Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [196]
From the Netherlands I flew on to West Germany, where I visited British forces. On Wednesday afternoon (21 September) I arrived in Bonn for talks and dinner with Chancellor Kohl. He and I discussed the approach to the Athens summit. I told him that it would be deplorable if the impetus he had given to reform at Stuttgart were now lost. So I was relieved when Herr Kohl said that sorting out the CAP and the system of financing the Community must take priority over new policies. He also told me that the European Community was ‘politically essential to Germany’ but it was ‘no good having the Community as a roof over Germany if the roof was leaking’ — an interesting metaphor, I thought; and anyone dealing with the European Community should pay careful attention to metaphors. We in Britain were inclined to minimize their significance — whether about ‘roofs’ or ‘trains’ — and to concentrate on the practicalities — mending the leaking roof, in Chancellor Kohl’ phrase. We had to learn the hard way that by agreement to what were apparently empty generalizations or vague aspirations we were later held to have committed ourselves to political structures which were contrary to our interests. But this is to anticipate a little.
However, I was already beginning to feel — I did so increasingly as the years went by — that there was an imbalance in western diplomacy. European Community heads of government and ministers met regularly, drawn together initially by Community problems, but at the same time discussing wider international issues. By contrast, there was not enough contact and understanding between the European countries and our transatlantic allies in NATO — the United States and Canada. I hoped that my visit to Canada and the United States at the end of September would do something to put this right.
The Canadian visit was, in fact, made on their initiative. The sensitive question of the patriation of the Canadian Constitution from the Westminster Parliament was now behind us.* My visit was an opportunity to emphasize the value of trade and investment links and, still more important, to try to persuade Canadians to take a larger and more vigorous part in the western alliance than they had under their present Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau. It was common knowledge that Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal Government — who sometimes seemed more interested in the politics of the Third World than in the great East-West issues — were extremely unpopular. But I would also be meeting the Conservative prime ministers of the provinces of Ontario and Alberta, as well as the new Conservative leader at federal level, Brian Mulroney, who had just been elected to the Canadian Parliament and who was firm favourite to replace Pierre Trudeau as Prime Minister at the next election.
I flew into Ottawa on the evening of Sunday 25 September and had supper at the High Commission, one of the great historic buildings in Ottawa. Two of the paragraphs of the speech I was to deliver the following day to the Canadian House of Commons were in French and a French teacher had been specially laid on when I arrived so that I could get my pronunciation just right and avoid international incidents.
The following morning I had talks with Pierre