Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  The next morning, Thursday, April Fools’ Day, the Cabinet met, and wrung its hands. Humphrey Atkins, Carrington’s number two at the Foreign Office, told colleagues that ‘we are trying to solve the problem by diplomatic means.’51 Mrs Thatcher added that ‘The US [is] the most powerful thing available to us.’52 Disappointed by Haig’s ‘very flabby reply’53 to Carrington’s earlier request for help, Mrs Thatcher now awaited the results of her own appeal to Reagan. Difficulties with America were soon to become a recurring theme. They caused neuralgia in Whitehall because of the collective memory of the disaster in 1956 when the United States had decided not to support the Anglo-French occupation of the Suez Canal. The result had been the fall of Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister, and the end of Britain’s standing as an imperial power. On this day, however, President Reagan did his best. Because he was in hospital undergoing tests on his urinary tract, he was not able to ring President Galtieri until 6.30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. To the amazement of White House staff, Galtieri refused to take the call. Dennis Blair of the National Security Council (NSC) staff, quickly realized why: ‘I said “No, wait a minute. They’re invading, but he hasn’t worked out yet what to tell our President.” ’ Blair then rang Robin Renwick at the British Embassy to tell him that the invasion must be going ahead.54 About two hours later, Galtieri agreed to speak to Reagan. ‘Galtieri had obviously been drinking,’ recalled William Clark, the National Security Advisor, ‘and this habit may have influenced his actions.’55 The conversation lasted a tortured fifty minutes, with Galtieri dancing around Reagan’s questions before rejecting the President’s good offices for finding an agreement. When Reagan asked for his assurance that there would be no landing the next day, ‘Galtieri responded with a portentous silence.’56 According to Jim Rentschler, Blair’s colleague on the NSC staff, Reagan warned Galtieri that ‘if armed force is involved we will not be able to side with you … you will be the guilty party.’57 He also warned the General that Mrs Thatcher would retake the islands by force and that, if she did so, the US would back her.58 Nicko Henderson, the British Ambassador in Washington, was swiftly informed of this unsuccessful conversation. According to Renwick, Henderson then telephoned the Prime Minister direct to tell her the news. Waking her up at four in the morning* he found her ‘not at all in a bellicose mood, but in a very sombre one, understanding full well the dangers that lay ahead.’ Renwick, meanwhile, ‘asked the Ministry of Defence to warn the Governor that he was going to have Argentine marines on his doorstep next morning’.59

  In fact, Henderson told Mrs Thatcher little she did not already know. Not long before midnight, she had received Carrington at No. 10. He had come straight off the plane from Israel, and was exhausted. Also present were Leach, Nott, Luce and various private secretaries. Luce was surprised, as he had been the previous day at the long meeting in Mrs Thatcher’s room in Parliament, that ‘no proper notes were taken by the private secretaries’.60* The meeting was frequently interrupted by calls from Haig to Carrington. Haig eventually reported that the President’s conversation with Galtieri had been ‘to no avail’.61 It was decided to put British troops on immediate notice of deployment to the South Atlantic. Early the next day, Leach issued the directive: ‘The task force is to be made ready and sailed.’

  ‘The next day [2 April] was a nightmare,’ Luce wrote later. ‘I knew the invasion was coming and there was nothing we could do.’62 The Cabinet met at 9.45 a.m., and was told that the invasion was imminent and was bound to succeed. Mrs Thatcher explained the plans for the Task Force, and said that the government could announce in public that ‘we have put people on immediate notice to sail for operations.’ Francis Pym was more robust: ‘Why not instruct to sail?’ ‘I don’t wish to close options,’ Mrs Thatcher replied.63 Geoffrey Howe thought even this announcement was a bad idea because it would ‘give impression that we are in a position to reverse or reconquer. We ought to convey the opposite impression.’ Nigel Lawson, however, thought that people would be passionately engaged: ‘Public opinion won’t regard this as a faraway island.’64 Mrs Thatcher wanted to avoid a parliamentary debate, preferring a simple statement to the House. She also announced that the situation would be handled by a small group of ministers – Whitelaw, Carrington, Nott and Pym. This, rather than the full membership of the Cabinet’s OD Committee, was the germ of what later became known as the War Cabinet. ‘If your four main ministers get together quickly,’ she explained later, ‘you can carry OD or anything else with you.’65

