Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Mrs Thatcher was at Chequers that morning. Lewin and Fieldhouse arrived to see her with this urgent request. The War Cabinet was not due to meet until the afternoon and so Mrs Thatcher quickly assembled all those members of it who had already arrived – including Whitelaw, Nott, Parkinson, Havers and Antony Acland (Francis Pym was in Washington), as well as the two admirals – in the small white drawing room.* Although this was ‘a very charged day’ because of the dangers that seemed to be accumulating,33 it was not one fraught with indecision or dispute. Clive Whitmore, who attended the key meeting, remembered a fairly brief discussion in which ‘the issues were presented in stark and simple terms.’34 Mrs Thatcher showed no desire to gainsay her admirals. She thought the intelligence showed ‘there was no doubt she [the Belgrano] was a threat.’35 Even the Foreign Office view, as advanced by Acland, was that ‘If it hadn’t wanted to be sunk, it shouldn’t have been there.’36 There was no disagreement. As always, Mrs Thatcher was very careful about legality. Havers assured her that the extension of the ROE was legal, though he successfully proposed that they should not be extended to auxiliaries and also pointed out that attacks became harder to justify the further away from the TEZ they got.37 Within twenty minutes or so, matters were settled: the ROE should be extended, with the general purpose of allowing the British fleet the freedom of action in self-defence which the Argentines had given themselves, and the specific and immediate purpose of allowing Conqueror to attack the Belgrano. As Mrs Thatcher put it in conversation years later, ‘You don’t wait for them to get to your ships.’38 At the formal meeting in the afternoon, more information was given about the threat to the Task Force. As Mrs Thatcher remembered it, ‘We broke up desperately worried that we hadn’t got or found the aircraft carrier again. We believed the navy had been reserved for a major attack on the Task Force.’39

  That night, Conqueror torpedoed the Belgrano. At 0811Z (the ‘Z’ denotes GMT), the Belgrano had turned west because the Argentine Commander Allara had concluded that a lack of wind meant that his carrier could not launch Skyhawks against the British. The Argentines had also lost the positions of the British carriers. To protect his ships from submarine attack, Allara considered it safer for them to retreat to shallow water. Woodward guessed that this change of plan was taking place, but was not sure. In any event, no change of course would have affected his intentions, since a ship moving away from him one day could be expected to try to return the next. At 1857Z, Conqueror attacked, scoring two hits, and withdrew quickly, evading counter-attacks. About 200 men were killed by one of the two explosions. Another 850 took to the life-rafts. No immediate attempt by Argentine vessels was made to rescue them. In her private memoir, Mrs Thatcher remarked that even though Conqueror withdrew, deliberately leaving the Argentine destroyers unmolested,* they were ‘slow to pick up survivors’.40 She was implying that they did not care enough for their own men. This seems unlikely. The probable explanation is that it was not until after midnight that they realized the Belgrano had sunk.41 In total, 321 men of the Belgrano died.

  ‘Gotcha!’ roared the Sun headline of the following day, and although this was later used as an example of callousness and jingoism, it did reflect widespread popular reaction. Public opinion was acutely conscious of the danger to the lives of British servicemen and was correspondingly relieved when any threat was removed. At the time the headline was composed, only the successful torpedo strike, rather than the large loss of Argentine life, was known. There was very little popular feeling that this had been an excessive action. It was only the following evening, when John Nott was in the middle of making a statement to the press on the subject, that the news of the sinking, and of the loss of life, came through. In the Commons the next day, Nott said that the Belgrano had been close to the Total Exclusion Zone ‘and was closing on elements of our Task Force, which was only hours away’.42 When it emerged that this had been an error, and that the Belgrano had actually been moving away from the TEZ, opponents began to suspect a cover-up.

