Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Mrs Thatcher was also served by able private secretaries in Clive Whitmore and John Coles, and turned to Whitmore, who had a Ministry of Defence background, for advice, but she certainly did not run policy through them as she was later to do with Coles’s successor, Charles Powell. So, in a crisis that had seemed to come out of nowhere, on a subject about which, she admitted to Whitmore, she knew very little,202 she was more or less on her own. It was not surprising that she turned not only for expertise but also for moral support to the naval and military commanders. She particularly admired John Fieldhouse, the Commander-in-Chief Fleet, and, above all, Lewin himself. According to John Coles, Lewin ‘exuded calm, confidence, experience and a charm to which she was not immune’.203 ‘She had the wisdom to realize that she had a great deal to learn,’ said Whitmore,204 and Lewin was her ideal teacher, both because he was a sailor,* whose service was, until the actual landing on the Falklands, in the lead, and because of his own character. Seeing him every day at the War Cabinet, she came to rely on his judgment more than on anyone else’s. The result was that, although Mrs Thatcher had to spend more of her time with diplomatic decisions than with military ones, in her eyes the needs of the armed services came first. The key to success, as Denis advised her, was ‘Get the Chiefs, give them clear objectives and then get out of the way.’205

  Exhausted though he was, Haig did not allow the collapse of his discussions with Argentina to bring the whole business to an end. Indeed, he did not sit back and analyse the situation very clearly. Robin Renwick assessed him thus: ‘Haig, whose intentions were honourable, but who had none of Kissinger’s intellectual power, had difficulty understanding that he was trying to bridge an unbridgeable gap. Temperamentally hyperactive, he also seemed to be operating under serious personal strain … it was disconcerting to find ourselves dealing with a US Secretary of State who, under the strain, had developed facial tics reminiscent of Dr Strangelove.’206 When he saw Reagan on 20 April, Haig had a new suggestion. Instead of using his good offices any further, he would throw away earlier drafts and come up with his own proposal for presentation to both sides. ‘I don’t think Margaret Thatcher should be asked to concede any more,’ Reagan had written in his diary the day before, but he now assented to Haig’s request to revisit the issue.207 Haig invited Pym to visit him in Washington on 22–23 April for a final round of discussion. Mrs Thatcher had her doubts about Haig even before this suggestion. Speaking on the telephone to Pym from Chequers on 18 April, she said: ‘I have an awful suspicion that compromise is going to be everything to him [Haig],’208 but she did not feel that she could refuse the request. The War Cabinet agreed that Pym should go, bearing counter-proposals to those last offered by Argentina, which Britain had already rejected.

  While Haig flew back and forth, the Task Force moved steadily onward. Meetings of the War Cabinet concerned themselves more and more with the military reality. On 15 April, at a meeting which took place in the Ministry of Defence, it was given a very full account, by the top brass, of the likely course of the war. There had been suggestions of blockading the Falklands if negotiations failed; now, ‘anyone who had harboured such ideas was soon disabused of them.’209 The politicians were warned of the possible loss of aircraft and the difficulty of maintenance of equipment in stormy seas. The ‘window’ of two to three weeks in May, when a landing ‘without terrible casualties’ would be possible, was emphasized. There was also a great need for more equipment and men: ‘There was to be no respite at all’ – ‘The original Task Force seemed big but a veritable Armada was to follow.’210 Mrs Thatcher recalled the scene when the full situation had been expounded to her political colleagues: ‘I looked from the Chiefs of Staff to the committee. It was a lot for them to take and I realised that they were somewhat stunned … I remember saying everyone must look confident as they left.’211* The following day, the War Cabinet debated whether Britain should bomb enemy aircraft on the Argentine mainland. The OD(SA) minutes record: ‘Although there was in reality no intention of attacking the Argentine mainland, there might be some military advantage in the Argentinians being afraid of that.’212 It was also asked to agree the repossession of South Georgia and the Rules of Engagement (ROE) which would apply. Mrs Thatcher recalled that this was ‘the first time any of us had had the awesome responsibility of ensuring that our Armed Forces had the right instructions’.213 The recapture of South Georgia was not a military necessity, but it was seen as a political one. Mrs Thatcher pushed the idea, against the objections of Fieldhouse, though not of Lewin.214 It would right the wrong of the first Argentine aggression which had begun the conflict and would show, much earlier than was logistically possible on the Falkland Islands themselves, that Britain really was prepared to land and fight to regain territory. On 19 April the War Cabinet decided that, regardless of the uncertain state of the Haig process, the attack on South Georgia should proceed.

