Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  This uneasy situation coincided with the pressures on public spending at home. Exasperated by the resistance of the Defence Secretary, Francis Pym, to her demands for economies, Mrs Thatcher had moved him to Leader of the House at the beginning of January. The task of Pym’s successor, John Nott, was to cut. And because Britain had made promises to NATO about increasing its alliance commitment, cuts could not come in Europe but had to be found elsewhere in the defence budget. Nott advanced the idea that surface ships were no longer as necessary to the navy as in the past. At an OD Committee to discuss the matter, the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Edwin Bramall,† recalled Mrs Thatcher asking Carrington his opinion of this new doctrine. ‘I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,’ said the Foreign Secretary, ‘but the Defence Secretary has no other option because we’d never get the cuts through NATO.’13 Because non-NATO cuts were easier to make in the navy than in the other services, this is what happened. The resistance from Admiral Sir Henry Leach,‡ the Chief of the Naval Staff, was so fierce that it may even have been counter-productive. According to David Omand,§ Nott’s private secretary, the navy failed to make a ‘modern case’ for its surface ships, falling back on ‘Atlantic convoy stuff’, but was, in essence, in the right: the internal battle was so intense that ‘We’d taken our eye off the ball about what defence forces were really there for.’14

  One of the victims of this process was the ice patrol ship HMS Endurance, the only Royal Navy vessel regularly in service in the South Atlantic. Its withdrawal, following the 1981–2 season, was announced in June 1981. The Foreign Office objected, because of the signals withdrawal would send to Argentina, but did not press its case to the utterance. Mrs Thatcher herself was not convinced of the importance of Endurance. As late as early March 1982, she chatted about the issue to Richard Luce,* who by then had replaced Nicholas Ridley at the Foreign Office. When Luce tried to tell her that Endurance mattered, ‘She said that Endurance was no good; it just went “pop, pop, pop”.’15

  So Britain had failed to get a deal with Argentina, and failed to pursue the alternative of much stronger support for the regeneration of the Falklands. By sentencing Endurance to death, it had signalled a lack of will to defend the islands. As Rex Hunt, the Governor of the Falklands, noted in his annual review of 1981, ‘by the end of the year even our most loyal friends were beginning to doubt the good faith of HMG.’16 He expected the next set of talks with Argentina to break down and recommended ‘contingency plans now’ in case this happened.

  Early in December 1981 a new junta grabbed power in Argentina, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, the commander of the army. It quickly decided that a resolution of the Malvinas question was the priority for 1982. In mid-January, a secret National Strategy Directive was circulated, stating that the Military Committee had ‘resolved to analyse the possibility of the use of military power to obtain the political objective’.17 None of this reached British intelligence, nor was it relayed diplomatically. Richard Luce later wrote that Anthony Williams, the British Ambassador in Buenos Aires, ‘never gave me any impression of a sense of urgency about the new Government’s attitude to the Falklands’.18 Britain, represented by Luce, went forward to talks with Argentina in New York at the end of February. Though not agreeing anything of substance, these talks seemed to set up a process which would go forward. The joint communiqué spoke of ‘a cordial and positive spirit’.

  On 3 March, however, the news appeared in the British press that Argentina had refused to publish the joint communiqué. Instead, the junta forced the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to put out a unilateral statement. This revealed the content of the New York discussions, although they had been confidential, and insisted that British recognition of Argentine sovereignty must be made within a period which ‘will necessarily have to be short’. If this did not happen, Argentina would ‘choose freely the procedure which best accords with her interests’.19 At the same time, bellicose articles began to appear in the Argentine press, calling for direct military action in a few months’ time, if Britain did not agree. On Williams’s report from Buenos Aires about the threatening communiqué, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘We must make contingency plans.’ As Sir Lawrence Freedman puts it in his official history of the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher’s request ‘does not appear to have reached any part of the intelligence community’.20