  The events surrounding the sinking of the Belgrano would later become a cause célèbre, even a ‘King Charles’s head’, among those opposed to war. It was claimed that the ship had been sunk in order to destroy the US–Peruvian ‘peace process’, but this has been disproved, notably by Freedman:43 at the time of its decision to allow the sinking of the Belgrano, the War Cabinet did not know of the Peruvian proposals. The military effect of the sinking was to prevent the Argentine fleet daring to engage the Task Force or break through the TEZ for the rest of the war. But its immediate political effect was to alter international opinion. Ireland pronounced itself ‘appalled’ and called for an end to the EEC sanctions against Argentina and a meeting of the UN Security Council to call for a ceasefire. There was highly unfavourable reaction even from more supportive EEC states, including Germany, Holland and France. Argentina immediately assumed (mistakenly) that the British had been able to hit the Belgrano because of US satellite intelligence, and so was furious with America. To a world which until then had regarded the Falklands crisis as almost a comic opera, the scale of the loss of life was horrifying. ‘We’re all trying to bring peace,’ Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, ‘but the bleeding has started.’44 It was the third anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s general election victory.*

  No one reacted with more frenzied activity than Al Haig. On the day that the decision to sink the Belgrano was made (but before either man knew about it), he and Pym had met in Washington. Haig had told Pym that he thought the imposition of the TEZ obviated the need for a major assault, and had outlined his latest ideas ‘which had originated in a Peruvian initiative’.45 Pym had told a press conference in Washington that ‘there is no other military action at present other than making the zone secure.’46 Beside her transcript of this, Mrs Thatcher scrawled her wiggly line of disfavour. When the news of the Belgrano reached Haig, he pushed his seven proposals even harder, using President Belaúnde of Peru as the link with Argentina and the means of not making the plans look too much like his own. He spoke to Henderson in what the British Ambassador called ‘an extremely active frame of mind’.47 Henderson cabled home: ‘He thought there was nothing to stop us sinking the whole Argentine fleet.’ Then there would be collapse in Buenos Aires and the alienation of Latin America. The British, Haig said, should propose a ceasefire. ‘I told him’, wrote Henderson, ‘that after waiting three weeks while the Argentines reinforced the islands we were not in a mood to rush to an Armistice just because the Argentines were losing hands down.’48 In the course of the day, Haig rang Henderson three times, reporting that Belaúnde ‘complained bitterly that British action had torpedoed the chances of peace’,49 and urging swift settlement on the basis of his proposals. Haig remained very sensitive in later life about this period: ‘There wasn’t any pressure from me. At all. You’d better look at Mr Pym there. He was a very active guy. I certainly wasn’t putting any pressure on Britain. Margaret knew that.’50 Mrs Thatcher’s memoirs speak differently: ‘Once again, Mr Haig was bringing diplomatic pressure to bear.’51* In private, she was more caustic: ‘The devil! Al Haig!’: she resented his talk of ‘diplomatic magnanimity’.52 Magnanimity is something offered by the victors: Britain had not yet won. The divisions within the American administration are well illustrated by the fact that Caspar Weinberger chose 3 May as the moment to make the British an offer so generous as to be actually embarrassing: he proposed to make an aircraft carrier available to the Task Force to provide a mobile runway.53† Despite its gratitude, Britain refused.

  In the House of Commons on 4 May, Denis Healey, for the Labour Opposition, became more aggressive in calling for a peace deal. In words not likely to please Mrs Thatcher, Francis Pym replied: ‘I agree … that in the end, whenever that is, there must be a negotiated settlement. The sooner that it comes, the better it will be.’54

  Just before 11 o’clock that evening, John Nott had to come to the House. He informed MPs that the Type 42 destroyer HMS Sheffield had been hit by an Exocet
missile earlier in the day. Sheffield was part of an ‘Air Defence Screen’ to protect the Task Force from Exocet attack, a little more than 50 miles south-east of Port Stanley, so, in taking the hit, she had, in a tragic way, been performing her function. Fires had broken out and spread fast. Eventually, the captain gave the order to abandon ship. Of a crew of 281, it later emerged that twenty had died and twenty-six had been wounded. ‘We were indeed shocked at the fierceness of the fire … so many suffered such bad burns,’ Mrs Thatcher recorded in her private memoir, and she was upset that ‘We never learned how best to announce such grievous news.’55 In this case, the decision was made to tell the world about the loss of Sheffield before the next of kin had been informed about casualties. She hated this, but thought it better than keeping people in doubt about which ship had been hit, particularly as Argentina often put out false statements which caused even more alarm uncorrected. The Prime Minister took the news very hard. After Nott’s statement in the House, she sat in her Commons room, with Willie Whitelaw, in tears. Whitelaw emerged and said to her detective Barry Strevens, who was guarding the door: ‘Don’t let anyone in. She wants to be alone.’56