  Although this plan for military action was, of course, secret, it was decided that Haig should be informed. Nicko Henderson conveyed the information to the Secretary of State and then cabled London in some dismay. Haig had first of all tried to delay the operation until he and Pym and Costa Méndez, who would be in Washington, had met. ‘I said’, Henderson wrote, ‘… that I thought this was quite out of the question.’215 After further discussion, Henderson cabled again. Haig had told him that he thought the attack on South Georgia would be seen by Argentina as US–UK collusion, and that he should therefore ‘give the Argentine junta advance notice of our intended operation’.216 Henderson said he had registered ‘strong objection’ to this, and Haig had backed off, saying, which was hardly better, that instead he would publicly criticize Britain for using force.217 Henderson told him that this would cause great resentment in Britain. In the House of Commons on the same day, Francis Pym, when answering questions about possible military action against Argentina, said, ‘I will exclude it so long as negotiations are in play.’218 This was a departure from agreed policy, and so Pym was then forced to reappear in the Chamber immediately to correct what he had just said. It was against this uneasy background of rising tension – because of the secret yet imminent plans to attack South Georgia – that Francis Pym flew into Washington.

  On the morning of Saturday 24 April, Pym returned blearily to London. In her own account composed the following year, Mrs Thatcher wrote: ‘This was one of the most crucial days in the Falklands story and a critical one for me personally.’219 Pym went straight to see her. He was accompanied by Sir Julian Bullard,* the Deputy Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office whom Mrs Thatcher had passed over for promotion in favour of Antony Acland. Although Pym admitted that he had not got several of the things that Britain wanted, he believed he had a deal he could recommend. Mrs Thatcher thought otherwise: ‘The document he brought back was a complete sell-out. It differed infinitesimally from the Buenos Aires text.’220 It would, she wrote on the master copy of the American draft, create ‘Merger [of the Falklands] with Argentina’ and, by mentioning only ‘due regard for the rights of the islanders’ rather than the paramountcy of their wishes, it would have ‘signed away all possibility of [their] staying with us’.221 Mrs Thatcher’s analysis was correct. ‘Our proposals, in fact, are a camouflaged transfer of sovereignty,’ Haig later admitted to his American colleagues.222 The US records reveal that Pym was well aware of the deficiencies of the draft. At the end of the negotiations he had told Haig starkly that the text they had agreed on ‘rewarded Argentine aggression’.223 Pym appeared resigned to this. Mrs Thatcher was certainly not. She considered that Pym had been weak: ‘Haig had obviously played upon the closeness of hostilities … He is a powerful persuader and anyone the other side of the table must stand up to him and not give ground.’224 Haig had ‘got at him’, she thought, and had threatened him that if we did not agree the text he (Haig) would put his own text to Argentina and ‘then we might be on our own.’ According to Mrs Thatcher, the conversation ended: ‘I repeated to Francis that we could not accept them [Haig�
�s terms]. He said he thought we should accept them. We were at loggerheads.’225 ‘If you wanted to avoid a war,’ Pym later recalled, ‘that’s the price you would have to pay.’226 Bravely, Bullard said to her: ‘I thought the job of diplomacy was to try to bring peace.’ To this, Mrs Thatcher made no reply.227 In her memoirs, she describes what Pym proposed as ‘conditional surrender’.228

