Besides, the political situation was calculated to make Tories stick together. Poor Michael Foot was becoming ever more a figure of fun. At the Cenotaph Remembrance Day ceremony, he appeared wearing a mouldy-looking donkey jacket* and laid his wreath with, as the Daily Telegraph put it, ‘all the reverent dignity of a tramp inspecting a cigarette end’.120 This moment seemed to confirm for all time in the public mind the idea that Foot could never conceivably be prime minister. He then embarked on a long, shambolic and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to force Peter Tatchell,† the hard-left Labour candidate for the expected Bermondsey by-election, to stand down, while all the time losing recruits to the SDP. In early December 1981, Arthur Scargill was elected president of the National Union of Mineworkers, and his victory was hailed publicly by Tony Benn as giving ‘fresh hopes for battles inside and outside of Parliament’.121 The miners rejected an improved pay offer of 9.3 per cent, and for several weeks people believed that the cosmic clash between Tories and miners, last seen in early 1974, was about to be replayed. In the same month, martial law was declared in Poland, with the house arrest of the Solidarity leader, Lech Wałe˛sa, and dozens of demonstrators being killed. The world watched anxiously to see if the Soviet Union would actually invade to back up the repression it had ordered. Not for the first time, the sense of threat helped Mrs Thatcher rally people to her side.
At the turn of the year, Ian Gow wrote her a thank-you letter for a Christmas present (‘The Crown Derby coffee cups and saucers are really superb’), which sought to strengthen her. ‘You have been a giant among pygmies,’ he wrote. ‘Your diagnosis of our national malaise and your prescription for national recovery are both more perceptive and more far-sighted than any of your contemporaries,’ and he went on, ‘I was so pleased when you said in September that you would like me to “see you through to the end”.’122 The letter expressed at the same time a sort of bunker mentality – what was ‘the end’ to be? – and a firm hope.
Early in 1982, Mrs Thatcher also revealed, which people had been inclined to forget, that she was a human being after all. Taking part in the Paris–Dakar motor rally, Mark Thatcher got stuck in the Sahara desert in Algeria. ‘The car was buggered,’ Mark remembered. ‘I just had to sit still in it,’ which he did, reading The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth.123 Although he was not lost, nobody knew where he was for four days after he was noticed to be missing. ‘… Algerian report suggests kidnap,’ said Bernard Ingham in his press digest, with rather brutal directness.124 Mrs Thatcher was distraught. Very unusually for her, she cancelled some of her business, including a meeting with the Hungarian Foreign Minister, which would have been a possibly eye-opening venture for a prime minister who to date had largely avoided contact with Communist leaders. But she kept an appointment at a lunch for the National Federation of the Self-employed. Emerging from it, she was besieged by reporters and photographers, and could not keep back tears when the press asked her about her son’s disappearance. This was the only time that anyone working with Mrs Thatcher could remember when private events made normal work impossible.125 And although those around her were disgusted with the press intrusion, the resulting coverage helped her. The popular papers said how she touched ‘the hearts and compassion of the people’126 and that people now warmed to her ‘as a woman and a mother’.127
With prompt and adroit courtesy which Mrs Thatcher never forgot, President Mitterrand offered her any military service that might help her find her son, although the Algerians inevitably took the lead. Denis flew out to Algeria on a plane provided by Hector Laing, to oversee the effort.128 Thanks to the local knowledge of Colonel Khalil of the Algerian armed forces, father and son were reunited after thirty-one hours of searching from the air. Mark was flown home safe and well. Mrs Thatcher’s private secretaries, genuinely moved by the maternal feeling they had seen, bought her a huge bunch of flowers.129 After the generosity of the Algerian government and others had been taken into account, the remaining tab for Mark’s adventure stood at £1,191, the cost of phone calls and telegrams. Considering these legitimate ‘diplomatic costs’, the Foreign Office intended to pick up the bill, but Mrs Thatcher demurred. ‘I must pay the £1,191,’ she scribbled. ‘We can therefore say that no extra cost has fallen on the British taxpayer. To who [sic] do I make out the cheque?’130* It was left to Carol to provide a slightly critical note. In interviews in the tabloids, Ingham reported, she ‘says she hopes Mark stops racing because the Prime Minister could do without this additional hassle’.131
On 21 January 1982, the miners’ strike ballot came out against a strike, with only Scotland and Scargill’s home patch, Yorkshire, voting in favour. The moderate outgoing president, Joe Gormley, had intervened to influence the vote against Scargill. The widespread view was that ‘mortgage power’ had got the better of militancy. Increasingly bourgeois workers did not seek political confrontation. This was good news for Mrs Thatcher. It seems to have taught Arthur Scargill that he should never again expose himself to the dangers of a ballot.
