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.’