Gaitskell was not alone in his opposition. ‘If they don’t want us we certainly don’t need them’, was increasingly the attitude. But still Heath could not believe that, after so many weeks and so much bargaining, the negotiations could founder. Even the pessimistic Dixon, on the last day of the discussions before the adjournment, told Eric Roll that the French were ‘rather resentful of our rewriting their sacred writings…But they are chittering with interest; not, I judge, with hostility.’32
Through the autumn and early winter, the mood of optimism grew stronger. Frank Giles, the exceptionally well-informed Sunday Times correspondent in Paris, said that British entry was now very nearly a certainty. ‘If the Archangel Gabriel himself were conducting the negotiations,’ he wrote, ‘he could (assuming, of course, that he was British) scarcely do better than Mr Heath.’ The crunch would come in mid-January 1963, Heath told the Cabinet. The French had agreed that there could be a long ministerial meeting and, though they had not accepted that this should be the final stage, they seemed resigned to the certainty that substantial progress would be made. The French were isolated, he announced confidently on 10 January. All the other members were ‘earnestly seeking to reach a settlement on terms acceptable to the UK’. The possibility that the French would not be deterred by the feelings of their allies, though it had been endlessly discussed, still seemed too fanciful a chimera to take seriously.33
What disturbed Heath most was that the negotiations in Brussels were only part, and not necessarily the most important part, of the relationship between Britain and Europe, particularly between Britain and France. In March 1962, in a memorandum to the Foreign Secretary dealing with the possibility of cooperating with the European countries on the development of nuclear weapons, Heath showed that he was painfully aware of the link between such matters and British accession to the Common Market:
What alarms me more than anything, is that, at the same time as we are trying to negotiate our entry into the EEC – in which we have all too few cards to play – we are giving every indication of wishing to carry out political policies which are anathema to the two most important members of the Community. This can only increase the mistrust and suspicion already felt towards us in the political sphere…We must never forget that the countries of the Community are interested in two things: first, in jointly increasing their own prosperity – in which they regard us as a possible liability and the Commonwealth as an undesirable complication; secondly, in strengthening their defence against what they regard as the persistent and menacing threat from the Soviet Union…What they see here is our apparent determination, with the United States, to prevent the French from developing their atomic and nuclear defence…Our colleagues have instructed us to carry out a negotiation for our entry into the EEC at the same time as they – showing a complete lack of understanding of European attitudes and problems – are carrying out contrary policies in the political and defence fields. It is no wonder that these negotiations, already sufficiently difficult and complicated, threaten to become almost unmanageable.34
For ‘our colleagues’ read, above all, the Prime Minister. Macmillan negotiated with the Americans at Nassau an agreement for the exclusive provision of Polaris missiles to be carried on nuclear submarines; to de Gaulle, at Rambouillet in mid-December 1962, he made it clear that, though the French were welcome to jog along as junior partners, the so-called ‘independent’ deterrent would remain firmly in British hands. ‘I only trust that nothing I have done at Rambouillet or Nassau has increased our difficulties,’ Macmillan wrote apologetically to Heath. His trust was misplaced. ‘I can well imagine de Gaulle’s feeling’, wrote Heath in his memoirs, ‘at being asked to accept the terms of an agreement negotiated in his absence by the British and American governments. With more sensitive handling, we might, at the very least, have denied him this particular excuse for behaving vindictively towards the British.’35
Was the nuclear issue a decisive feature in de Gaulle’s thinking or was it just one more piece of evidence that Britain could never become truly European? From early in the negotiations Heath had been in no doubt that de Gaulle disliked the idea of British entry; he told Macmillan that ‘there was a genuine fear on de Gaulle’s part of admitting Britain as a kind of Trojan horse which would either disrupt the present system or prevent French domination’. But it did not necessarily follow that he would block British entry whatever the outcome of the negotiations. Some of the British team involved in the negotiations were convinced that that had been his intention from the start. He was determined to keep us out, says the British diplomat, Michael Butler, ‘because he feared the UK would gang up with Holland and Germany to create a Europe which was both too federal and too closely linked to the United States’. Any delay in making his position brutally clear was caused by his hope that the negotiations would break down without his intervention.36 Yet Couve de Murville, whom Heath believed would not wilfully have misled him, told him just before the final sessions in Brussels: ‘No power on earth can now prevent these negotiations from being successful.’ De Gaulle, he claimed, had ‘neither the power nor the intention to veto UK membership’. Eric Roll was convinced that the General ‘made up his mind almost at the end’. The answer could be that de Gaulle did not ask himself till the last minute whether or not his mind was made up. He preferred not to contemplate the problem until it was thrust upon him. But if a decision had been forced upon him three or six months earlier he would almost certainly have acted as he did in January 1963. His mind may not have been made up earlier, but his mindset was inexorably fixed. Given his temperament it seems almost inconceivable that, whatever the course of the negotiations, whatever the feelings of the other countries involved, he would have allowed the British to enter the Community.37
A few days before the last round began Heath dined with the American diplomat George Ball in Paris. He was ‘in ebullient high spirits’, wrote Ball. He described his meetings with various French ministers and concluded that, though some serious obstacles remained, he was ‘reasonably confident that the British application was in no serious trouble’. Then came de Gaulle’s press conference of 14 January, at which he stated bluntly that Britain was socially, economically and politically unsuitable to be a member of the European Community. Swiftly, Couve de Murville made it clear that, so far as the French were concerned, the negotiations were over. Heath at first hoped that so arrogant a volte-face might ‘rouse the Five to a new level of anger’, but, as he told the Government in London: ‘It begins to look as though none of them will have much stomach for the idea of carrying things to the point of breaking up the EEC.’ The last meeting of 29 January confirmed this view. Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister, condemned the French behaviour in the harshest terms. It was, he said, ‘a day of defeat for Europe…If the Rome Treaty did not explode, the Community spirit was gravely, perhaps mortally wounded.’ But the Rome Treaty did not explode, nor was it near doing so. Gerhard Schroeder, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, made the best of it when he praised ‘the splendid effort which had been made by his British friends’ and hoped that ‘the impulse for European unity would not die away in Britain. For the day would come when it could be realised.’ Heath in his reply spoke with moving dignity. There was no need for fear, he said: ‘We would not turn our backs; we were a part of Europe by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilisation.’38
It was one of the worst days of his life. The journalist Nicholas Carroll recorded seeing him in his hotel just before midnight: ‘The Lord Privy Seal, normally cheerful and tireless and the best-liked negotiator here, seemed frozen into profound depression; his cheeks grey, his eyes glazed with fatigue.’ Christopher Soames recalled driving with him to the meeting when they already knew that the veto was to be applied. ‘I remember sort of putting my hand on his knee and saying: “You mustn’t mind too much, Ted. Nobody could have tried harder than you”…and I got absolutely frozen dead-pan. I could never understand how undemonstrative he was.’39 Impassivity was indeed his usual reaction to