Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says that she was ‘deeply unhappy about the US/Peruvian proposals’ and implies that Pym was weaker on the subject than she was, ‘but we had to make some response.’ She makes much of the modifications to the proposals which the Cabinet agreed and which she communicated to Reagan. She records that her original letter to Reagan had to be redrafted because it ‘revealed perhaps too much of my frustration’.71 This is true, but grossly understates the facts. The phrase about Reagan being ‘the only person who will understand the significance of what I am saying’ survived into the final draft, but had more or less lost the powerful meaning it possessed in the first. That first draft, written in her own hand, was a personal letter from Margaret to Ron, half begging, half defiant – a cry of wounded friendship. In it, she bluntly rejected Reagan’s claim that his suggestions were ‘faithful to the basic principles we must protect’ – ‘alas they are not.’ Haig was telling Pym, she said, that Argentina would not accept the Falklanders’ right of self-determination: ‘So our principles are no longer what we believe, nor those we were elected to serve, but what the dictator will accept.’ And the proposals for interim administration gave Argentina more power than before it invaded – ‘what then is to stop another invasion to achieve the rest?’ ‘Before this aggression,’ Mrs Thatcher went on, ‘the Falklands were a democratic country, with liberty and a just law. After the proposed settlement, the one thing they cannot have is the only way of life they want. Perhaps you will now see why I feel so deeply about this. That our traditional friendship, to which I still loyally adhere, should have brought me and those I represent into conflict with fundamental democratic principles sounds impossible while you are at the White House and I am at No. 10.’72 Her message was that Reagan’s proposed deal with Argentina betrayed both their common beliefs and their friendship. If she had sent it, she would have forced the President to choose one side or the other. In the end, she did not dare.

  Mrs Thatcher hints at some of this in her memoirs, but she cannot quite bring herself to say that she did, though with qualifications, approve the plan which she so much disliked. She accepted what she had avoided accepting with Haig’s original set of ideas in April, and what, at that time, she had so excoriated Francis Pym for advocating. In her memoirs, the actual decision of the Cabinet to accept and the full purport of her letter to Reagan are glossed over. In her private account, the days from 5 to 12 May are simply not described. This suggests that she had a bad conscience on the subject. After all, she had regarded Pym’s attempt to get the April Haig proposals accepted as ‘the crisis of Britain’s honour’. The ‘Peruvian’ proposals, by her own admission, would have removed the self-governing and self-determining rights of the Falkland Islanders and removed the islands from British administration. Was this, after British blood had been shed, honourable?

  Most of those close to Mrs Thatcher in the process have tended to explain her conduct away. Antony Acland considered that ‘Reluctantly, she thought the Peruvian proposals would satisfy the wishes of the islanders.’73 Both John Coles and Clive Whitmore believed that she accepted in perfect confidence that Argentina would refuse: it was ‘inconceivable’ to her that Argentina would ever accept any plan which made its troops leave the Falklands,74 but the US–Peruvian plan was something that ‘had to be explored’ to sustain the presentation of the British case.75 For Cecil Parkinson, the risk involved in accepting the plan gained no more than her ‘glancing attention’ because it was so clear that Argentina would reject it.76 This evidence by people close to the scene needs to be carefully weighed. They are certainly correct when they state that Mrs Thatcher was always highly doubtful that Argentina would ever make a genuine deal, and this made it easier for her to offer apparent concessions. However, it is also clear that she did accept reductions of the rights of the Falklanders and, indeed, of Britain, against which she had always publicly set her face, and that she did so not only out of calculation, but out of desperation. The international sympathy for Britain after the sinking of the Belgrano and even of Sheffield became dramatically less favourable and the mood at home became more febrile. Above all, the pressure from the United States suddenly increased. The interventions of Haig and, which weighed more strongly with her, of Reagan convinced her that she could no longer rely on their support unless she gave them some concessions. So she conceded. And in her letter to Reagan, she did clearly acknowledge and plan for the possibility of Argentine acceptance. The letter ended: ‘Assuming that they [the Haig proposals] are accepted by Argentines, then during the negotiation period that will follow we shall have to fight fiercely for the rights of the Falklanders who have been so loyal to everything in which you and we believe.’77 Perhaps there was a complicity between Reagan and herself implied in the letter she eventually sent – I will pretend to accept, and you will pretend to accept my acceptance, and will make sure that I am not held to it. That is the implication of her tone, but there is no evidence that she had any assurances from Reagan on any of this. On 6 May, Ingham told her that the press reported a ‘Big new diplomatic drive with UK apparently shifting its position over withdrawal as a precondition for ceasefire’.78 She put her disapproving wiggly line beside this, but it was not an inaccurate picture. The truth is that she was in a tight corner, and gave away much more than she wanted. She may have been tactically correct to do what she did, but she had troubled her own conscience.