  The prevailing view remained that Argentina would not actually attack the Falklands. The Reagan administration in Washington had established better relations with Argentina – a fact which itself emboldened the junta. Thomas Enders, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, had been visiting Buenos Aires on the day the junta had issued its aggressive communiqué on the New York talks. His telegram back to Washington suggested that the statement ‘may have been no more than to satisfy domestic public opinion, but we cannot be certain. Clearly, a resolution of this ancient dispute is as far off as ever and the local jingos are speculating again about an armed Argentine landing in the islands.’21 But on 12 March Enders told the British that in his view Argentina was not contemplating ‘anything drastic’.22* On 19 March, Ambassador Williams wrote to Luce dismissing the idea of the use of force by Argentina: ‘we know the current team to be much too intelligent to do anything so silly.’ As soon as they received the letter, however, the Foreign Office wrote on it, ‘overtaken by events’.23 These events soon prompted Argentina’s ‘current team’ to do something very silly indeed.

  On 18 March 1982, Argentine scrap metal dealers had landed on the British dependency of South Georgia, which was governed from the Falklands Islands. They were fulfilling a legitimate contract which originated with a British company, but they did not have permission to land, and they were taken to South Georgia by the Argentine navy. Once landed, they damaged and robbed property of the British Antarctic Survey and ran up the Argentine flag. Rex Hunt, the Governor, ordered them to leave. On 21 March the condemned but still functioning Endurance was despatched from the Falklands to make for South Georgia, with the strong agreement of Mrs Thatcher. The Foreign Office now tied itself in knots. Would the arrival of Endurance in South Georgia only make Argentina more intransigent? Was Britain wise to adopt a high tone when it was not in a position to enforce its will? Back home, the House of Commons sought answers. A statement by Richard Luce, promising ‘firm action’, was not really believed. The numerous Tory backbenchers who felt strongly on the subject were suspicious, not only of the Foreign Office, but even of Mrs Thatcher. When Alan Clark, discussing the situation with colleagues, suggested that Mrs Thatcher would surely sympathize with those, including himself, who ‘think Imperially’, Nick Budgen replied: ‘Don’t bet on that, Alan. She is governed only by what the Americans want. At heart she is just a vulgar, middle-class Reaganite.’24

  There is no evidence that Argentina had contrived the original incident, but it certainly took advantage of it. On 23 March, the day of Luce’s statement to the Commons, the junta decided to send Marines to Leith in South Georgia. These landed on the night of 24 March. On the same day, the junta secretly brought forward its plans for the invasion of the Falkland Islands. Two days later – again, of course, secretly – it ordered the invasion to proceed. Poor Ambassador Williams in Buenos Aires, uneasily conscious that he was being kept in the dark, wailed to the Foreign Office about the Argentine Foreign Minister, ‘I have the growing impression that Costa Mendez has been less than honest with me.’25

  On 25 March, the Cabinet discussed the matter unproductively. Carrington told his colleagues that the situation was ‘escalating into something which may be very difficult politically and diplomatically’.26 Mrs Thatcher said that she simply did not know what Endurance could do. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, pressed for robust action: ‘We said we’re going to remove them.’ But Carrington shied away: ‘No – that they must go.’ An Argentine invasion of the Falklands was discussed. The Cabinet minutes record the conclusion that ‘if the Argentines thereafter threatened military action, Bri
tain would face an almost impossible task in seeking to defend the Islands at such long range.’27 The scrapping of Endurance ‘might now need to be reconsidered’. But even now the government machine and No. 10 itself were not geared to a full-blown crisis. On the same day, Richard Luce interceded with No. 10 to make an announcement that Endurance would be retained, but Clive Whitmore told him to plead his case with defence ministers, not with the Prime Minister.28 The next day, the Ministry of Defence presented Mrs Thatcher with some hastily prepared contingency plans. Deterring any Argentine aggression, the Prime Minister was informed, would require a substantial Royal Navy flotilla, led by either Hermes or Invincible. Once it had arrived in the South Atlantic, the experts judged this force would be sufficient to ward off any invasion, but ‘if faced with Argentine occupation on arrival there would be no certainty that such a force would be able to retake the dependency’. ‘You can imagine that turned a knife in my heart,’ Mrs Thatcher later recalled.29 Her great concern was that to take such action would provoke the very thing that she was trying to forestall, i.e. an invasion. If this took place before the flotilla arrived, it would not be possible to undo it. ‘That would have been the greatest humiliation for Britain,’ Mrs Thatcher concluded.30 She duly rejected the plan. On 29 March, Carrington and Mrs Thatcher flew to Brussels together for an EEC summit, and discussed the situation on the plane. Instead of a flotilla, they agreed to send a submarine* to the South Atlantic and order a second to be prepared. But despite the crisis, and the fact that Carrington had already written to the US Secretary of State, Al Haig, asking him to intercede with Argentina, they agreed that Carrington’s planned visit to Israel should go ahead. According to John Coles, who travelled with Mrs Thatcher that day as her overseas private secretary, there was as yet no belief in her mind or that of Carrington that Argentina was about to invade.31