When the Cabinet met for its first discussion of Budget ideas on 28 January, contention had mysteriously vanished. Howe was able to tell colleagues that a PSBR within the range of £7.5 billion to £9 billion was achievable, and that exports were in a better state. He canvassed basic rate income tax reductions, or the raising of thresholds. Even Jim Prior, though asking for a PSBR of £11 billion and for British entry into the ERM, declared: ‘I think we are just about out of recession.’ Nigel Lawson encapsulated the Dry narrative of economic recovery: ‘This Budget should be different from last year’s Budget; because of last year’s Budget, it can be.’ Mrs Thatcher closed proceedings by saying that the discussion had been ‘very interesting and harmonious’.132 When the Budget came, on 9 March, Howe could boast that, for the first time in his chancellorship, the PSBR had come in below the figure forecast, as a result of which interest rates had already dropped 3 percentage points from their high of 16 per cent the previous autumn. He increased income tax thresholds above inflation and cut the National Insurance surcharge by 1.5 per cent. Addressing the dispute between supporters of sterling M3 as a measure of the growth of money supply and those who advocated monetary base control (M0), Howe produced a compromise in which a ‘diversity of targets’ was to be aimed at. He also launched the Community Programme, by which the long-term unemployed could be paid to work in community schemes. This was the fruit of work by Norman Tebbit and David Young, whom Tebbit had put in to supplant the Priorite Sir Richard O’Brien as head of the Manpower Services Commission, the government body charged with addressing unemployment.
The press reaction to the 1982 Budget was favourable, as was that of Conservative MPs. Although tremendous economic difficulties remained, the sting of the controversy which had been so poisonous in 1981 was drawn. A Thatcherite recovery – or at any rate a recovery with Mrs Thatcher firmly in charge – had begun, weeks before the news from the South Atlantic which was to convulse British politics.
23
The Falklands invasion
‘The worst moment of my life’
Early in the morning of Friday 2 April 1982, Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands, a British colony in the South Atlantic. The prospect of imminent invasion had become clear only on 31 March, and as late as 5 p.m., London time, the following day Cabinet Office officials had been saying that the intelligence reports received ‘did not necessarily provide definitive evidence that an invasion was about to take place’.1 A week earlier, Argentina had not yet taken the decision to invade. A month earlier, there had been no obvious crisis at all. At 9.25 a.m., Falklands time (12.25 p.m. in London), on the day of the invasion, the British Governor ordered the small contingent of Royal Marines defending Government House in the capital, Port Stanley, to surrender. Argentine troops made them lie on the ground to be photographed. The Argentine flag flew over Port Stanley. The humiliation of Britain was sudden, and complete. Unless it could be reversed, Mrs Thatcher could not expect to survive as prime
minister.