  The War Cabinet was due to meet to discuss the Haig–Pym document at 6.15 that night. With typical thoroughness, Mrs Thatcher prepared for the meeting and the expected battle: ‘The rest of the day I spent comparing the four texts that we had considered over the whole of the negotiations demonstrating how far our position had deteriorated and how the Falkland Islanders were being betrayed.’ She called in Michael Havers for his view, which served ‘only to confirm my worst fears’. Despite her objections, ‘Francis had put in a paper to the committee [that is, the War Cabinet] recommending acceptance of the Haig terms … A former Defence Secretary and present Foreign Secretary of Britain recommended peace at that price. Had it gone through the committee I could not have stayed.’ She decided to try to head Pym off before the meeting began: ‘Shortly before 6 p.m. people were assembling outside the Cabinet Room. And Francis was trying to get their support. I asked Willie Whitelaw to come and see me [in her study] and told him I could not accept these terms and gave him my reasons. As always, he backed my judgement.’229 At the meeting, Pym presented his case, but Mrs Thatcher went through the draft ‘clause by clause’ comparing draft with draft. She got the support of most of those in the room, but there was no need to outvote Pym directly. ‘John Nott found the procedural way through … His proposal was that we should make no comment on the [latest Haig] draft but tell Haig to put it to the Argentinians.’ The War Cabinet recognized this as risky, but considered it ‘virtually impossible’ that Argentina would agree to withdraw.230 Once Buenos Aires rejected the Haig proposal, the United States would have to come down on Britain’s side. The minutes of the War Cabinet simply record agreement that the view of Argentina on the Haig–Pym proposals should be sought first. They gloss over this crucial, emotional disagreement between Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, and of course she did not make any resignation threat at the meeting. As Mrs Thatcher put it in her private memoir – in a phrase she expunged when she adapted it for her published autobiography: ‘So the crisis passed, the crisis of Britain’s honour.’231*

  Why, exactly, was Mrs Thatcher so beside herself about the text which Francis Pym brought back from Washington? In her memoirs, she makes much of various differences between it and earlier plans – for example, that the provision for British naval forces to stand 200 miles off the Falkland Islands within seven days of signature of the proposed agreement and before more than half the Argentine troops would have left the islands was worse than anything previously proposed. It is true that Pym had failed to get the American security guarantee of the proposed arrangements which the War Cabinet sought. This reinforced Mrs Thatcher’s basic fear about most agreements: as Denis Thatcher characterized it, ‘Let ’em off the hook and it’s going to happen again.’232 More importantly, the language Pym had accepted on long-term negotiations effectively ruled out a return to the status quo ante, while giving the Argentines the opportunity to alter the character of the islands before a final settlement. Mrs Thatcher was bound to be dissatisfied. But she had proved that she understood the need for concessions in the past and – as will be seen – in future negotiations she would be prepared to countenance further concessions just as damaging as those now proposed by Pym. The contents of the Haig–Pym plan do not fully explain the intensity of her reaction, which provides the most blazing passages in her private memoir.

  Part of the explanation surely lies in the fact that the agreement was concluded by the Foreign Secretary alone, and abroad. As we have seen, Mrs Thatcher chafed at the lack of a proper Prime Minister’s department. She hated not having full information, and she sometimes suspected she was being double-crossed. In general, as had been the case with the negotiations over the EEC budget, she tended to become very nervous when a minister went abroad on his own on an important mission. When Pym, whom, of all her senior ministers, she trusted the least, left the country and started to deal with the – as she saw him – unreliable Haig, all her fears were aroused. Although she would never have said it in so many words, she was frightened that a political rival would return with a ‘peace’ deal which would ditch her, lose the Falklands and put him in the best position to succeed her. As Brian Fall, Pym’s private secretary, judged it, she had a picture in her mind of Pym returning to Britain with a false triumph: ‘She didn’t want a Munich-like piece of paper to be produced.’233

