission made a proposal in November. I called a meeting of the Working Group immediately and it was agreed within twenty minutes – about 5 pages a minute! It went to Council as an ‘A’ point.
I also arranged with Hywel Jones, who at that time was a Director in the Training Division of DGV, for a draft resolution on the employment of disabled people to be drawn up. This was adopted at the Council meeting in December.
Norman Tebbit stories
The original inspiration for this book was to collect together a number of stories involving Norman Tebbit. I had first met Mr Tebbit, when I went to be interviewed for the job as Private Secretary to Robin Chichester-Clark in 1972. At that time the young Mr Tebbit was Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Mr Chichester-Clark. A PPS is an unpaid position, which is the first rung on the ladder towards becoming a Government minister. I did not get that job.
The next time I saw him was in September 1981. He had just been appointed as Secretary of State for Employment in succession to James Prior. Every six months, there was a meeting in Brussels of a body called the Standing Committee on Employment (SEC). This was chaired by the President of the Council of Ministers (in this case Norman Tebbit). Ministers from all Member States, the Commissioner and representatives of employers’ and trades union organisations were present. Its basic political purpose was to give the trades union an opportunity to air their grievances in front of the Commission and ministers.
Traditionally, the President read out his “Conclusions” from the meeting at the end. I was invited to a meeting in Caxton House, the new Headquarters of the Department of Employment, to prepare the Secretary of State for the meeting. The full panoply of DE officials were there from Donald Derx (Deputy Secretary) downwards. They were reassuring Mr Tebbit that it was a routine meeting, which would not raise any problems. I felt it incumbent on me to say that I did not see it that way: many of the trade union representatives were from French-speaking unions, who, unlike the TUC at that time, were pro-European and would be seeking to exert pressure for more European Community action on workers’ rights. Mr Tebbit replied: “I shall just remind them, who won the battle of Waterloo!”
It was customary for the President’s Conclusions to be negotiated during a break before the end of the meeting. On this occasion the main participants were Enzo Chioccioli, John Morley from the Commission, Bill Callaghan from the TUC and myself. I do not recall the contents, but, if John Morley was involved, I am sure they were sensible.[10] There was an almighty row! The trades union representatives complained bitterly and the meeting ended in uproar. At least I had the satisfaction of warning Mr Tebbit that it wouldn’t be a stroll in the park. It transpired afterwards that the real reason why some of the trade union representatives were upset was that the Conclusions had been drafted in English and they could not understand them!
[10] Sir William Callaghan received a knighthood in 2007 for distinguished service to health and safety.
After the UK Presidency, Mr Tebbit was a regular attender at meetings of the Council of Ministers. He was a trained pilot and wanted to fly himself to one or more of the meetings, much to the chagrin of Donald Derx. I remember him coming by private plane on at least one occasion, but I don’t think he actually piloted it himself.
On one occasion, he was staying with Bill Nicholl. We were invited to a dinner at Bill and Helen’s house. There was a friendly, half-joking debate between Mr Tebbit and Bill about the role of the party in government. Mr Tebbit argued that during their first term in government, the ministers were like the ship’s captain – the guardian of the ship. But, if they were elected for a second term, they became the ship’s masters.
Bill, himself, had a fund of colourful stories. His home Department was the Board of Trade. Some years before, he had been sent to India to work. Bill was a very accomplished linguist and decided he wanted to learn the local language. He found an old man who was willing to give him lessons. As was to be expected, Bill learned very quickly and was not shy at showing off his prowess with the locals. To his chagrin, every time he did so, people started laughing. In the end, he couldn’t contain himself and asked: “Why, when I speak your language, does everyone burst out laughing?” The reply came: “You speak the language very well, you have a good vocabulary and a good knowledge of grammar, but you sound like an old man with no teeth!”
In late 1981 or early 1982, the Commission, at the behest of Ivor Richard, produced a proposal for a Directive on part time work and another on temporary work. These came up for an orientation debate in the Council of Ministers. Norman Tebbit had read the Explanatory Memorandum of the temporary work proposal and noted that it included a statement that temporary workers should enjoy the same benefits in kind as permanent workers. It gave the right to equal access to a company swimming pool as an example. Mr Tebbit ridiculed this. Ivor Richard, who was a big man, replied that if he had a swimming pool, he would willingly invite the Secretary of State to join him in it. To which Mr Tebbit retorted: “If you were in it, there wouldn’t be room for anyone else!” All this greatly amused and puzzled the representatives of the other Member States: Council meetings were supposed to be serious and polite, i.e. dull and boring!
