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By Root 3183 0

We wanted an agreement at this meeting but only if it was close enough to our terms. We had our reasons. After France the presidency would go to Ireland which would be no improvement — indeed worse because the French themselves, for the reasons I have outlined, were likely to be more difficult when they were not in the chair. Moreover, we had no agreement on rebates for the current year, nor for the future; and our 1983 refund of 750 million ecus (£400 million) was still being held up. I was prepared to accept, if necessary, a different formula from that which we had advanced, but the money rebated must be enough and the arrangement had to be lasting.

I arrived at lunchtime at the Château of Fontainebleau to be met by President Mitterrand and a full guard of honour. The French know how to do these things properly. Whereas Versailles provided the heads of government with an experience of the splendour of France in the Grand Siècle, Fontainebleau — the creation of Francis I who vied with our own Henry VIII on the famous Field of Cloth of Gold — represents the height of French Renaissance culture. Lunch took place in the Château’s Hall of Columns and then we went through into the Ballroom, which was heavily disguised by interpreters’ booths, for the first session of the Council. Without any warning, President Mitterrand asked me to open the proceedings by summing up the results of the recent economic summit in London. Others then joined in to give their own views and two hours elapsed. I started to fidget. Were these just delaying tactics? At last we got on to the budget. Again I opened, demonstrating what I thought unsatisfactory about the other schemes which had been put forward to provide a solution and argued for our own ideas of a formula. There was further discussion. Then President Mitterrand remitted the matter to the Foreign ministers to discuss later in the evening. Our meeting now returned to generalities, in particular President Mitterrand’s lively account of his recent visit to Moscow.

That evening we drove back along the road through the forest to our hotel at Barbizon. This little village attracts artists and gastronomes. Anyone who has eaten at the local Hôtellerie du Bas-Bréau will know why: the food was simply delicious.* Over dinner I was wondering what the Foreign ministers were going to come up with. As we drank our coffee, we saw that the Foreign ministers were taking theirs outside on to the terrace and naturally concluded that they had done their work. Far from it. It appeared that over dinner the French Foreign minister, M. Cheysson, had been regaling his colleagues with his own recollections of Moscow. President Mitterrand did not conceal his displeasure and the Foreign ministers quickly went inside again to get down to discussing the budget.

For our part, the heads of government spent some time discussing the future of the Community. We got on to the question of the number of commissioners once enlargement to take in Spain and Portugal had occurred. I was alone in being prepared to settle for one commissioner per country so as to reduce the number from sixteen to twelve. I asked M. Thorn (with whom I often saw eye to eye — he did not have the grandiose ambitions and bureaucratic leanings of his successor) whether there was really enough work for seventeen commissioners. He said no. But my colleagues from France, Germany and Italy were not prepared to reduce their representation. So the Commission ended up with the full complement — and the devil makes work for idle hands.

At about 11.30 p.m. M. Cheysson emerged once more to tell us that the Foreign ministers had ‘clarified the points of difference’. In fact, the French had apparently managed to persuade the Foreign ministers to favour a rebate system giving us back a simple percentage of our net contribution. On such a percentage system there would be no link between net contributions and relative prosperity — unlike the ‘threshold’ system we had been arguing for. We had privately envisaged that this is how matters might eventually turn out.