grown up a regular Anglo-Romanian seminar on education, held one year in Bucharest and one year in Cambridge. My Romanian opposite number, Mircea Malita, was a distinguished mathematician. Like other ‘cultural’ events under communism, these seminars had a largely political and diplomatic purpose. That said, there was no doubt in my mind about the cultural riches of Romania itself — not only Bucharest, known as ‘the Paris of the Balkans’ (still at that time spared from the later devastation inflicted on it by Ceausescu’s megalomaniac building plans of the 1980s), but also the luminous painted monastery churches of Bukovina, which I visited in September 1971. Not surprisingly, the Romanians were anxious to continue to cultivate me when I became Leader of the Opposition, and for the moment this accorded with my purposes as well.
At the time of my second visit at the beginning of September 1975, Romania occupied a unique position in the communist world. Following in the footsteps of his (already disgraced) predecessor Gheorghe Dej, Nicolae Ceausescu had plotted out an independent path for Romania within the Warsaw Pact. In 1968, for example, he had visited Prague and, apparently sincerely, expressed support for the Polish reform movement and bitterly condemned the Russian suppression of it. The Western view, which I then shared, was that Romania should be accorded discreet support in the hope that its example might lead to further fragmentation in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. In fact, Ceausescu was playing a ruthless game in which ethnic tensions (with Hungary), East- West competition (between NATO and the Warsaw Pact) and rivalry within the communist world (between the Soviet Union and China) were exploited as seemed appropriate at any juncture.
Between the conversations I had with Ceausescu in 1971 and 1975 he had further consolidated his position. Although he had become effective leader in 1965, it was not until 1974 that he united the functions of Party Leader and Head of State and Government. From now on he was freer to indulge his political fantasies. For what we Westerners did not sufficiently grasp was that Ceausescu was a throwback both to Stalinism, whose methods he employed, and indeed to a more traditional Balkan despotism for which the promotion of his family and the flaunting of wealth and power were essential trappings. Ceausescu himself never struck me as anything out of the ordinary, just cold, rather dull, spewing forth streams of statistics and possessing that stilted formal courtesy that communists adopted as a substitute for genuine civilization. We discussed the Soviet threat and he gave me a long account, faithfully mirrored later by guides, diplomats and factory managers, of the astonishing successes of the Romanian economy. He was particularly proud of the level of ‘investment’ which, as a share of the national income, certainly dwarfed that of Western countries. In fact, of course, misdirected investment is a classic feature of the planned economy; it was just that Romania, whose people apart from the ruling elite lived in poverty, misdirected more than the others.
I was also shown around a scientific institute specializing in polymer research. My guide was none other than Elena Ceausescu, who had already begun to indulge a personal fantasy world which matched her husband’s in absurdity, if not in human consequences: she was determined to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on polymers. It subsequently emerged that she could barely have distinguished a polymer from a polygon. But behind the defences of translation and communist long-windedness she put up quite a good show.
In other ways, however, Romania did illustrate more characteristic features of the communist system. I visited a factory and heard from those in charge — I presumed they were the management — a litany of the company’s achievements. ‘That’s very interesting,’ I said, ‘but could I speak to the trade union leaders here? Perhaps they may have something to add?’ A look of astonishment spread across their faces. ‘But that’s us!’ they replied. What the individual workers at the factory — or indeed the neighbours across whose houses it was belching thick brown smoke — might have commented is another matter. For, as in the fully developed socialist state, the trade unions of Romania were political not industrial institutions.
A little later I had dinner with Members of the Romanian ‘Parliament’. It was explained to me that one had to be a member of an approved, i.e. reliably communist, trade union in order to stand in a parliamentary election. They showed me the list of some thirty-five such bodies. Looking down it, the ‘beekeepers’ union’ caught my eye. The opportunity was irresistible. In grave fashion I began to interrogate them. How large was the beekeepers’ bloc in Parliament? Who were its leaders? What were the factions? Was there an anti-beekeepers’ faction? The evening slipped by more quickly.
