• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2639 0

My interventions appeared to be well received — not least by the Germans, as Count Lambsdorff subsequently told us. It was perhaps the nearest we ever came to an Anglo-German entente. I noted that many of our present difficulties stemmed from the pursuit of Keynesian policies with their emphasis on the deficit financing of public expenditure and I stressed the need to control the money supply in order to defeat inflation. There followed, after Mr Ohira and Chancellor Schmidt had taken a similar line, an extraordinary intervention by President Giscard in which he mounted a spirited defence of Lord Keynes and clearly rejected the basic free market approach as unnecessarily deflationary. Sig. Andreotti — Italy’s Prime Minister then and again in my last days as Prime Minister — endorsed the French view. It was a revealing expression of the fundamental philosophical differences which divide the Community.

It was also revealing about the personalities of President Giscard and Prime Minister Andreotti. President Giscard d’Estaing was never someone to whom I warmed. I had the strong impression that the feeling was mutual. This was more surprising than it seems, for I have a soft spot for French charm and, after all, President Giscard was seen as a man of the Right. But he was a difficult interlocutor, speaking in paragraphs of perfectly crafted prose which seemed to brook no interruption. Moreover, his politics were very different from mine: though he had the manners of an aristocrat, he had the mind-set of a technocrat. He saw politics as an élite sport to be carried on for the benefit of the people but not really with their participation. There might be something to be said for this if technocrats really were cool intellectual guardians above the passions and interests of the rest of us. But President Giscard was as likely as anyone to be swept away by intellectual and political fashion; he simply expressed his passions coldly.

Prime Minister Andreotti was no more on my wavelength than the French President. Even more than the latter, this apparently indispensable participant in Italian governments represented an approach to politics which I could not share. He seemed to have a positive aversion to principle, even a conviction that a man of principle was doomed to be a figure of fun. He saw politics as an eighteenth-century general saw war: a vast and elaborate set of parade ground manoeuvres by armies that would never actually engage in conflict but instead declare victory, surrender or compromise as their apparent strength dictated in order to collaborate on the real business of sharing the spoils. A talent for striking political deals rather than a conviction of political truths might be required by Italy’s system and it was certainly regarded as de rigueur in the Community, but I could not help but find something distasteful about those who practised it.

For all their hospitality, it would be difficult to claim too much for the quality of Japan’s chairmanship of the proceedings. At one stage I intervened to clarify for the sake of the officials — the ‘sherpas’ as they are known — precisely which of the two alternative draft communiqués we were discussing. While we were entertained that evening at a banquet given by the Emperor of Japan, the sherpas began their work. At about two o’clock in the morning, still in my evening dress, I went to see how the communiqué drafters were getting on with their work. I found them refining their earlier draft in the light of our discussions and setting out alternative forms of words where decisions would be required from the summit the following day. I hoped we would be as businesslike as they evidently were.

The following day we met once again at the Akasaka Palace to go through the communiqué, always a tedious and lengthy process. There was some disagreement between the Americans and the Europeans about the base year from which to set our different targets for the reduction of oil imports. But for me perhaps the most revealing discussion concerned the Japanese target. Until almost the