  At 11 a.m., Humphrey Atkins made a statement to the Commons on the latest situation. He was not able to confirm the invasion but reported, inaccurately, that the Governor had been able to communicate with the Foreign Office. Just as ministers were leaving the Commons, John Nott went to Mrs Thatcher’s room there to tell her, on the strength of a message from the Marines, that the invasion had taken place; this was not fully confirmed till 6 p.m. Luce gave himself some grim amusement by reading the very last intelligence report which said there was ‘no incontrovertible evidence of invasion’. Mrs Thatcher was deeply disturbed by the performance of the intelligence community. Patrick Wright,† newly appointed chairman of the JIC, was summoned to Chequers following the invasion to be dressed down at considerable length for failing to predict the attack. Wright had only been in the job for a couple of weeks, but this made no difference to Mrs Thatcher. The encounter ended with Clive Whitmore coming into the room and Mrs Thatcher saying, ‘Clive, I think Mr Wright needs a very strong drink.’66

  Once the invasion was a known fact, the Cabinet met for a second time. The most important decision before colleagues, said the Prime Minister, was whether or not to put the fleet to sea. By doing so, it was not automatically committing to operations: ‘It keeps open options.’ Ministers asked Leach, who had been summoned to attend the meeting, about the military difficulties. He said the services were ‘never confident in the face of air threat [which would be a particular problem when landing on the Falklands], but with anti-air capability we could provide, I would feel confident of success.’ Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, summed it up: ‘Do we hit back, or cringe?’ But Mrs Thatcher preferred to revert to the immediate: ‘We have to decide whether to tell the fleet to sail, and say so in the House tomorrow.’ (It had been agreed that, as had not happened since the Suez crisis of 1956, the House should sit on a Saturday, and debate in full, rather than settle for the statement which Mrs Thatcher would have preferred.) Carrington said: ‘I rather doubt whether our speeches are credible if we don’t tell the force to sail.’ ‘We should lose a vote of confidence if we don’t sail,’ said Michael Heseltine, ‘but we don’t know where we are going.’67 Mrs Thatcher asked the opinion of each Cabinet minister in turn. Only one, John Biffen – ‘a little runt of a man’ in the view of Henry Leach68 – was brave enough to say that he was against the despatch of the Task Force.*

  ‘It was a very bad day for the Foreign Office,’ Luce admitted, ‘and the machine appeared to collapse.’69 The Foreign Office had provided the Prime Minister with a memorandum, written by John Weston† of its defence department, which enraged her. The memo was bleak. It claimed that Britain would not be supported in the Security Council if it used heavy force, the European allies could not be depended on, and it could not be assumed that the US would ‘remain unambivalent … They did not support Anglo-French military action in 1956.’ If Britain got the islands back, they would be difficult to hold, the paper went on, and anyway, ‘Unless the 1,800 islanders were manifestly being subjected to inhumane treatment by Argentine occupying forces, it would be hard to persuade people that the game was worth the candle.’70 This was the document Mrs Thatcher was referring to when she wrote in her memoirs that the Foreign Office advice received that day ‘summed up the flexibility of principle characteristic of that department’.71 King Charles Street also sent her a draft for her speech the following day which she considered inadequate. It did not mention the despatch of the Task Force. At 9.30 p.m., Mrs Thatcher rang L
uce to tell him it was ‘appalling’ and to discuss various points. He offered to come round to her, ‘but she preferred to rewrite it herself in the night.’72 In fact, the drafting was done by Whitmore and Coles who simply, for lack of time, divided the work in half. Whitmore drafted the key words about the aims of the Task Force – the repossession of the islands, the removal of the Argentines and the fulfilment of the wishes of the islanders. ‘The words were considered very carefully.’73 At first they thought of aiming at the ‘restoration of British sovereignty’, but decided that it was safer and more accurate (since sovereignty had not been removed by the invasion) to use the phrase ‘British administration’. Mrs Thatcher was under great strain. At one point during the speech preparation, she realized that all the GMT hours she had been working with in the draft had been wrongly computed against Argentine time. ‘She almost visibly collapsed,’ remembered John Coles. ‘Whitmore calmed her down beautifully.’74*

