Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [335]
On the basic question of whether I had been right to refuse what was on offer there was little dispute. A letter I received from one parliamentary colleague began:
Glory Glory Halleluia and many congratulations on your courageous and absolutely correct stand at the EEC summit tonight.
Apart from my own summits with the other European heads of government in the run up to important Councils, I always received up-to-the-minute reports from our embassies and officials on what could be deduced of the private intentions of other governments and the state of public and press opinion in their countries. The two crucial players would be France — which still held the presidency — and Germany. Before the European Assembly election campaign got under way I tried to persuade President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl to agree to sort out the budget. In this I was certainly being a ‘better’ European than they were: for public opinion in Britain was all for intransigence. But I suspect that the French President, at least, was not minded to reach a deal until the elections had come and gone. My attempts failed.
As the Council approached it still seemed to us that President Mitterrand had not yet finally decided between two possible courses of action — a solution which would be a diplomatic triumph for France (in the chair) or a failure which would all be down to ‘Perfidious Albion’. Whatever his private political calculations, the French President was also now publicly calling for yet another ‘relaunch’ of the Community, something which was music to Chancellor Kohl’s ears. So when we prepared our own paper on the Community’s future for the forthcoming summit, I accepted that it should be liberally sprinkled with communautaire phrases.
The French President’s intentions continued to be unclear. Whether the French themselves were confused or whether these were tactics designed to confuse us in the best tradition of Gallic gamesmanship we could not yet tell. A number of apparently unco-ordinated French ideas to settle the budget were in circulation; which, if any, had the President’s own support was unknown. Then on the eve of the Council, President Mitterrand departed for Moscow with an air of nonchalance, which may itself have been an aspect of psychological warfare.
What would the German position be? There were some reasons for optimism. It seemed that Chancellor Kohl was now definitely anxious for a successful summit. At Brussels, where he had been blamed for the failure of the budget negotiations, he had learnt the danger of taking ill-thought-out initiatives. We thought that he would support the French presidency and that he would probably be willing to agree to a better deal for Britain than he had proposed at Brussels. The most encouraging consideration was that he needed the Community’s agreement to enable him to provide a politically necessary subsidy for his farmers — and for Chancellor Kohl domestic political considerations always came first. As by far the largest net contributors to the Community, the Germans wanted both to set a limit to their contributions — as we did — and to ensure that they did not finish up paying for the whole of our own rebate. But they were surprisingly vague on how precisely to achieve this.
THE FONTAINEBLEAU EUROPEAN COUNCIL
The European Council was held at Fontainebleau, just outside Paris, on Monday 25 and Tuesday 26 June. On the short flight in the And-over from Northolt to Orly I finalized our tactics. Geoffrey Howe and I shared the same analysis.