  But there was an even stronger reason why Mrs Thatcher was in a state of such high emotion. On Thursday 22 April, while Pym was in Washington, she was presented with ‘another matter which had made the decision on the Saturday evening one of very deep feeling’.234 Lewin and Nott came to see her. British Special Forces had landed on a glacier in South Georgia for reconnaissance: ‘There was a cruel wind which blew all the snow from the glacier and there was no way they could dig in and keep warm.’235 They therefore sent a message to be rescued. Two helicopters came in and, in the appalling weather, crashed. ‘We didn’t know whether all lives had been lost or not. It was a terrible start to the campaign. Was the weather going to beat our courage and bravery.’236 When they brought the news, Lewin and Nott did not know whether lives – as many as seventeen were at stake – had been lost. John Coles witnessed the intensity of this experience in Mrs Thatcher’s mind. When Nott brought her the news of the crash, she wept. Clive Whitmore said to her quietly, ‘There’s going to be a lot more of this.’237 ‘My heart was heavy’, remembered Mrs Thatcher, ‘as I changed to go to a dinner at the Mansion House … I wondered how I could conceal my feelings, whether this was an omen and was there worse to come. Was the task that we had set ourselves impossible.’ She went on: ‘Just as I reached the bottom of the staircase Clive came rushing out of the office.’ He told her that a third helicopter had managed to save all the men: ‘I went out walking on air. Nothing else in the world mattered – the men were safe.’238

  Years later, Mrs Thatcher described the day of the South Georgia rescue as ‘one of the most terrifying I can remember’.239 Because it was the first military adventure of the war, it was her first experience of what it was like to send men into situations in which they might die. Her natural, maternal human sympathy and her ardour for British servicemen’s welfare made her even more sensitive to this than the average male political leader would have been. She was also acutely conscious of political danger: if the first bold strike, urged on by her, had ended in fiasco and tragedy – as, for a few hours, she feared had happened – how long would public support last? Two days later, with this risk overcome, but the retaking of South Georgia not yet effected, Mrs Thatcher was naturally even less patient than usual with the demands of diplomacy. The idea that the government might nullify the efforts of British troops even as they were going in to recapture a British possession took on a peculiar horror in her mind. She had given instructions that the War Cabinet should not be fully informed of the near-disaster in South Georgia, so while these emotions seethed within her their cause was unknown to Francis Pym.

  The next day, Sunday 25 April, the War Cabinet met at Chequers as the attempt to retake South Georgia was in progress. Later in the afternoon, Mrs Thatcher was brought the news from South Georgia. British forces had recaptured the island. At Grytviken, they had spotted the Argentine submarine Santa Fe, on the surface of the water, and captured it too. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘An audience was arranged with the Queen that evening at Windsor. I was glad to be able personally to give her the news that one of her islands had been recovered.’240 Her private memoir conveys her joy more strongly: ‘I … went over to see the Queen at Windsor. It was so wonderful to be able personally to give her the news that one of her islands had been restored
to her.’241 She then returned to Downing Street and worked out how best to release the news of success. ‘I felt that John Nott should have the privilege of announcing it so got him along to No. 10.’242 Prime Minister and Defence Secretary emerged together from the front door and Nott made a statement. He read out the message from the victorious HMS Antrim: ‘Be pleased to inform Her Majesty that the White Ensign flies alongside the Union Flag in Grytviken South Georgia. God Save The Queen.’ The press then tried to get reaction from Nott. Mrs Thatcher intervened: ‘Just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the Marines.’ Then the reporters turned to her, and one called out: ‘Are we going to war with Argentina, Mrs Thatcher?’ By this time, she and Nott were turning back towards the front door. ‘Rejoice,’ she said again,243 and passed through the door. Her words were later reorganized by myth so that she was quoted as saying ‘Rejoice! Rejoice!’ and were represented as being triumphalist. In the 1983 general election campaign, Denis Healey referred to this moment and described Mrs Thatcher as ‘glorying in slaughter’. In fact, South Georgia had been recaptured without loss of life on either side, and this, Mrs Thatcher considered, was worth rejoicing about. Besides, fortune, which on Thursday had seemed so doubtful, had now favoured the British cause: ‘It had indeed been an eventful weekend. One went from near despair to confident reassurance.’244