  But she remained capable of the tart expression which was her version of wit. That day, the Cabinet had decided to freeze Argentine assets in Britain. Late at night, John Kerr, Geoffrey Howe’s private secretary, realized that there were not enough Lords of the Treasury around to sign the Order in Council required to act fast, so he took the necessary paper to the Prime Minister herself, because of her formal title of First Lord of the Treasury, for signature. ‘Thank God someone in Whitehall still knows what to do,’ Mrs Thatcher told him. Kerr pointed out that if Britain took Argentine money, Argentina would take British. ‘I don’t think this is the time for points like that, do you, John?’ said Mrs Thatcher.75

  In a broadcast to the Argentine people that night, General Galtieri explained that the British ‘lack of goodwill’ in negotiations had made the invasion of the Malvinas necessary. The South Georgia incident had finally proved this. ‘With Christian faith I pray’, he said, that Britain would now understand its error. He invoked ‘the protection of God and his holy Mother’ and exclaimed, ‘Glory to the great Argentine people. May this be God’s will.’ For all the vainglory, aggression and machismo of Argentine behaviour, Galtieri’s position was not completely incomprehensible. It must indeed have seemed to Buenos Aires that negotiations in which the British always happily held out the possibility of conceding sovereignty and yet never did so were a dishonest game. And the junta could have been forgiven for concluding, from Britain’s economic weakness and actions like the planned withdrawal of Endurance, that the will to resist Argentina was absent. In letting the invasion build up, Britain had failed to understand the mentality of a military dictatorship and had taken too little care for the Falkland Islanders. But Argentina had made a greater error: it did not understand the powerful interaction between the sympathy due to the plight of the islanders, who saw themselves as British, and the power of the British Parliament when roused.

  Parliament met on Saturday 3 April 1982 in a state of high emotion, stirred up by a furious press. It was widely believed that the Royal Marines at Port Stanley had been ordered to surrender without a fight. This was not the case but the government did not have clear information at that point.* It had frighteningly little that it could say with confidence. Carrington and others were right that the government could not survive the wrath of MPs if it were not able to announce that the fleet would be ready to sail on Monday. Given the scale of the disaster, some clear and immediate military response was the minimum required. Mrs Thatcher opened the debate. Alan Clark recorded that she spoke at first ‘very slowly but didactically’ but later, when being barracked, ‘She changed gear and gabbled.’76 She was not derailed by the interruptions, but she failed to rouse her own benches. The Prime Minister related the series of events that had led to disaster and set out the position: ‘I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government’s objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment.’77 These words bound her from the beginning, as she intended they should. They set an irreducible minimum. Mrs Thatcher ended her speech with sentences which reflected the feeling on both sides of the House and brought the matter home: ‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown.’ They had the right to choose and preserve their British way of life and Britain must ‘do everything that we can to uphold that right’.78

  Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, Argentina’s junta was, in the eyes of the Labour leader Michael Foot, a semi-fascist regime, and so he found it much easier to expend his contempt on it than if it had been left wing. The attack on the islands had been a ‘foul and brutal aggression’, Foot told the Commons, and he dismissed the idea that Britain’s position was in any way imperialist. He attacked the government’s unpreparedness, but refrained from a personal assault on ministers, and accepted the sending of the Task Force. It was Enoch Powell, understanding Mrs Thatcher’s mentality, who issued her with the most arresting challenge. She was known as ‘the Iron Lady’, he said. ‘In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right honourable Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.’79 Alan Clark noted in his diary, when reflecting later on the debate, ‘how low she held her head, how knotted with pain and apprehension she seemed as he [Powell] pronounced his famous judgment’.80 It was this sense of being put to the test, by Parliament, nation and her own conscience, which Mrs Thatcher carried away from the debate. John Coles noticed that it was Powell’s remark which stuck: ‘She came back to her room afterwards, and that was what was in her mind.’81