How could such a thing have happened? The final act of invasion was sudden, but the passions which gave rise to it were deep rooted. The origins of the dispute over the Falkland Islands dated almost as far back as their discovery by Europeans. An English captain in the Royal Navy was the first person to land on the islands, in 1690, and named them after Lord Falkland, then the First Lord of the Admiralty. The name for the islands always preferred by Argentina – Las Malvinas – was a Spanish version of the name Les Malouines (because of a supposed resemblance to St Malo in Brittany), reflecting the fact that France had occupied them in the middle of the eighteenth century. Having bought France out, Spain pressed her long-standing claim, which was always contested by Britain and nearly produced a war in 1770.* When Argentina became independent of Spain in 1816, it considered itself the heir to all Spanish claims. Britain, which had left the islands, though still claiming them, in 1774, renewed its interest in them after Argentina appointed a political and military governor there in 1829. In January 1833, the British reoccupied the islands, and have been there ever since.
The original British legal title to the Falkland Islands was not considered absolutely secure by the British government,* but government legal experts reposed greater confidence in the right of ‘prescription’ – the fact that, from 1833, British rule and occupation were continuous, and that the inhabitants were almost all of British stock and enthusiastically loyal to the Crown. Argentina, on the other hand, was quite uninterested in the opinions of the inhabitants of the islands. It regarded the Malvinas as part of the title deeds of the nation. In a country whose internal politics were often fraught and which, in 1982, was ruled by an unstable and unpopular military oligarchy, this was the only issue guaranteed to produce emotional unity. As the 150th anniversary of what Argentina saw as unjust occupation approached, the junta grabbed a symbolic moment to right the seeming wrong.
This coincided with a particularly weak British position. In modern times, the British government had increasingly come to regard the Falkland Islands as a nuisance. With only 1,800 inhabitants, 8,000 miles from Britain, and little apparent strategic significance, the islands needed economic development to have a future, and this was difficult without the help of Argentina, which is around 300 miles away at the nearest point. To the British Foreign Office, the Falklands got in the way of good relations with Latin America. For many years, attempts had been made to steer a course between the absolutism of Argentine claims of sovereignty on the one hand and the Falklanders’ deep suspicion of Argentina on the other. Not long after Mrs Thatcher came into office in 1979, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, offered a solution. He resisted the idea, arising from Lord Shackleton’s report on the subject,† that a ‘Fortress Falklands’ policy of economic development regardless of Argentina could be pursued. Carrington told the Overseas and Defence Committee of the Cabinet (OD) that Fortress Falklands would produce ‘a serious threat of Argentine invasion, which would require the long-term commitment of substantial British forces’.2 In a letter to Mrs Thatcher on 20 September 1979, he told her that a form of leaseback, by which sovereignty was ceded to Argentina in return for continuing British administration and way of life, was the answer.
Mrs Thatcher’s immediate and instinctive reaction to leaseback was hostile. In the notes she scribbled on Carrington’s letter, and on John Hunt’s covering memo about it, she expressed all the main objections which were to bulk so large later. Against a passage which spoke about the need to respect the wishes of the islanders, she wrote: ‘And they must not be pressured into agreeing.’ Commenting on the idea of leaseback itself, she wrote: ‘As in Hong Kong – the 99 yr lease comes to an end & causes problems.’ On top of Carrington’s letter, she summed up: ‘I cannot possibly agree to the line the Foreign Secretary is proposing. Nor would it get through the H of C – let alone the Parliamentary Party.’3 When the Foreign Office brought the whole thing to OD the following month, in a much more detailed memo, Mrs Thatcher was even more suspicious. She thought that she was being almost double-crossed. ‘I don’t like this paper,’ she wrote on its first page, ‘– the definition of the Options is designed not to enumerate the Options but to achieve the desired conclusion.’Alongside the memo’s statement that ‘the Argentine claim is not just a matter of law but of national honour and machismo,’ she commented: ‘According to the Foreign Office our national honour doesn’t seem to matter!?’4 ‘Please don’t deal with this before the Rhodesian issue is finished,’ she added, fearing not only the pressure of time, but also of rebellion from the Tory right. This last request was followed, and the matter did not come back to OD until 30 January 1980. By this time, Carrington had managed to push his case. The minutes record that the Prime Minister, in her summing up, said that there was a ‘danger that any resumption of talks might appear to foreshadow a surrender of sovereignty … There was no legal basis for such a surrender’; but they also record that she and the committee saw ‘force’ in the Foreign Secretary’s argument that there should be ‘general and exploratory’ talks with Argentina ‘particularly since it reflected the views of the Islanders themselves’. Nicholas Ridley, the relevant junior minister at the Foreign Office, was charged with seeing if leaseback could be made to work.
