Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  Argentina’s Independence Day falls on 25 May,† and the Argentine air force chose it to launch their most successful and audacious attacks of the war. The Prime Minister was working in her office in the House of Commons that evening when John Nott came to tell her that the destroyer HMS Coventry had been bombed by Argentine aircraft and was sinking. It later turned out that nineteen men had died. Because the details were so uncertain, it was decided not to release the name of the ship until the following day, but the fact that a ship, unnamed, had been hit, was announced that night: ‘Whether the decision was right or wrong I do not know – the effect was that every navy family was anxious,’ Mrs Thatcher remembered.141 Later that evening, the duty clerk at No. 10 reported to Mrs Thatcher that the Atlantic Conveyor, which was carrying nineteen Harriers and the helicopters intended to transport troops across the Falklands terrain to Port Stanley, had been hit. There was even a false report from Argentina that Invincible had been struck. Denis Thatcher walked into the bedroom that night to find his wife sitting on the end of the bed, weeping: ‘Oh no, oh no! Another ship! All my young men!’ He sat down beside her and said, ‘That’s what war’s like, love. I’ve been in one. I know.’142 Early the next morning, Mrs Thatcher was informed that most of the crews of both the stricken vessels had been rescued, that the Harriers – though not the helicopters, eight of which were lost – had earlier been transferred to Hermes and Invincible, and that the report about the strike against Invincible was false, but she went to bed that night not knowing any of these things, and worrying, too, that ‘somewhere east of the Falklands was the QEII* carrying 3,500 troops’: ‘Perhaps this was the worst night of all … we learned the deep sorrows of war.’143

  In Mrs Thatcher’s mind, deep sorrow only strengthened her resolve to fight. Indeed, she was once again fired up by the idea that Britain should attack Argentine ships within their own waters – on the grounds that they were attacking British ones within theirs – and even launch raids on the Argentine mainland. Although ‘visibly uncomfortable at having to disagree with her’,144 the Attorney-General, Michael Havers, told her that this would be contrary to international law, and the idea was not pursued. ‘Our submarine commanders’, Mrs Thatcher wrote, ‘were left prowling up and down the line, very frustrated.’145

  World opinion reacted adversely to the onset of the land war. From the UN in New York, Anthony Parsons reported that ‘The elastic of our support, even from our close friends (with the exception of the Old Commonwealth) is stretching very thin.’146 As soon as the British had landed on the islands, Pope John Paul II, whose visit to Britain the following week still remained in the balance, sent a message to Britain and to Argentina, beginning ‘In deep anguish’ and calling for a ceasefire and the ‘magnanimous acceptance of reasonable renunciations’.147 Mrs Thatcher replied the same day, saying that his anguish ‘finds immediate echo here in London’, but that the conflict was Argentina’s fault.148† Chancellor Schmidt of Germany started to criticize Britain publicly.‡ On 24 May, Al Haig called in Henderson and Robin Renwick. He was fretting about the opportunities for Soviet and Cuban influence and pushing for ‘magnanimity’. But Renwick had been briefed on Haig’s line in advance so the two Britons came prepared. ‘Churchill was talking about magnanimity once victory had been achieved,’ Henderson told Haig; ‘… with his [Haig’s] military record he surely must understand that we couldn’t ask servicemen to risk their lives fighting their way across the islands and then tell them at the moment of victory that they had to stop.’149 Henderson also deployed a sensitive argument: ‘I reminded Haig how often he had assured me that this would not be another Suez. If the US Government now took action which would have the effect of trying to bring our forces to a halt before their mission was accomplished, the charge of another Suez would be raised. How would it be if the Cubans occupied Puerto Rico and we then said that as part of any settlement the Americans must withdraw as well as the Cubans?’150 These objections did not silence Haig, however. On 25 May, he telegraphed Pym, asking him to persuade the Cabinet to put forward terms for a just and reasonable settlement, and offered, for the first time, a US battalion-sized force (with Brazilian help) to guarantee the integrity of an interim administration on the islands.