There was a tradition that each Presidency invited Ministers of Labour from all the other Member States to an informal meeting in their country. Attendance was restricted to one Minister and two officials per Member State. In the case of the UK, Donald Derx used to go from London and Gerry Wilson from UKREP. This was about the only occasion when Gerry Wilson “pulled rank”. When it came to the UK Presidency, we had a much bigger delegation. So the first informal meeting I went to was held in the Intercontinental Hotel in London in 1981. I do not remember much about the meeting itself, but I do remember a splendid meal – with English wine – in the magnificent setting of Lancaster House. I did not go to the Belgian informal meeting, but the Danish Social Affairs Counsellor, who had replaced Morten Fenger during my Presidency – gave me a personal invitation to the meeting in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1982.
In the spring of 1983, I was again invited to the German informal meeting in Bonn. It was just before the General Election in the UK. Norman Tebbit came to that meeting. He seemed to be enjoying the relief from domestic politics. Alan Hatfull, the British Labour attaché in Bonn, had persuaded Mr Tebbit that he would like to visit a German Vocational Training Centre after the informal meeting had finished. His return plane had been booked to accommodate that. However, the day before, Mr Tebbit decided that he would prefer to work in the hotel room in the afternoon rather than visit the training centre. I was asked to see if that could be arranged, as the room had been booked only until midday. The following morning, there was a discussion about the proposal for a Directive on part-time work, where, not for the first time, the UK was in a minority of one in opposing it. Mr Tebbit was having a difficult time. In the course of the discussion, I received a message from the Germans to say that Mr Tebbit could keep the room. I was sitting next to him. I wrote a message: Secretary of State, you can stay in your room all day, if you want. On reflection, not very elegant. The reply came back very quickly: I shall probably wish that I had!
At the end of the same meeting, the Greek Minister, as was the tradition, in a long speech, thanked the German Minister for his hospitality and invited his fellow ministers to an informal meeting in Greece in the autumn. He noted that the previous evening we had visited a cathedral where the one Christian God was worshipped and it was very splendid, but, he added: In Greece we have many temples and many gods … Mr Tebbit said in an aside to us: Another example of Greek overmanning! Unfortunately, like the rest of us, he was listening to the interpreter through his headset, which meant that his aside could be heard by everyone in the room.
I saw a different side to Mr Tebbit the last time I met him. We went to Luxembourg for the Council of Ministers meeting in June 1983. We were all assembled in the UK’s room in the Council building with HM Ambassador to Luxembourg. Mr Tebbit was late arriving. When he did arrive I came to understand the expression: he had a face like thunder! I don’t know whether he had come on a commercial flight or in a private plane. Either way, he had not had a smooth passage through the Luxembourg border controls and he was very angry.
Life outside the office
We lived in Brussels for five and half years between February 1978 and September 1983. The start was inauspicious, especially for Jennifer.
My predecessor, Tim Biddescombe, had booked us in to the Hotel Derby, where we had dark and dingy back rooms, in which we slept for the first eight nights. We had got the boys, who were 7 and 10, into the British School of Brussels, which was in Tervuren about 15 km from the centre of Brussels. Jennifer’s first experience of driving on the right was to drive from the hotel in an almost new car to the school. The first thing she had to do was to negotiate the complicated Montgomery roundabout, which was a test for any driver – I always avoided it, whenever possible. She did it without mishap!
We had hoped to take over Tim Biddescombe’s house, which was in Woluwe St Pierre within the city boundaries and well situated for shops, the school and the office. However, as in Swaziland, there was a shortage of accommodation and that house was allocated to Charles Drake-Francis, a career diplomat, and his family.
The following Sunday, however, we moved into a very large four bedroomed house in Kasteelstraat, about 14 kilometres from the centre of Brussels, in the parish of Overijse. Brussels is a bilingual, predominantly French, ‘island’ in Flanders, which is Dutch-speaking.[11] There is a strip of land, no more than 20 kilometres wide – and less in parts, to the south and east of Brussels, which is Dutch-speaking. South of that comes Wallonia, which is French speaking.
Kasteelstraat 34 (2021)
[11] Flemish is a dialect of Dutch. After the war, a linguistic Commission was set up, with the consequence that a common Dutch language is taught in Belgian and Dutch schools and used in official documents in both countries.
The town council in Overijse was militant in its defence of the Dutch language. All official documents were in Dutch, including notes from the Post Office. For that reason I decided fairly early on that I ought to try to learn Dutch, because, when the postman put a card in the letterbox, it was difficult to work out whether we had to collect a parcel, or pay a fine or something else.
