European Diary, 1977-1981 Read Online Free Page B

satisfactorily to occupy twelve Commissioners (other than the President). And I did not have anything approaching prime ministerial powers: once appointed, Commissioners had to be lived with as though they were members of a college of cardinals. They certainly could not be sacked by the President. Nor could solutions be imposed upon one without the almost unanimous support of all the others. In practice dispositions had to be negotiated.
    The central difficulty was that I could not put Ortoli into Economic and Monetary Affairs unless I could first get Wilhelm Haferkamp out of this portfolio which he held in the existing Commission. And if I could not put Ortoli there, where could I put him? Nowhere to his pleasure, except perhaps for External Affairs (and I did not think he was the right man or the right nationality forrelations with the Americans), and nowhere at all of any significance except at the price of disrupting one of my other cherished plans: Gundelach for Agriculture, Davignon for Industry and the Internal Market, Cheysson to stay with Development Aid.
    Haferkamp was stubbornly resistant to going to Social Affairs. I did not see how I could possibly impose this upon him as the senior Commissioner of the most important country without at least acceding to the wish of the German Government that his junior, Guido Brunner, should have External Affairs. But I thought (and several of those who had been in the Ortoli Commission agreed with me) that Haferkamp was the bigger man of the two. I therefore decided that the only thing to do was a sudden switch of expectation: take the risk of putting Haferkamp into External Affairs, which was only a risk that he would not do much, and all the other major dispositions would fall into place.
    This was the position when I assembled the new Commission for twenty-four hours of familiarization and discussion at Ditchley Park in north Oxfordshire on 22 and 23 December. I am not sure that excursion was a total success. It was inconveniently close to Christmas, but there was no other time we could find. It was a summoning of the metropolitan Europeans to the periphery of the empire. The weather was raw and misty, and some at least of the visitors were more struck by the coldness of the bathrooms than by the splendours of Ditchley. Perhaps the most memorable outcome was a
Financial Times
fantasy by David Watt in which a murder à
la
Christie
(Orient Express)
was apparently committed: all twelve had separate but convergent motives for committing the crime. The victim was obviously me.
    However there was some useful discussion and considerable but not complete progress was made with portfolios. Haferkamp embraced the prospect of External Affairs with enthusiasm. Ortoli, Gundelach and Davignon were also settled. But quite a lot of loose ends remained to tie up. My fellow Commissioners (all of whom I had met individually before, but never collectively) were a variegated lot (as they should have been), not only as to nationality but also as to background, knowledge and ability. Insofar as there was any obvious division of category between them, it was between the five who had substantial experience of a previous Commission plus Davignon (who knew just as much from his Belgian ForeignMinistry experience) on the one hand, and the seven tyros on the other. The seven of course included the President, of which fact the first six occasionally let it slip that they were fully aware.
    Ditchley therefore had the effect of slightly heightening the atmosphere of apprehensive anticipation in which the Christmas holidays would in any event have been passed. The fourth of January, the date of departure, drew inexorably nearer.

1977

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    The first month or so of 1977 was taken up with initial dispositions—first of Commission portfolios and then of Directors-General, the rough equivalent of Whitehall permanent secretaries—and with the semi-formal establishment of relations with the other