  As before, it was General Galtieri who got Mrs Thatcher out of her immediate difficulty. It had been reported that Argentina would accept the Haig–Belaúnde ideas, but on the night of Wednesday 5 May Galtieri told Belaúnde that Argentina had rejected the proposals. It would go, instead, to the United Nations, where it believed that world opinion was now turning in its favour. Haig told Henderson that ‘they were a gang of bandits down there [in Buenos Aires]’.79 He said that, after a UN pantomime, the issue would eventually return to America to sort out, so it was important that Britain and the United States remained in close touch about UN tactics. The trouble for Britain, however, was that the US was represented at the UN by the person Henderson referred to as ‘the ineffable Kirkpatrick’.80 Argentina claimed that it had accepted all the suggestions of the UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar – though this was not the case – and sought a UN motion for ceasefire without withdrawal. Attention now focused on the efforts of Pérez de Cuéllar.

  The resourceful Anthony Parsons was ready. As early as 3 May, he had revised his view that the involvement of the Secretary-General was unwelcome to Britain, though it was undoubtedly unwelcome to Haig, who did not want anyone else to get credit for peace-making. Expecting the breakdown of Haig’s US–Peruvian initiative, Parsons cabled Pym to say that there would soon be a need to ‘fill the diplomatic vacuum’. He proposed to reply to Pérez de Cuéllar’s aide-memoire of the previous week, inviting him to ‘refine his ideas’.81 Sure enough, offers of help, mostly unwelcome, poured in after the sinking of the Belgrano and then after the Argentine rejection of Haig’s seven points. The King of Spain called for a ceasefire and proposed his good offices to the Secretary-General. The President of Mexico suggested to Mrs Thatcher that he set up a meeting between her and General Galtieri. Back at home, Cardinals Hume and Gray, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Scotland respectively, sent Mrs Thatcher a letter questioning whether there was any longer a due proportion between ends and means in the Falklands conflict.82 This caused Mrs Thatcher more anxiety than it might normally have done, because the cardinals were just off to Rome to discuss the proposed visit of Pope John Paul II to Britain, the first by any pope in history, which was planned for the end of the month, but now hung in the balance because of the war. Mrs Thatcher was very keen on the visit, and was dismayed by the potential propaganda effect of its cancellation. The handling of Britain’s cause was not becoming any easier.*

  As Parsons had correctly calculated, British readiness to deal with Pérez de Cuéllar enabled the Secretary-General to persuade the I
rish not to press their case for a ceasefire resolution. Pérez de Cuéllar was ‘behaving extremely well’, he cabled,83 by which Parsons meant that the Secretary-General was telling him what Argentina was up to. It was trying to force Britain to break off UN negotiations, so the best response was to spin them out. Possible texts flew back and forth. As she had done before when under stress about complicated negotiations, Mrs Thatcher telephoned Anthony Parsons in New York. ‘I feel a little bit remote,’ she told him. She sought Parsons’s advice about whether she should ask Pérez de Cuéllar, whom she regarded as having ‘tremendous integrity’, to see her. Referring to the sinking of the Belgrano, she felt that ‘perhaps … we did not make the best impression last weekend’; now she wanted to appear as willing as possible. ‘I realise’, she said, ‘that he [Pérez de Cuéllar] would also have to go to Buenos Aires. But in the back of my mind is that he is probably the only person who can sort something out between us. Are you with me?’84 In other words, she was still contemplating the possibility of a deal with Argentina. Parsons slightly deflected the idea of a meeting, playing the gentle part of confessor or therapist to the Prime Minister. Mrs Thatcher continued: ‘In the end you know we might have to go in … I just feel deeply … first that our people there were living in self-determination and freedom before this started and one can’t hand them over to anything less. But secondly that it is going to be the most awful waste of young life if we really do have to go and take those islands.’ In a rather mangled sentence which crammed in her concerns, she asked Parsons to tell Pérez de Cuéllar that ‘I will do everything … to see if we can upholding the rule of international law and the liberty and justice in which I believe passionately for our people to see if we can stop a final battle.’85 When writing her memoirs ten years later, Mrs Thatcher argued with her assistants that her phrase about the ‘awful waste of young life’ should be taken out, lest it upset the families of those who had died.86 But in fact her words indicate that she did constantly feel the human concern which her opponents often accused her of lacking. In the end, she backed down, and the words appeared.

