Mrs Thatcher goes to Brussels

‘Délégation Royaume Uni. Salle 4’ announces a scruffy piece of paper projected onto the black and white television screens of the Centre Charlemagne. The journalists hurry upstairs for the latest from Mr Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary. Mr Ingham is not conspicuously communautaire. He tells us who spoke in the session — Mr Lubbers, Herr Kohl, Mrs Thatcher and ‘Mr Papandreou — I always call him Mr Papadopoulos’. A nodding acquaintance with recent Greek history would have made Mr Ingham realise that such a slip, though easier on the tongue, is as politically uncomfortable as calling M. Mitterrand ‘Marshal Pétain’.

But then Mr Ingham is not paid to spread sweetness and light. His heavy face and thick eyebrows and Yorkshire accent presage no good to foreigners and suggest an impatience with discussion of ideals. ‘Yes,’ he said on the first day, when asked whether Britain would consider different means to achieving the same end: ‘That’s what we’re talking about — money.’

Mr Ingham’s attitude — which seems to be a succinct expression of Mrs Thatcher’s — is generally agreed to be deplorable here. ‘Thatcher veut ses sous’, says the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, as if the Prime Minister were quarrelling over who ordered second helpings of bread in a shared restaurant meal. The same people who have complained incessantly about the amount of money spent on the Falklands are now saying that Britain should not quibble over its EEC contribution because it is no more than that amount. After the negotiations finally broke down over Britain’s budget rebate, M. Mitterrand spoke of the unanimity of the nine against the intransigence of the one, and more darkly of future meetings between those countries sympathetic to Community ideals, implying Britain’s exclusion.