  That day, the Foreign Office received the first indication of Argentine ships sailing, but ‘no intelligence warning of an invasion’.32 In a statement to the Commons the following day, Luce said that Britain would defend the Falklands ‘to the best of our ability’: ‘I knew deep down how dangerously empty these words had become.’33 The government was embarrassed, in the questions on Luce’s statement, when Jim Callaghan revealed to the House that in 1977, when there had been some trouble with Argentina, he had ordered British ships to stand 400 miles off the Falklands, ready to protect them if necessary. It has subsequently emerged that Argentina did not know of this action at the time,34 so Callaghan’s revelation actually held no lessons about deterrence, but the House did not know this.

  At 11 in the morning on Wednesday 31 March 1982, the Joint Intelligence Committee produced its first immediate assessment of the Falklands since the previous July. Although it hedged a bit, it did not assert that Argentina was about to invade, preferring the view that ‘the Argentine Government does not wish to be the first to adopt forcible measures.’35 An air of uncertainty prevailed in Whitehall.

  Early that evening, however, everything changed. An intercept provided London with ‘the first clear indication’ that Argentina would invade the Falklands on Friday.36 This news broke with Whitehall surprisingly empty. Lord Carrington was in Israel. Sir Michael Palliser, the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, was retiring that week. The Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS), Admiral Sir Terence Lewin,* was in New Zealand and the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Edwin Bramall, was in Northern Ireland. The Commander-in-Chief Fleet, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse,† was in Gibraltar. These absences may have added to the confusion of the day, but from Mrs Thatcher’s vantage point they may also have made a positive difference to the outcome of the whole drama.

  The first intelligence report of the invasion was brought to Mrs Thatcher by John Nott, the only relevant Cabinet minister in London that day. They met in her room in the Commons in the early evening. Nott was accompanied by his Permanent Secretary, Sir Frank Cooper. Sir Antony Acland,‡ Sir Michael Palliser’s successor, was present, as was Richard Luce. Mrs Thatcher was attended by Clive Whitmore and John Coles. Ian Gow kept coming in and out. Mrs Thatcher later described Nott’s announcement of the impending invasion as ‘the worst … moment of my life’.37 All those in the room remembered the atmosphere as gloomy and confused. The priority was drafting an urgent message to President Reagan, warning him of the impending invasion and asking him to intervene. Henderson was also told to see Haig and plead the British case. However, as was her wont when under stress, Mrs Thatcher soon hurried off down the byways of minutiae. Even worse for her than the appalling fact of invasion, however, was the attitude of those at the meeting about what could be done. Nott recalled that the meeting was ‘heavily weighted in favour of the Foreign Office search for a diplomatic solution’,38 but Luce noted almost the opposite, recording that there was much too little focus on how to try to head off the invasion by diplomatic means.39 In fact it was Nott himself, in the absence of the other principals, who was the only person in a position to have given the Prime Minister a strong positive view of his own. This he did not do. Backed up by Cooper, he said he thought that recapture was all but impossible. According to John Coles, Mrs Thatcher was aware that doubts about the chance of recapture were also held by some of the service chiefs, notably Bramall, so the balance of expert knowledge was against her. Coles recalled the exchange between Defence Secretary and Prime Minister, which he noted: ‘Mrs Thatcher: “You’ll have to take them back.” Nott: “We can’t.” Mrs Thatcher: “You’ll have to.” ’40 She had the will, but not yet the way.

