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124Alan S. Milwardresources’ on condition that the Bundestag would ratify them only if the date fornegotiations, which could be named by the French after the summit, allowed thosenegotiations to start within six months after its close. 13 The same six months werethus the maximum time allowed for agreement on ‘completion’. But in return forthis agreement, Germany had been forced to accept that France should have a vetoon any subsequent alteration of the financial regulation of the CommonAgricultural Policy. It was, Frank said, the price that had to be paid for satisfactoryresults on other points, namely the opening of negotiations with Britain within thattime limit for its accession to the Community. Brandt, he added, had made it clearthat the Bundestag would not ratify the financial agreement unless developmentson other points agreed at the summit were satisfactory. 14There had been discussion between Pompidou and Brandt over the defects ofthe Common Agricultural Policy. The British view of what had happened was thatBrandt had been swayed by the idea that France was finding its acquis lesssatisfactory in terms of the whole economy than it had originally hoped. The CAPwas creating rigidities in French agriculture through maldistribution of its rewards.The ‘thank-you’ letter to Brandt, composed by the UK Foreign andCommonwealth Office was delayed for more than a week by Wilson, who wantedto write into it as far as was possible the ways in which the CAP might be changed.He also altered the Foreign Office phrase that the outcome of the summit was“encouraging” to “reasonably encouraging”. The discussions in the officialsessions of the summit were indefatigably reported to London in numeroustelegrams each day by the embassy in The Hague and British officials, Wilson aswell, knew that the Dutch had argued throughout that the financial regulation foragriculture should be changeable if the Community was enlarged. Brandt’spressure for change had evidently been less strong. Little or nothing emerged interms of domestic policy in France from Pompidou’s own musings on the CAP’sdefects.To what extent any early or substantial change in the operations of the CAP wasrealistic in French or German politics is not a question which has received muchanalysis up to the present. The disgruntled view of the Brandt-Pompidou deal takenby the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and by Wilson himself is probably bettertestimony to their anxieties about what for the most part were political realitieswhich it had never been within British power or influence to alter than to anyduplicity on Brandt’s part. It was Brandt who had won for them what they had mostwanted from the start of 1966, negotiations for entry. Frank saw Wilson after hismeeting with the Foreign secretary and was treated to the prime minister’s owncritical views on the CAP followed by a plea for more financial returns from it for13. Ibid., Record of a Conversation between the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and the deputyunder-secretary for European affairs of the Foreign ministry of the FRG at No.1 Carlton Gardensat 9.15 a.m., 3 December 1969.14. Ibid.