  Haig’s latest ideas included an international peacekeeping force and a contact group of Britain, the United States, Brazil and Argentina. For Francis Pym and the Foreign Office, who still clung to the idea that there could not be ‘simply a return to the status quo ante’,151 the Haig ideas contained some merit: they also assumed, as Haig did, that Argentina, once thrown off the islands, would go on fighting, or seek some form of revenge. Mrs Thatcher felt compelled to look at the American ideas politely, but, with British troops landed, she was no longer willing to concede anything substantial. According to Robert Armstrong, she was ‘absolutely determined to see it through. She was not going to give in to pressure from Washington or anywhere else which implied any dilution or diminution of British sovereignty in the Falklands.’152 Henderson was worried by her reaction, lest it provoke the Americans, and rang round private secretaries frequently to keep abreast of her mood.153 On the various pieces of paper which, via Henderson, put forward Haig’s proposals, Mrs Thatcher repeatedly scribbled ‘No.’ He wrote in his diary: ‘Mrs T has not yet consigned me to the Tower; but I am told that her voice drops two dangerous decibels when she goes through my telegrams during inner Cabinet meetings. How much lower would it sink in patient but intolerant wrath if I included in my messages all Haig’s pleas that she should … even before we have overcome the Argentinian garrison, show magnanimity.’154

  On 26 May, Pym informed Haig that with troops on the ground there had been a ‘major change in parliamentary and public opinion’ in Britain. The ideas he and Haig had discussed previously, of an interim administration or mutual withdrawal, were no longer realistic: ‘They were just not political starters now.’155 Bowing to reality, Haig began to back away from his efforts to force a deal. He realized that Britain was not going to agree to negotiations while hostilities were under way, and that same day he reported as much to the President. ‘It would be a major error for us to pressure the British at all at this point,’ he wrote to Reagan. ‘Given the mood in London, American pressure would be in vain; we should conserve our leverage with Mrs. Thatcher until it can be used to produce results, i.e., when the islands are effectively in British hands.’156 But not everyone in the US administration was ready to accept an Argentine defeat as a fait accompli. Jeane Kirkpatrick, who dismissed the British determination to deliver victory on the battlefield as ‘part of the temperament of Mrs Thatcher’,157 kept up her pressure at the UN and with the White House.* Those around President Reagan were also anxious about the effect of the fighting on his forthcoming visit to Britain. The American press started to raise this concern, and Mike Deaver, Reagan’s Deputy Chief of Staff, told Henderson that if there was still serious fighting during the visit, ‘the banquet might not be televised and the President’s ride [on horseback] with the Queen might have to be cancelled.’158 It would look bad if the President were touring Britain and Europe during a bloodbath: ‘The mid-term Congressional elections were coming up. One of the things that Deaver’s crowd had been interested in was in showing Ronald Reagan the peacemaker.’159 Kirkpatrick, with support from Clark and Reagan’s staff, urged that the President should call Mrs Thatcher in the name of peace. He did so at 11 p.m. UK time on Monday 31 May.

  The President began with flattery to make his point: ‘Your impressive military advance could maybe change the diplomatic options …’,160 but Mrs Thatcher did not give him much of a chance. She said that British troops were only ‘a third of the way’ to reconquest. She would not countenance Reagan’s Brazilian-based peace plan, or any idea of a premature settlement: ‘This is democracy and our island, and the very worst thing for democracy would be if we failed now … I didn’t lose some of my finest ships and some of my finest lives to leave quietly under a ceasefire.’ Reagan
was interrupted repeatedly by Mrs Thatcher’s flow and found himself reduced to the occasional ‘yes’, ‘Well …’ or ‘Margaret, I …’. How would the President feel, she asked, ‘supposing Alaska were invaded’? Reagan suggested that such a situation might not be entirely analogous. ‘More or less so’, she snapped. ‘Ron, I am not handing over … I’m not handing over the island now … I can’t lose the lives and blood of our soldiers to hand over the islands to a contact [group] … after we’ve lost some of our finest young men, your [sic] surely not saying, that after the Argentinian withdrawal that our forces and our administration become immediately idle? I had to go immense distances and mobilise half my country.’ Mrs Thatcher insisted that Britain had fought unaided, and therefore had full rights about what happened next. Given the scale of American material and intelligence assistance, Reagan might well have jibbed at this 1940 notion of Britain standing alone, but he did not. ‘Well, Margaret, I know that I’ve intruded,’ he said, ‘and I know how …’ Mrs Thatcher cut him short yet again: ‘You haven’t intruded at all, and I’m glad you telephoned,’ she said.161