  The loss of Sheffield exposed a gap in attitude between those who had served in the Second World War and the younger generation. The former more readily understood that such things were unavoidable in war. They realized that the effect of such losses would tend to harden British public opinion in support of the Task Force. Younger people, especially in the media, were more shocked and more inclined to think that such a blow would see the whole thing called off. Throughout the crisis, Clive Whitmore had made it his business to remind Mrs Thatcher that she needed to make some sort of private calculation, grim though it was, of how many British deaths the government could sustain. She refused to put a figure on it, but was interested in his answer. He told her a maximum of a thousand.57 When the news of Sheffield broke, Mrs Thatcher understood very well that the public would need all the reassurance that could be offered. Lord Lewin later recalled:

  Cecil Parkinson said he would go on lunchtime television to explain that casualties were necessary in war, but Mrs Thatcher said, ‘No no, they’ll never believe a politician, CDS must do it.’ So I was sent out to Northwood on what was ostensibly a routine visit to discuss matters with John Fieldhouse. We emerged from the headquarters to be surrounded by television reporters and I said my little piece. It was the only time during the Falklands that I appeared on TV.58

  *

  The crisis had progressed, noted the CIA, from its ‘comic opera’ stage into the grim business of killing’.59 This led Washington to plumb new depths of desperation. Mrs Thatcher soon found herself under the greatest American pressure of the entire conflict as the so-called Peruvian Plan came to the fore. ‘Will they all now give peace a chance?’ wrote Ronald Reagan privately.60 In his diary Jim Rentschler recorded the perspective from the NSC in graphic terms:

  The stance of these two disputants increasingly resembles that of a couple of staggering streetfighters, spastically-swinging at each other while blinded into fury by the flow of their own blood. Alarmed by the mounting ferocity, my Latin American counterpart Roger Fontaine and I co-author a quick memo for [Judge William] Clark … ‘The sinkings of the Belgrano and the Sheffield bring the South Atlantic conflict to an alarmingly new and perhaps desperate stage, one which throws into sharper relief the negative strategic factors which the US will increasingly confront as the hostilities persist …’61

  The memo proposed that Britain should now ‘declare victory on the military level’, and the US should launch a new peace initiative via the OAS. ‘Now that we have come down on the British side,’ the Rentschler–Fontaine memo continued, ‘our leverage with Mrs Thatcher is greatly increased; we are a de facto partner in the enterprise and can use that position to push our own interests in ways denied to us in our previous “honest broker” role.’62

  Haig pushed as hard as he could. He wrote almost desperately to Francis Pym, who had listed British sticking points with the Peruvian Plan that Haig had outlined to him in Washington: ‘I must tell you with a candour possible only between closest allies that the ideas you have conveyed can lead only to one outcome: Argentine rejection …’63 But, as the US Embassy in London recognized, Pym was not the pivotal player. A cable sent back to Washington on 4 May reported that a ‘well-informed FCO source’ had told Embassy officials that ‘the FCO is more than conscious of the pitfalls of winning military battles and losing political wars, and sensitive as well to a shift in allied opinion in recent days. The problem now, he said, was to convince Thatcher.’64

  In light of all this, President Reagan was persuaded that it was time for him to intervene personally with Mrs Thatcher. Rather than using the telephone, where her greater grasp of detail tended to put him at a disadvantage, he approved the following letter:

  Dear Margaret

  The decisions I made last Friday [the tilt] were aimed at putting you in the strongest possible position to achieve a peaceful settlement in line with the basic principles and values to which we are both committed. I believe there is now a chance to realize that aim, and that we must seize it before more lives are lost.