  Another man who had received the intelligence report was Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord. He had just got back to his office from a day of naval inspections near Portsmouth. On his desk, as well as the intelligence report of the impending invasion, was the navy’s brief on the situation, saying, in effect, ‘Don’t touch it.’41 He was struck by the incompatibility of the two documents. If the invasion was happening, he reasoned, the navy should be doing everything possible to respond. Still wearing his admiral’s day uniform,* Leach went straight to Nott’s office in the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Being told that he was already with the Prime Minister in Parliament, Leach hurried to the Commons. Despite his uniform, the ushers in the Central Lobby were reluctant to let him through and made him wait for a quarter of an hour, until he was rescued, fuming, by a whip who gave him whisky. When at last he reached the Prime Minister’s office, he found ‘an aura of complete gloom. No one was talking. They were patently floundering.’ For Leach, it was ‘a stroke of luck’ that Mrs Thatcher was present, because if, as he had first expected, his meeting had been with Nott alone, ‘Nott wouldn’t have moved.’42 Leach thoroughly despised Nott for what he believed – unfairly – was his attempt to break the navy. Inspired by the importance and drama of the situation, the presence of the Prime Minister and possibly by the urge to get his own back, he was fired up. ‘I seriously believed that there was no point in having a navy if you couldn’t use it.’43

  Both Leach and Mrs Thatcher, who was always impressed by a uniform, were conscious that he was the only serviceman in the room. It was the admiral, not the Prime Minister, who took the initiative in the conversation. Leach asked for her political clearance to assemble a task force. As Leach remembered it, ‘No one uttered a word.’ ‘What does that mean?’ she asked eventually.44 He explained, and she asked further questions about naval capacity, such as aircraft carriers and helicopters. Leach pointed out that everything was in short supply, but not impossibly so. According to Coles, there was no direct reference to the defence cuts which she and Nott had been pushing through, but the consciousness of these was palpable.45 This gave Leach the moral advantage. ‘How long will it take to assemble the Task Force?’ asked Mrs Thatcher. ‘Three days,’ said Leach.* ‘How long to get there?’ ‘Three weeks.’ ‘Three weeks!’ exclaimed the Prime Minister, innocent of geography and of the sea. ‘Surely you mean three days.’ ‘No, I don’t.’46

  ‘Can we do it?’ asked Mrs Thatcher wi
th piercing urgency. ‘We can, Prime Minister,’ said Leach, ‘and, though it is not my place to say this, we must.’ ‘Why do you say that?’ ‘Because if we don’t do it, if we pussyfoot … we’ll be living in a totally different country whose word will count for little.’ At this, Leach remembered, Mrs Thatcher gave a sort of half-smile, as if this was what she had wanted to hear.47 By the time he left the meeting several hours later, Leach had full authority to assemble the Task Force, though not to sail.

  The meeting of 31 March has acquired mythical status in the history of the Falklands War, rightly so. For the rest of her life, Mrs Thatcher would often revert to this meeting in conversation, always making Leach the hero of the drama. He gave her ‘tremendous heart’, according to Clive Whitmore,48 and it was heart, at that moment, that she needed most of all. Diplomacy was in ruins; defeat, in the imminent invasion, was certain. Her country’s honour, her government and her career might all be lost in a matter of days. Her instincts told her to fight, but she could not do so in defiance of all expert advice. Leach gave her the necessary countervailing expertise. Nott, more generous to Leach than vice versa, admitted in later years that he had not been briefed about how the Task Force could be put together.49 He was pushed to one side. His private secretary, David Omand, who was at the meeting, noted that Mrs Thatcher’s very inexperience emboldened her; ‘She was placing the entire trust of the government in the navy.’50