A final practical lesson for me, which any Western politician or businessman visiting the Eastern bloc was well advised to learn as soon as possible, was to assume that someone was always listening. This was an inconvenience for people like me in the country for just a few days. But for the subjects of a communist state it was a kind of intellectual terror. Depriving human beings of their privacy has the intended psychological effect of making them withdrawn, introverted and incapable of the communication based on mutual trust which permits civil society. Thus communism applied sophisticated techniques in the service of a primitive ideology so as to destroy not just potential centres of opposition but rather the final enemy, human personality.
Ceausescu’s Romania already reflected this in an advanced form, though for me and my party it was a matter of farce, not tragedy. I had already been told at the British Embassy how one of our diplomats, anxious to recruit a nanny for his young children and hazy about how to insert a suitable advertisement in a Romanian newspaper, decided that the simplest and most reliable method was to tell an astonished friend on the Embassy telephone of his urgent requirement. Sure enough, and without a blush, in the course of some discussion of a quite different subject a Romanian official suggested a candidate.
Richard Ryder and I were put up in the State Guest House. Interestingly, the sitting-room ceiling consisted of an open wooden grille, doubtless good for ventilation but possibly for other purposes too. I just could not make the television work when I wanted to listen to the news. Richard was no more successful. We were still struggling when a knock on the door announced the arrival of a member of the Guest House staff who helpfully put us right.
Even before this visit, I had few illusions about the oppressive nature of the regime. Whatever Western strategic interests might require, I was determined that the pressure should be kept up to improve respect for human rights, particularly when the ink was barely dry on the Helsinki Agreement. An expatriate Romanian group in Britain, knowing of my impending visit, sent me a list of five political prisoners, asking me to urge their release. I immediately agreed to do so. But somehow the Foreign Office got wind of this and sought determinedly to dissuade me on the grounds that it would alienate Ceausescu to no good purpose. A senior civil servant explained in person the deep unwisdom of my intention. I was not impressed. In Bucharest I gave the Romanians the list and said that these people were wrongly imprisoned and must be set free. I was glad to see that they subsequently were.
Undoubtedly, the most important foreign tour I made in 1975 — probably the most significant during my time as Leader of the Opposition — was to the United States in September. I already, of course, knew something of the States; and I liked and admired most of what I knew. This, however, was my first opportunity to meet all the leading political figures, and do so on something approaching equal terms. I was guaranteed plenty of media attention, if largely for the depressing reason that Britain’s stock had rarely fallen lower. American newspapers, magazines and television programmes were concentrating on the precipitous decline of the British economy, the advance of trade union power, the extension of the socialist state and what was perceived to be a collapse of national self-confidence. Aside from the
I had discussed the situation with Norman Lamont, an early supporter whose job with Rothschilds enabled him to keep me in touch with what was going on in the City and abroad, and who had just returned from the United States where he had spoken to politicians, officials and opinion-formers. I gained the impression, which proved accurate, that the Ford Administration’s confidence had started modestly to increase, which was giving them all the more opportunity to worry about what was happening in Britain. The Prime Minister, who had recently been in Washington, had done nothing to improve perceptions by claiming that all our difficulties were grossly exaggerated. Something different and more serious was expected. I resolved to provide it.
Gordon Reece flew on ahead of me to New York in order to set up the media arrangements. Just before I left London he telephoned to say that expectations of my visit were now so high that I should make the first speech I was to deliver — to the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies in New York — a blockbuster rather than, as planned, a low-key performance with the main speech coming later in Washington. This required frenzied last-minute speech-rewriting with Adam Ridley, and it showed in the text. Most of the speech struck exactly the right note. It began by taking head-on the American comments on the sorry state of contemporary Britain and treating them seriously. I then drew attention to what I called ‘the progressive consensus, the doctrine that the state should be