  On 9 May the Argentine Foreign Minister, Costa Méndez, announced on CBS News that recognizing Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands was not, after all, a precondition of negotiations. This shift would prove short lived: just a week later the Argentines dropped this new language from their position. But, at least for a few days, Argentina appeared to be making the running. In the war of headlines, Britain now risked looking intransigent. As Parsons put it, ‘it is rapidly becoming a game of who wrongfoots whom when the negotiations break down.’87 Mrs Kirkpatrick was keen that President Reagan be made aware of the apparent shift on sovereignty, which she believed was a crucial Argentine concession. Through her contacts with Judge Clark and by asking Pérez de Cuéllar to intervene directly with the President, she pushed for Reagan to call Mrs Thatcher and urge compromise. At the same time, President Figueiredo of Brazil came to Washington and alarmed Reagan by telling him that he thought the British were on the verge of striking mainland Argentina.88 This combination of pressures persuaded Reagan to telephone Mrs Thatcher.

  The call came at a time when Mrs Thatcher was feeling particularly unreceptive. The previous day she had rejected the Foreign Office draft of a proposed message from her to the President seeking the elusive US military guarantee of the Falklands during Argentine withdrawal and interim administration. She had not liked its tone. ‘It is not the kind of letter that would appeal to him,’ she scribbled on the draft, ‘and not the kind of letter I am prepared to write. It is based on the view that I would be prepared to settle for a less than satisfactory agreement. If anything, my views are hardening because I think much of the compromise texts will be totally unacceptable to our people.’89 She felt vindicated in her tough line by the favourable results of the local elections on 6 May. In his press digest, Bernard Ingham had reported to her the newspaper view: ‘Tories seen to have achieved major victory in the local elections – much better than they dared to hope.’90 By the time she took Reagan’s call on Thursday 13 May, Mrs Thatcher had digested a morning’s press which was getting more and more anxious that Britain was conceding too much. ‘Some “populars” … feel there is a smell of Munich in the air,’ Ingham told her.91 The leading article in the Daily Telegraph was headed ‘A Dangerous Moment’. It attacked the suggestions coming from Pym and the Foreign Office: ‘The idea that men went to the bottom of the ocean so that diplomats could go peacefully to their beds would provoke fury.’92 The House of Commons was uneasy that day, too. Pym had dismayed many by speaking of ‘genuine Argentine willingness’ to negotiate, and when he said that the British government had an ‘open mind’ on sovereignty,93 Enoch Powell, who had seen Mrs Thatcher privately a few days earlier to discuss the war, denounced him. Mrs Thatcher answered Prime Minister’s Questions in more robust style. As she remembered it, ‘There was a noticeable difference in approach … between Francis and myself. His weaker line was not liked.’94

  So Reagan’s conciliatory opening lines on the telephone did not placate Mrs Thatcher: ‘The President said that he understood that the Prime Minister had been answering questions in Parliament. He thought she might like to hear a friendly voice. The Prime Minister said that Parliament was rather restless.’ She said there had now been six peace plans, and she was sick of Argentine game-playing. It was not true that the two sides were now close: there was no agreement about the interim administration or about whether South Georgia should, as Britain insisted, be treated as separate from the Falkland Islands. The President relayed to Mrs Thatcher his conversation with his Brazilian counterpart who, he said, would now talk to Galtieri and then report to him. Reagan would then talk again to Mrs Thatcher. In the meantime, would she ‘hold off military action’? Reagan was trying to set up informal backdoor negotiation. Mrs Thatcher would have none of it. She said that Britain would not delay, because time was running out. Reagan replied that he worried that Britain looked to the world like Goliath against the Argentine David. But Britain was 8,000 miles away, Mrs Thatcher exclaimed, and besides: ‘The President would not want his people to live under a similar regime.’ Reagan then told her, without identifying Jeane Kirkpatrick as his source, that he ‘had been under the impression that the Argentines had conceded the main points’. Mrs Thatcher said tartly that this was ‘not the case’. Argentine rule was ‘too much to ask the Islanders to accept’. ‘They were a loyal, true and thrifty people’ who wanted to ‘live their own lives … The two greatest democracies must surely protect that wish.’ The President replied that he ‘could not quarrel with these arguments’.95 He retired hurt. ‘I talked to Margaret,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘but don’t think I persuaded her against further military action.’96 Mrs Thatcher felt that she knew where to place the blame: ‘Mrs Kirkpatrick’s behaviour had been very vexing and thoroughly anti-British.’97

