Payments, and a meeting with Will Hutton

8.30 Arrive in office. This morning I am speaking at a seminar organised by Graham Bishop. We have booked the room for him, but they gave us the room that is used as overflow for the Group Room as the Group was expected to be away this week. So now we have a crisis as a different room has to be found.

10.00 With about 2 minutes to spare a new room is found so the seminar starts. I update as far as possible on the payments Directive, which is not really much as no agreement on capital has been reached. We do some exploring of who wants what and what if it all goes to a second reading, but it is really a waiting game now. We then move on to a discussion about the ECB and the proposed Target 2 clearing system.

13.30 Lunch with Hugh Saville from the Association of British Insurers. We discuss some possible ways of presenting a check list of improvements that have been/need to be put in place since the time of the Equitable Life problems and how they also key in to Solvency ll. We also discuss a possible fringe meeting for our Party Conference in September on planning and insurance.

15.30 Meeting with American Express about details of the latest payments proposals. Their points are valid but we have much bigger issues to resolve first.

20.00 Dinner with Will Hutton and other MEPs organised by the Centre. He was in Brux for the launch of his new book on China. The discussions on China continue through dinner. His basic premise is that China is not as strong as is made out, indeed it is really rather weak, so we should not be frightened to be open. I point out that we should be open and up for competition irrespective of whether they are weak or strong. Some Danish support for my view: easy to spot the liberals. Will admits he did not quite get the last 100 pages of the book right, so if I ever get the time to read it I can skip those!