The quiet revolutionary

Date: 19/10/1995

A little man in a dark grey suit scurries along Avenue d'Auderghem, head down against the wind, clutching a paper bag. He enters the Breydel building without fanfare or flanking minions, a lone figure who wouldn't warrant a second glance if you didn't know who he was.

But everybody knows who this man is, even if they don't quite catch his eye to nod hello on their way out for a two-hour lunch.

This is the boss, and he is heading back to his desk on the twelfth floor with his own five-minute lunch in that paper bag, a couple of rounds of sandwiches from a snack bar near Rond-Point Schuman.

David Williamson, Secretary-General of the Commission since 1987, looks like a mischievous school boy who has spent the morning scrumping apples and has got away with it. There is usually an impish grin about his cherubic features and if there isn't a catapult sticking out of his jacket pocket there should be.

He is fresh of face, chubby of cheek and appears much younger than his 61 years. His birthday falls on 8 May, the day before Schuman Day - “Williamson is always one step ahead,” an admirer once remarked.

The fact that a Briton is the head of the Commission civil service - only the second-ever secretary-general in its history - speaks volumes for his career track record. Few would have given any British national much chance of getting the plum job in the Eighties, in the midst of UK Prime Minister Thatcher's rantings against Europe.

But Williamson impressed all who came within his force field for almost two decades before that. From lowly beginnings in Britain's Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, this small but perfectly-informed fellow found himself the popular choice to replace Emile Noel, the Frenchmen who had dominated the Commission for nearly 30 years.

He had already been deputy director general for agriculture after 19 years in the British civil service. He had also spent four years running the Europe desk in the Cabinet Office, an ardent European at Mrs Thatcher's right hand. With that pedigree and despite the sponsorship of Mrs Thatcher, no-one quibbled over Williamson's country of origin: he might be British, but he's good, was the unanimous verdict.

Noel was a patrician overlord: Williamson is a technician, fascinated by the detailed workings of the Commission machine. “He is an engineer. His pleasure lies in seeing the place run smoothly,” observed a senior official who watched as Williamson got to grips with the bureaucracy. “If you show him a way things can be done better, he'll seize on it. He loves that sort of thing. He likes to get involved. He's definitely the man to go to when you want something to work.”

But Williamson is no automaton. “There's an anarchic, maverick side to him,” said one colleague. “He's always been indiscreet, but successfully so,” said another.

Civil servants tend to be over-cautious, wary of speaking out of turn and making headlines. Williamson is the exception: on the very few occasions he is rolled out for public consumption, he is a breath of fresh air. Jacques Delors relied on him last year when former Commissioner Poul Schmidhuber refused to face the flak over hysterical and damaging press accounts of a Court of Auditor's report on fraud and waste.

Williamson met the press and put the record straight. “This has become a bit of a game - let's get serious,” he said, pointing out, as the politicians seemed unable to do, that there was only one reference to fraud in the whole 484-page report.

“We should see more of him,” said one journalist. “He talks in simple language and doesn't waffle.” He doesn't like Euro-gobbledegook either, banishing the word “transparency” from his department as superfluous and meaningless.

Although a lover of fine claret, Williamson has never been dazzled by the grandeur of his position. He is perfectly content with his sandwiches, munching away while poring over the latest economic convergence criteria statistics or wading through the French text of the Maastricht Treaty, which is balanced atop a pile of hefty tomes on his cluttered coffee table.

His desk is cluttered too. In fact his entire office, just along the corridor from Commission President Jacques Santer, reflects the man himself - small, a bit dishevelled and stuffed full of information.

Many of his directors-general have miles more pile carpet, smarter desks and acres more windows, but David Williamson is not in it for all that.

He often appears shy and detached and is frequently alone on the fringe of the big events, as if determined to distance himself from weighty matters in which he will certainly have played a major behind-the-scenes part. Nevertheless he is happy, even willing to talk to anyone and despatch the myth of Commission opacity.

His indiscretion and irreverence, albeit in private, are a sure sign of his overwhelming confidence and authority. He may not warrant the fuss and attention that attends his political peers, but Williamson, married with two sons in their thirties, has become the power behind the throne.

He has no airs and graces and has no need of them in a bureaucracy in which the political hierarchy is no more directly-elected than Williamson himself. Thus Santer and his team have no exclusive claim on policy-making and forensic experts will find Williamson's fingerprints all over key policy documents, not least the Maastricht Treaty.

Since arriving in Brussels in 1987 to take charge of 15,000 Commission staff, David Williamson has been orchestrating a revolution, reorganising 23 directorates and supervising half a dozen task forces and special departments. He has master-minded the drastic cut-back in the mass of Euro law-making. He sees every piece of paper that goes to the 20 Commissioners from all departments. He likes to sign everything and uses his prodigious reading ability - he can get through a novel in an evening - to scan dozens of documents and reports in the course of a working week. As one close aide put it: “He is the only person in the Commission who is aware of every single thing that is going on.”

Williamson is, arguably, even more influential than the Commission President himself.

One of his favourite words is “jolly” - even the rabid attacks on Europe by the British tabloids can be “jolly” and “a bit of fun”, part of the warp and weave of the European debate. One gets the impression that he probably chuckled mightily over British tabloid newspaper The Sun's naughty front page headline “Up Yours Delors!” and he is stoical about the continued Euro-bashing that comes from his homeland. What angers him is what he sees as the often wrong-headed and pompous serious analysis of EU affairs in weighty journals.

Like any good civil servant, he is fiercely loyal. When Jacques Delors' plane had to be diverted to Charleroi, Williamson was furious about the stuffy officials there who dourly demanded passports and did nothing to ease the delays and discomfort. A strong letter went to the Belgians in his immaculate French protesting at such needless and unfeeling bureaucracy.

Such loyalty means we must wait for his memoirs to hear Williamson's account of how Santer matches up to his predecessor, but certainly the Luxembourger highly values his secretary-general's experience, perspective and monumental unflappability.

But how else could it be with a man who earned his European credentials in the Euro-sceptical Whitehall cauldron of the Eighties? Williamson had to hold the ring between Nigel Lawson as Chancellor (we're not handing over our money), Norman Tebbit as Industry Secretary (we're not handing over our sovereignty) and Mrs Thatcher (we're not handing over anything).

“Once you've been head of the European section in the Cabinet Office under Mrs Thatcher, coping with the Commission is a doddle,” said one Whitehall mandarin.

Williamson has never quite gone native, despite his propensity for talking about “UEM” instead of “EMU” and despite his endearing inability on occasions to recall the English for some phrase or saying. But while he continues to find wacky humour in what he does, and while he continues to nip out to fetch his own sandwiches, he will never be anything other than utterly British.

As a younger man he was a noted long-distance runner and the psychology of the track has doubtless helped him stay the course in Brussels. It is all, as he would say, rather jolly.