No Typists in Brussels What with contradictory versions of the
events of the long night of Brussels flying to and fro be- tween the Foreign Office and the Quai d'Orsay, and at least one paper (a Sunday) succumbing to an obfuscating attack of French "flu in its final, exclusive story of how the talks were adjourned, it seems as well to set the record straight. Yes, Mr. Heath did reserve his position on the agri- cultural price structure, as the French story has it, but, what it omitted to state, he only did this after the French delegation's re-raising of the financial regulation problem in the early hours of Sunday morning had indicated that a settlement was not going to be reached in that round of negotiations. The British reservation was, in fact, tactical and due to a desire not to give everything away in advance if the whole thing had to be negotiated again later. I am told that the tactics employed by M. Couve de Murville did, in fact, not meet with entire approval even within the French delegation. A high French official, after some discussion of the matter, even told a British journalist that he thought the British were owed an apology for the way in which the question of the financial-regulations had been raised. It was the inefficiency of the secretariat, he declared, the draft papers could not be typed in time
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