  Mrs Thatcher was very aware of what Admiral Woodward called ‘the tyranny of our timetable’,98 the fact that the South Atlantic winter would make action by the Royal Navy impossible by late June. Bearing in mind that the Task Force would be ready to try to land on the Falkland Islands from 16 May, Mrs Thatcher now had to balance these needs against those of anxious world opinion. Parsons represented to her that a British refusal to engage with the UN would lead to uncongenial proposals being tabled in New York. Against her instincts, she was persuaded to try to put together one final compromise negotiating package in a process which would not impede the Task Force but would convince the world of British reasonableness. Partly as a device to delay the British response to Pérez de Cuéllar on the various drafts, Mrs Thatcher recalled Parsons, and also Henderson, for discussions.

  On Saturday 15 May, British Special Forces mounted a successful raid on Pebble Island in the Falklands, disabling eleven Argentine aircraft and an ammunition dump. On the next day the War Cabinet met at Chequers, with Parsons and Henderson in attendance. Proceedings went on from 10 in the morning until 4.30 p.m., and v
erged on the acrimonious. Although she was wholly complicit in the process – working out Britain’s final negotiating position for presentation to Argentina on a take-or-leave-it basis – Mrs Thatcher was also resentful of having to go through it at all. She therefore took it out on her colleagues. Nicko Henderson recorded in his diary: ‘The problem was that the PM veered the whole time towards being uncompromising, so that the rest of us, and in particular the FCO participants, constantly found themselves under attack for being wet, ready to sell out, unsupportive of British interests, etc.’99 Parsons, being the diplomat at the UN, bore the brunt of her attacks. His self-confidence and sense of humour, however, won the Prime Minister over: ‘He curled his feet under the chair, saying to her “I’m getting out of the way because you’re going to kick me.” ’100*

  He, Henderson and Mrs Thatcher led the drafting, as the entire party sat round the oblong table in the Great Parlour. The two Foreign Office men were ‘absolutely superb at persuading her to have one more try for a settlement because “We’ve got to look reasonable in the eyes of the world” ’.101 Looking back on the day a year later, Mrs Thatcher did not recall undue friction: the meeting agreed that ‘Anthony Parsons should hand over the text as our final negotiating position and ask [Pérez de Cuéllar] to put it to the Argentines. We required an answer by Wednesday evening [19 May].’102 Wednesday was picked because that would allow just enough time for the expected rejection by Argentina to come before any British landing on the islands – the attack would therefore come after talks had failed and could not be accused of torpedoing them. Francis Pym proposed that, if the Argentines rejected the document, Britain should publish it, to display its moderation: ‘The idea was a good one.’103

  The text agreed several compromises of the British position, or, as Mrs Thatcher preferred to think of it, put forward ‘a very reasonable offer’.104 Although keeping South Georgia and the other dependencies out of the deal in a side-letter, it abandoned the British commitment to resumed British administration of the Falklands proper in favour of a UN administrator supervising a mutual withdrawal. The administrator would then govern in consultation with the representative institutions of the islands, which would include Argentines (even though hardly any Argentines lived on the Falklands). Self-determination was not mentioned, although references were included to Article 73 of the UN Charter which mentions ‘developing self-government’. Under the British plan, the UN would conduct the ensuing negotiations about sovereignty which, given Argentine intransigence, were not likely to go Britain’s way. When the meeting ended, Parsons felt that so much had been conceded that he needed to be doubly sure that Mrs Thatcher understood what had happened: