European Diary, 1977-1981 by Roy Jenkins

the Belgians, and asked him to lunch afterwards. He expressed pleasure at all this and saw me off very graciously, conducting me out to my car, which again is very different from Buckingham Palace protocol.
    In the afternoon we had a visit from Vice-President Mondale, which wasn’t bad going on the fifth day in office of the new administration. I received him at the front door at 3 o’clock. We then had an hour’s discussion with five people on each side. The conversation covered an obvious range of subjects and was not particularly deep, but was friendly with a fair mutuality ofapproach, particularly about a timetable for various meetings, the Summit, the resumption of the North/South dialogue 19 etc., and was generally thought by those on our side–perhaps to a greater extent than by me–to have been very satisfactory and worthwhile. I thought we only skimmed the surface of issues, but that was clearly all that he wanted to do at that stage and indeed all that he was briefed to do. But within the limits which he wanted to explore he was well-informed and spoke fluently and confidently without any significant reference to notes.
    He made it clear, to our pleasure, that he was strongly in favour of Community representation at the Summit, and also at the end delivered to me an invitation to go to Washington on an official visit to the President at some reasonably early date. He presented me with an embossed and personally signed copy of Carter’s inaugural address, the oratorical quality of which, such as it was, seemed to me to be somewhat diluted by ending up ‘Thank you very much’, which is not exactly how I think the Gettysburg Address concluded.
    We then proceeded to the Commission room, I introduced him before cameras to all the other Commissioners, and we settled down for a rather formal twenty-five minutes, with expressions of greeting and exchange of views. Haferkamp and I saw him off downstairs, with great mutual expressions of goodwill.
    TUESDAY, 25 JANUARY.
Brussels.
    Left home just after 10.00 for my second visit in two days to the Palais de Bruxelles, this time for the diplomatic reception given by the King and Queen for the Commission and for the ambassadors accredited to the Community. On going in I noticed that the Commissioners who were before or round about me walking up the stairs all seemed rather more formally dressed than I was, i.e. wearing black suits, white shirts and dark ties, whereas I was wearing a striped shirt, having been firmly told that dress was informal. However, I need not have worried, for Davignon, who was presumably the most at home in those surroundings of any Commissioner, had also omitted to reduce himself to white, andindeed more significantly the King, when we were taken in to see him, was wearing brown shoes with a very light blue suit!
    George Ball 20 and Fernand Spaak (our Ambassador in Washington) to lunch, rue de Praetère.
    In the evening we gave the first of our obligatory Val Duchesse dinners for the Permanent Representatives, other Commissioners etc. to mark the change of Council presidency, i.e. from Dutch to British. A party of fifty.
    WEDNESDAY, 26 JANUARY.
Brussels.
    Our longest ordinary Commission session yet: 10.05 to 1.05, and 3.20 to 6.30. It is exhausting presiding for this length of time. The degree of strain is quite different from that of participating as a non-presiding member in the British Cabinet. Apart from the fact that they go on longer in total, being in the chair imposes a different degree of effort, for one is not able to have those agreeable half-hours or so in which to abstract one’s mind from the boredom of the colleagues by doing some forward diary planning or concentrating on some similar matter. That is nearly impossible in the chair, though I noticed that Davignon—not of course in the chair—was wisely doing precisely this at one stage.
    We had Gundelach’s fish issue, then the so-called