For the occasion of the first anniversary last month (10 April) of the Smolensk air disaster which killed President Lech Kaczynski and Madame Maria Kaczynska, I wrote a short piece recalling my own memories of them. It was published in the Polish weekly Uwazam Rze.

Here below is the core of the article as I submitted it.

One of my first encounters with Lech Kaczynski came in 2004 when he was still Major of Warsaw. I was on my way to his office accompanying the then Lord Major of London on a visit to Poland. My mobile telephone rang. The Polish and British co-organisers of the project to take the Moniuszko opera Straszny Dwór to London were fast running out of time to raise the sponsorship funds needed – perhaps we could raise the issue with Mayor Kaczynski and ask for the City’s support?

The meeting went well as the two Mayors discussed Warsaw’s fast-developing investment potential. As the discussion concluded I raised the Straszny Dwór project and explained the problem. Mayor Kaczynski without more ado nodded to one of his team, saying in effect “Sort it out.”

That immediate spontaneous gesture, motivated by his wish to see Polish high culture represented strongly in other world capitals, made all the difference.  Not only Straszny Dwór but also Szymanowski’s King Roger and Penderecki’s Ubu Rex duly made it to London a few weeks later in a form never seen there before.

In late 2006 President Kaczynski was established in office and visited London for talks with Prime Minister Tony Blair. The visit featured a speech on Polish domestic and foreign policy at London University. President Kaczynski delivered it without notes, moving expertly through a range of thoughtful points and sub-points and sub-sub-points while returning smoothly to his main themes.

A key policy problem then was how the European Union should deal with the fiasco created by the collapse in 2005 of the ‘Constitutional Treaty’ after the French and Dutch referenda. At the heart of the issue was the vexed question of how far if at all the new Treaty should reduce Poland’s very favourable voting ‘weight’ at the European Union level as previously agreed under the Nice Treaty.

President Kaczynski during this London visit and separately when he met EU Ambassadors in Warsaw made a powerful impression when talking about the proposed new Treaty; it was more than obvious that he had studied the draft treaty with his own legal expert eye, and identified various objections not only on matters of detail but also on the underlying political and legal philosophy.

One of his main points was that an important principle of ‘historic justice’ was involved. Over the past 50 years Western Europe in general and Germany in particular had surged ahead, while Poland had been held back by the Yalta post-WW2 settlement and the ensuing decades of wretched communism. Poland now had the right – even the responsibility – to defend stoutly any advantage it now enjoyed in its long march to try to catch up with Western European nations.

President Kaczynski developed this idea to make a striking new political claim: even if Poland had no choice but to accept existing EU laws and norms known as the acquis communautaire, Poland should not be expected to abide by some sort of ‘progressive’ European moral and psychological acquis communautaire which it had not shaped because it had languished for so long behind the Iron Curtain. Poland’s family values and Christian heritage were, he insisted, European assets which at long last had to be respected as part of the European civilisational mainstream.

President Kaczynski knew full well that these arguments were not going to be popular with some parts of the European political and media elite. Indeed, this made him all the more convinced that he was right.

For some people his positions were baffling because they simply had not been heard before. Why was Poland now talking about the Second World War again? Should we not all be looking forward, not rummaging around in the past? Other people were keen to play down this approach for much darker reasons – the less said about communist crimes in Poland and across Europe, the better for them.

It was clear to European Ambassadors in Warsaw that President Kaczynski would be a stubborn advocate for Poland’s position when the end-game negotiation on a new Treaty took place: a leader closely familiar with the actual text of the draft treaty who looked at the core issues in a sweeping historical context would be a rare phenomenon indeed at that level.

So it proved. In 2007 Tony Blair in his final weeks as British Prime Minister flew to Warsaw to meet Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and President Lech Kaczynski, to hear for himself how Poland planned to handle the final negotiation. He enjoyed the meetings and departed impressed at both the negotiating tenacity and intellectual grasp of principle which the Polish side had displayed.

At the final EU Summit in June 2007 under the German Presidency the core issue as expected was the voting question. Most other European leaders seemed to believe that after making a few rhetorical pronouncements President Kaczynski would quickly give way and strike a deal. The British team knew that Poland would negotiate hard and long. The arguments dragged on, with the German side pressing Tony Blair to use his friendship with President Kaczynski to urge ‘flexibility’.

A deal was reached, late in the night. Germany achieved its objective of a new EU vote weighting package, but Poland won a long lead-time for the current arrangements extending well past the next EU Budget negotiation. President Kaczynski himself had been all the more formidable in the hard bargaining sessions at the top European level because he had done so much careful personal preparation – and because he was comfortable about the underlying justice of his position.

One of my final diplomatic receptions in Warsaw came in June 2007 when my wife and I hosted an exhibition of portraits by Barbara Kaczmarowska Hamilton at my Residence in Warsaw. We invited Madame Kaczynska to the event and she graciously accepted. We met her on numerous occasions officially and unofficially in Warsaw. She was a remarkable woman, invariably accentuating the positive and generous yet with touching self-deprecation and a twinkling eye of wry humour, as she displayed on one of her first official engagements as First Lady in early 2006 when she hosted a lunch for Princess Anne. When my wife and I left Warsaw Madame Kaczynska sent us a portrait of the President and herself signed with her own warm personal words of greeting. It is one of our most prized possessions.

To sum up.

Lech and Maria Kaczynska lived and died by their principles: unfailing personal integrity and private modesty combined with a profound love of their country and its historic role in European civilisation. Their political opponents seized on their refusal to make the usual easy compromises of politics as a sign of inflexibility, if not extremism.

But their distinguished lives – and perhaps too the appalling symbolism of their deaths en route to honour the memories of the victims of Katyn – remind us all that in a cynical world beset with relativistic nihilism there is a place of high honour for honest people who hold fast to their beliefs and are proud of their country.