  Reiterating that Pym’s answers to Haig’s ‘formulations’ would not work with Buenos Aires, Reagan went on:

  I urge you to agree to have these ideas proposed by us and Peru as soon as possible, recognizing that it will be difficult to get Peruvian agreement to join us in this initiative and more difficult still to gain Argentine acceptance. This, I am convinced, is now our best hope.

  Sincerely,

  Ron65

  Mrs Thatcher summoned an emergency meeting of the full Cabinet, the first such since 2 April, for the morning of 5 May. She circulated the US–Peruvian proposals to colleagues. Pym gave the Cabinet his view that Argentina probably would not accept but it ‘would be acceptable to us’ if it did. He admitted that there was ‘an area of controversy’ about the nature of the local administration permitted under the plan: ‘I acknowledge it’s a fudge.’66 Ministers then began a long debate. Nigel Lawson feared that, once enmeshed in talks, Britain would find it difficult to break them off and start fighting again. Patrick Jenkin, on the other hand, said that ‘what happened yesterday’ (the sinking of Sheffield) meant that Britain had to offer a ceasefire. Several others disagreed. Keith Joseph said that Sheffield should not make the government alter course, and the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, warned that Conservative MPs would see British efforts to negotiate as a climbdown after the loss of Sheffield. Norman Fowler, the Secretary of State for Social Services,* said, ‘we are giving up a great deal: e.g. on self-determination,’ and Michael Heseltine declared, ‘I regard terms in front of us as abandoning the things we set out to achieve.’ Willie Whitelaw, on the other hand, argued that the Cabinet should not refuse the proposals because, if it did so, ‘We’ll lose [the] Americans,’ and might lose in the House of Commons. He recommended acceptance, sticking in a few ‘unfundamental changes’ which would improve Britain’s position.

  It was the Prime Minister herself who pushed colleagues towards acceptance. She agreed that the Peruvian Plan ‘compromises principles’, but Britain simply would not be able to get everything it wanted into the plan: ‘I fear we can’t get wishes of people and self-determination … If we can get something different on local administration, exclusion of South Georgia [the government was anxious to establish that the ‘dependent territories’ such as the reoccupied South Georgia were not necessarily to be covered by the same agreement as the Falkland Islands], guarantee from US, then worth it.’ Pym then told Mrs Thatcher that she would not get the ‘consultation with the elected representatives of the people’ that she wished to insist on. The discussion prompted Jopling to warn of the danger of leaks about a divided Cabinet. No, said Mrs Thatcher, supported by Geoffrey Howe, it was ‘not a basically divided Cabinet’, and – to counter the undercurrent which most worried her – she added, ‘Sheffield not a fatal moment’.67
The official minutes of the Cabinet recorded the collective view that acceptance of the plan was required for presentational reasons: ‘If Britain were seen to reject [it], she would be severely criticised by international opinion, which was already moving against her.’68 Far from scuppering the US–Peruvian proposals, the sinking of the Belgrano had the opposite effect. Followed by the loss of Sheffield, it forced Mrs Thatcher to be seen to accept them.

  After Cabinet, the Prime Minister replied to the US President. Unlike Reagan’s slightly chilly letter, hers was more personal: ‘I am writing to you separately because I think you are the only person who will understand the significance of what I am saying.’ She had, she said, always tried ‘to stay loyal to the United States’; the friendship between the two countries ‘matters very much to the future of the free world’. Argentina, on the other hand, did not respect basic principles. She feared that, under US suggestions, ‘we shall find that in the process of negotiation democracy and freedom for the Falklanders will have been compromised.’ The settlement proposed ‘did not provide unambiguously for the right of self-determination’, and Haig had rejected any self-determination provision because Argentina would turn it down. Therefore, ‘I have tried to temper Al Haig’s latest proposals a little by suggesting that the interim administration must at least consult with the locally elected representatives. It is not too much to ask – and I do not think you will turn it down.’69 In short, she was following the Willie Whitelaw recommendation: although complaining as she did so, she was making only ‘unfundamental changes’, while acceding to Reagan’s request. In the commentary for the President which he attached to Mrs Thatcher’s reply, Judge Clark wrote: ‘In a word, Maggie accepts the proposal.’70