An extreme example of linguistic intolerance occurred to Wendy Allman. They lived not far from us. Their sons, Steve and Max, were a few years older than our boys and also went to the British School. They were good athletes and were chosen to represent Belgium for their age group at an international athletics meeting in France. They needed a document from the Town Hall in Overijse. Wendy was a French teacher. She spoke very good French and passable German. But she didn’t speak Dutch. She went along to the Town Hall with her request in French, English and German, but the officials pretended not to understand her. The boys didn’t get their documents.
On the other hand, Peter lost his Belgian Identity Card. Possibly with Wendy’s experience in mind, I went to the local Police Station, armed with a well-rehearsed request in Dutch. The policeman was impressed and we went on to have an interesting conversation in French and English – and Peter got a new Identity Card!
Similarly, some ten years later, Dieter Kaschke drove over to Brussels from Bonn. He took us in his car to the Zonienwoud (Forêt de Soignes). We parked the car somewhere near the border of Overijse and Tervuren and went for a walk. When we got back, someone had bashed the car and Dieter wanted to report it to the police. We went to the police station in Overijse and again I had prepared something in my head to say in Dutch. Again the policeman was most helpful and produced relevant documentation for Dieter to sign in any of four languages. That would not have happened if I had gone in speaking French.
Generally speaking at that time most Flemish people were good linguists. As a diplomat, I was entitled to duty-free petrol (but only from Shell garages). There was a convenient Shell garage not far from our house on the Steenweg op Brussel. One evening, on my way home from work, I called in at the Shell garage to fill up with petrol. There was an old lady at the cash desk. She was speaking German to the customer in front of me. She saw my petrol vouchers and spoke to me in English. She was a native Dutch speaker and almost certainly spoke French.
On the other hand, native French speakers sometimes had problems. Our neighbours in Kasteelstraat were French speaking, though José was bilingual. Their son, Jerry, who was a teenager, when we arrived, spoke French and had a big problem learning Dutch. The consequence was that he had great difficulty in getting a job, because nearly all jobs in the area required employees to be bilingual. He is a brilliant artist and now owns an art gallery in Ixelles.
Kasteelstraat was part of a large post-war development two kilometres from the centre of Overijse, which is a picturesque old Flemish town. The area is famous for growing large (and expensive) dessert grapes. A few hundred metres from our house was a small shopping centre with a very large Delhaize supermarket. In the vicinity there were several other shops, including a newsagent, a fine delicatessen, a pharmacy, a shop selling mainly sports clothing and a cycle shop. The newsagent sold English newspapers. When I came back to Skegness to see my parents, my father used to have to order a copy of the Observer if I wanted one. At the shop in Belgium there was a pile of Observers a metre high from about 11:00 am on Sundays and a similar pile of Sunday Times.
In order to go from our house into Brussels (or anywhere else apart from to the south) one had to cross the Forêt de Soignes. This is a vast (4421 hectare) forest at the south-eastern edge of Brussels, consisting of mainly beech and oak trees. It is criss-crossed with main roads, minor roads, cycle paths, footpaths and other tracks. It is a wonderful place to go to fill one’s lungs with fresh air.
Brussels, itself, is a marvellous place to live in or near. Bill Bryson, in his book Neither here nor there: Travels in Europe, wrote that he came to Brussels, saw the Grand’Place, decided there was nothing else to see and caught the next train to Luxembourg. I can understand that to a certain extent. The Grand’Place is exceptional. I went there hundreds of times, but never failed to marvel at its majestic splendour. But away from the Grand’Place, the many other jewels are often hidden away from the casual visitor. For much of Brussels was destroyed, not by the bombs, but by the bulldozers that transformed the city in the nineteen fifties and sixties. But the jewels are there to be found: the churches, palaces, squares, parks museums and small houses, such as those belonging to Erasmus or Victor Horta.
From where we lived, we needed a car to go anywhere beyond walking distance. (There was a bus service into Brussels which went along the Steenweg op Brussel, but we never learned how to use it.) We could drive into the centre of Brussels, but normally we drove to a large shopping centre at Demey and took the metro from there. Within forty minutes of leaving home, we could be in the centre of a capital city with all its shops, restaurants, cinemas and other attractions. There were about a dozen cinemas in the centre of Brussels. There was also a cinema complex at the end of the metro line at Heysel, with over twenty screens and a number of restaurants and boutiques. At any one time there would be a dozen or so films that could be watched in the original English language.
Continued in Back To The Smoke#2