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By Root 2829 0

Minister — with the press in hot pursuit, as the story rumbled on. My host, Felipe Gonzalez, was as always the model of courtesy and charm. He prudently, if ambiguously, told me that ‘careful study’ of my Bruges speech ‘could lead to some useful conclusions’. But most of our conversations concentrated on defence and on Gibraltar. Though relations had much improved since the Brussels Agreement of 1984 which reopened the Spanish-Gibraltar border, there was tension over the use of the airport. Spain was, I knew, doing so well out of the Community that I would never get a Socialist Spanish Prime Minister to challenge the arrangements that his country found so lucrative. Equally, I had no doubt that in the long term a proud, ancient nation like Spain would baulk at continued loss of national self-determination in exchange for German-financed subsidies. But that time had not yet arrived.

VISIT TO DEIDESHEIM

The Rhodes European Council in early December of 1988 was something of a non-event in Community terms, though it was enlivened for the press by my forthright recriminations against the Belgians and the Irish for their shabby part in the Ryan affair.* The Community was — unusually — conscious that with the Delors Report on EMU in the making it had enough to be getting along with. Nor was the Greek presidency in a mood to press new initiatives: Mr Papandreou was in fragile health and his Government’s political prospects were highly uncertain as a result of financial scandals which had caught up with it.

Nonetheless something productive did come out of Rhodes. I had one of my bilaterals with Helmut Kohl who was more sensitive than I was to the stories which by now regularly appeared in the press about our bad personal relations. Indeed, he had acquired the habit of beginning our discussions by stressing the importance of giving the public impression of being on good terms. In fact, we did not get on at all badly. The problem was that on certain economic and social questions we thought along different lines. At Rhodes he pressed again the invitation he had first made at Chequers in July for me to meet him at his home near Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland-Palatinate in the spring: I accepted with the greatest pleasure

As always on these occasions, I was accompanied by Charles Powell. Charles was my private secretary on foreign affairs from 1984 until I left office. He worked tirelessly and fast; he was a uniquely gifted draftsman who invariably in his minutes got both flavour and substance precisely right; he managed always to be charming and diplomatic — yet recognized, as I did, that there was more to foreign policy than diplomacy. He was, in all respects, simply outstanding.

So it was that on Sunday 30 April we arrived in the charming village of Deidesheim to be met by a beaming Federal Chancellor on his home soil. In fact, there was not a great deal for him to beam about. He was in domestic political difficulties. West Germany had been rocked by the strange phenomenon of ‘Gorby-mania’ and, under intense pressure from an always instinctively neutralist German public opinion, the staunchly pro-NATO Chancellor Kohl had begun to shift his ground on the subject of short-range nuclear weapons (SNF). I took him to task on this, deploying all the arguments for a credible short-range nuclear deterrent and for sticking by previously agreed NATO decisions.* The discussion on this subject lasted two hours and became quite heated. Chancellor Kohl was, I thought, deeply uncomfortable, as any politician will be whose instincts and principles push him one way while his short-term political interests push him the other. But we both made an effort to live up to what our diplomats rather than the press — out as ever for a story of Anglo-German ‘hand-bagging’ — wanted.

And indeed the atmosphere at Deidesheim was otherwise amicable. It was jolly, quaint, sentimental and slightly overdone — gemütlich is, I think, the German word. Lunch consisted of potato soup, pig’s stomach (which the German Chancellor clearly enjoyed), sausage, liver dumplings