Although a close political ally of Mrs Thatcher’s on economic matters (the only such ally in her Foreign Office team), Ridley had a lack of affection for British overseas possessions quite at odds with her own attitudes. He also had a dangerously flip turn of phrase. The record of his talks in New York with Commodore Cavandoli, his Argentine opposite number, shows Ridley in best dismissive vein: ‘We had given up a third of the world’s surface and found it on the whole beneficial to do so. The only claim Britain had which he felt strongly about was our long-standing claim to Bordeaux, his motive being wine. He found it hard to see the motive towards the islands where there was no wine.’5 At secret talks between Ridley and Cavandoli near Geneva in August, the principle of leaseback, with ninety-nine years as the probable extent of the lease, was hypothetically agreed.
At a meeting of OD on 7 November 1980, Mrs Thatcher expressed her doubts. ‘This would be very difficult: surrender of sovereignty,’ Robert Armstrong noted her saying.6 According to her own memory, she reacted angrily to Ridley’s claim that Britain could not defend the Falklands: ‘We could bomb Buenos Aires if nothing else.’ ‘It was just an instinctive reaction,’ she added. ‘It was not recorded.’7 What was recorded, by Armstrong, was her view that ‘We can’t afford to defend them. We are yielding to threats.’ Carrington said that leaseback was the ‘only idea that has any future’. Mrs Thatcher urged Ridley to work on backbenchers, and said: ‘Our fallback is that we do nothing without consent of the islanders.’
This consent was not forthcoming. Towards the end of November, Ridley visited the islands, talking to as many of the inhabitants as he could. In one public meeting, an islander said: ‘I don’t think we should give them sovereignty. We’re giving up our birthright.’ To this Ridley replied, ‘Well then you take the consequences [of not giving up sovereignty], not me.’8 Although he added that Britain would defend the islands from Argentine attack, the phrase about taking the consequences was not a happy one. It stuck in the islanders’ minds. He left the islands without carrying his point, though without a formal rejection of his proposals. On 2 December 1980, he made a statement to Parliament in which, as Mrs Thatcher had originally predicted, the idea of leaseback was fiercely attacked by MPs on all sides for betraying the Falklanders. At OD a month earlier, Mrs Thatcher had repeated her anxiety: ‘My fear is an awful row from our backbenchers.’9 She had been proved right.
Meeting the day after the ‘awful row’, ministers in OD cogitated inconclusively. Referring to the exclusion of Falklanders from the automatic right to emigrate to Britain under the forthcoming British Nationality Act, Mrs Thatcher mused: ‘We shall have to give an undertaking that they should come here.’10 But this was not followed through, because of the precede
nt it would set for all other citizens of British Dependent Territories (as colonies were now formally known). On 7 January 1981, the Falklands Councillors – the islands’ elected representatives – gave a hostile view of leaseback and advocated a freeze to the sovereignty dispute. The Foreign Office did not attempt to develop a new policy to give some positive effect to the islanders’ wishes, but treated them with borderline contempt. The islanders were ‘simple people and they clung to simple ideas’, declared Sir Michael Palliser that June.11 If they would not agree to put leaseback on the table, the Foreign Office felt that negotiations would prove futile. The result was impasse, and rising Argentine impatience. In July 1981, in what turned out to be its last assessment of the problem before the crisis of the following March, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC),* while not predicting the worst, did say that if Argentina came to believe that it would not get a peaceful transfer of sovereignty ‘a full-scale invasion cannot be discounted.’12
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography Page 88