  John Nott, who wound up the debate for the government, was frequently absent from the Chamber before his speech, accumulating the latest fragments of information, and this was held against him by the MPs who crowded into it. When he came to speak, he was, in the words of Alan Clark, ‘a disaster. He stammered and stuttered and garbled … He refused to give way; he gave way; he changed his mind; he stood up again; he sat down again. All this against a constant roaring of disapproval and contempt.’82 Mrs Thatcher’s speech had not been a triumph of oratory, but she had held the line and refrained from partisan politics. Nott made the ‘terrible error’83 of attacking Labour in the course of his self-justification. It was, Mrs Thatcher privately remembered, ‘a lousy speech’,84 and he lost the House. As early as December the previous year, Nott had privately decided to leave politics, feeling that his career had been damaged by his behaviour in resisting and then accepting defence cuts, including that of the carrier Invincible, but Mrs Thatcher had refused to let him go.85 Perhaps he felt that he was getting his comeuppance: certainly his heart was not in it any longer, and he was ‘unnerved’.86

  Nott, with Carrington, whose speech in the House of Lords had, as is customary in the Upper House, been courteously received, then had to appear before an impromptu meeting of the 1922 Committee (and Conservative peers), proposed by the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling. They were assailed. Jopling remembered the backbenchers ‘baying for blood’.87 Ian Gow attended, and scribbled Mrs Thatcher a note of proceedings, with each MP’s contribution recorded and attributed. He came round to her room in the Commons immediately after the meeting, telling her how bad things had been, particularly for Carrington. His written record, of which what follows is a small part, slips into capital letters at moments of high stress.

  PACKED MEETING.

  Buck. MOST DISTURBING. MOST WORRYING … Griffiths. Best loyalty we can show is frankness. Credibility of Conservative Government here – APPLAUSE … Hogg. MUST RECOVER SOVEREIGNTY. Unless we do Party will not hold loyalty … Stokes. Working men appalled at what has happened … smell of appeasement about the FO … Waller. They should resign. Colvin. NO RESIGNATIONS NOW … Lord Onslow. SINK THE WHOLE FLEET. Aitken. DECLARE WAR AS FLEET SAILS. Lloyd. WHY THE HELL WERE WE NEGOTIATING.

  Against these assaults, Gow records the rather murmured re
sponses – ‘accept political situation for our party is bad’, ‘we have no money’, ‘geography is difficult’, ‘misunderstandings’ – of Nott and Carrington.* Carrington, who had never been elected to anything and had never had a good relationship with the parliamentary party, was badly shaken. So was Nott. Both edged towards resignation, Carrington indicating as much to Mrs Thatcher in her room after the meeting. Worried about Carrington’s state of mind, Jopling got Whitelaw to invite him for lunch at his official residence, Dorneywood, the following day, and they thought they had persuaded him to stay.88 Carrington also went to call on Lord Home for advice. Face to face, Home tried to persuade him that he should stay, but when Carrington left the drawing room to go to the lavatory, Lady Home met him in the passage and told him: ‘Alec says if he were in your position, he wouldn’t have any hesitation about going.’89 The Foreign Office had failed either to foresee or to avert the invasion of British soil. Rumours spread of a very hostile leading article which would appear in The Times the following morning. There was a sense that Carrington must now fall on his sword and assume responsibility. Although advised by Cecil Parkinson that the departure of Carrington was unfortunately necessary,90 Mrs Thatcher was most reluctant to see him go. Apart from anything else, she felt exposed.*