  In the White House, though, there was dismay. Jim Rentschler of the NSC staff listened in on the call. A ‘disastrous phone exchange with the PM’, he noted in his diary. No one had checked with the NSC to make sure that the President was properly briefed and so he ‘came off sounding like even more of wimp than Jimmy Carter’.162 Rentschler recalled: ‘Here is the strongest US leader since Theodore Roosevelt on this telephone exchange with the British PM. And he tries to put his talking points across and she would just come back and say “Listen, Ron. They were the aggressors. They asked for this. We gave them every chance to pull back. They didn’t pull back. I’m sorry. We’re not going to stop this military campaign when we’re at the point of total victory.” Reagan would try to get in and would say, “Yes Margaret. Ah … er, er, er … yes, yes, yeah …” Thatcher was just telling him what’s for.’163 Haig, too, was in a great agitation about the call. Opposed to further pressure on London just days earlier, he now reverted to prior form and rang Henderson warning of ‘great difficulties ahead in our relations … you must help the Argentines to find a way out, short of total humiliation.’164 Judge Clark saw Henderson and said that Reagan had been disturbed by Mrs Thatcher’s claim that Britain had acted on its own.

  Mrs Thatcher also chose to be angry about Reagan’s intervention, complaining that the White House had not given warning of the President’s concerns in advance of the call. For this reason, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘I was perhaps more forceful than friendly.’165 She rang Henderson on an open line soon after the call and said that she was ‘dismayed’ by Reagan’s attitude and ‘most upset’ and she wanted Henderson to tell the President so. ‘It is pure Haigism,’ she said. ‘This phrase’, Henderson noted, ‘was uttered in the most withering tone, the speaker no doubt aware of the openness of the line.’ ‘We’ve lost a lot of blood,’ she went on, ‘and it’s the best blood.’166 It seems likely that Mrs Thatcher was deploying her indignation in a calculated way. The call had not seriously altered her attitude to the President: ‘I don’t recall her being all that angry with Reagan personally over this,’ said Whitmore. ‘She understood that he was basically personally sympathetic … but that he was straddling still an administration that was pulling in different directions.’167 In an interview with the Washington Post which appeared three days after her telephone conversation with Reagan, she declared that the President had been ‘absolutely marvellous’ in his view that aggression should not pay.168 In private she drew confidence from her belief that, so long as she held her ground, ‘the administration was very largely behind the British position and she could count on their support in the final analysis.’169 In a sense she was right, but the Americans did not give up their quest for some last-minute saving of Argentine face. The diplomatic stage now moved to the UN and to Versailles, where the G7 leaders were due to gather on 4 June.

  Given the course of the fighting in the ten days after the Task Force landed, it was scarcely surprising that Mrs Thatcher hardened her attitude to any deal with Argentina. The combination of painful losses and military success fired up her passions. She worked in the spirit of Sir Francis Drake’s prayer that it is the pursuing of ‘any great matter’ until it be ‘thoroughly finished’ which ‘yieldeth the true glory’. She felt ‘an element of guilt’170 about the entire Falklands operation, both because of her ultimate responsibility for the policy failure which had made the Argentine invasion possible and because of the direct danger to the men. ‘At No. 10,’ she wrote in her private memoir, ‘one was protected and safe – one felt so guilty at the comfort.’171 Mrs Thatcher believed ever more strongly that would-be peacemakers must be made to understand that nothing should prejudice the success of the Task Force or unnecessarily endanger servicemen’s lives. She applied this not only to diplomats and foreign leaders, but also to the media. As the landing at San Carlos approached, there was outrage among the Task Force that the BBC External Services had broadcast that the Battle Group and the Amphibious Group had joined up. And when, later, British troops were preparing to attack the Argentine forces at Goose Green, the BBC broadcast the fact that the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment were within 5 miles of Darwin near by. Lieutenant Colonel ‘H’ Jones, the officer commanding the attack on Goose Green, told comrades that he wanted to sue the BBC for this. ‘There was talk among the men that the Director-General of the BBC should be charged with treason.’172 All Mrs Thatcher’s sympathies were with the Task Force and against the media. ‘Many of the public (including us)’, she wrote, ‘did not like the attitude [of the media] particularly of the BBC … My concern was always the safety of our forces. Theirs was news.’173 The BBC, in particular, seemed neutral between Britain and Argentina, and this she more than once criticized in the House of Commons. Of the Darwin report, she wrote, ‘Can there ever have been an army which had to fight its battles against media reporting like that?’174 Although Mrs Thatcher always had a good understanding of how to use the press and television to project herself in the Falklands crisis, her dislike of the media’s behaviour probably made the task of running information during the war harder for the government. Bernard Ingham complained that the role of PR was being neglected.175 There were times when the understandable desire to withhold information which might be of use to the enemy led to the withholding of information which the public needed to know, and created unnecessary anxiety about potential losses. Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, most of Fleet Street, though not the broadcast media, was extremely sympathetic to her cause.

  Once the Task Force was landed, Mrs Thatcher felt she could return to the public sphere and strengthen her broad moral and political arguments for what it was doing. Speaking to the Conservative Women’s Conference on the day after the Argentine Independence Day attacks, she deployed the phrase of Harry Truman which she was later repeatedly to apply to the conflicts of the Cold War – that she wanted not mere peace, but ‘peace with freedom and justice’.176 She emphasized the old imperial ties by quoting the New Zealand Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, ‘With the Falkland Islanders, it is family,’ and she invoked Shakespeare (King John): ‘Nought shall make us rue, If England to herself do rest but true.’* In her Washington Post interview a few days later, she took from the Falklands experience a renewed idea of the British character: ‘If you ask a person here what he would associate with Britain, it’s not this talk about the welfare state or any sort of benefits or jargon … he would say “We are a free country.” ’177

  In her address to the Conservative Women’s Conference, Mrs Thatcher also used a phrase which betrayed the problem on her mind. There was, she said, ‘no question of pressing the Force Commander to move forward prematurely’.178 But, in a sense, there was just such pressure. Two things had happened. The first was that the requirements of politics now diverged from immediate military needs. The greatest fear for the British government was no longer a negotiated settlement but irresistibl
e international pressure for a ceasefire. It would have been intolerable for Britain to have had to stop fighting with only a toehold on the islands. Because of this, it was vital for the Task Force to recapture so much ground so quickly that all talk of a ceasefire would be superseded by the restoration of British administration in Port Stanley. Unfortunately, while the planning of the landing had been so careful and intense, the plan for moving on to repossess Port Stanley was surprisingly vague. The second consideration was the home front. The War Cabinet believed that any sense that the British forces were hanging around at San Carlos or unable to break out would dismay domestic opinion. It therefore urgently wanted a move forward, and if it was not possible immediately to close on Stanley, it wanted a visible victory. An attack on the Argentine garrison at Goose Green seemed to fit the bill.

  On Wednesday 26 May, the day of Mrs Thatcher’s speech to the Women’s Conference, Fieldhouse sent Brigadier Thompson a signal making the political dimension of the risk of a ceasefire explicit and ordering that ‘With this in mind you should do all you can to bring the Darwin/Goose Green operation to a successful conclusion with Union Jack seen to be flying in Darwin.’179 In a radio telephone conversation with Thompson, Fieldhouse made it pretty clear that, if Thompson would not attack Goose Green, he would put in a commander who would.180 On the ground, though, Thompson naturally did not want to do anything premature. Because of the loss of the helicopters in the Atlantic Conveyor, British troops would have to advance towards Port Stanley on foot. Thompson wanted to be in a position to do this properly: ‘I didn’t want to charge forward with just a packet of sandwiches in my pocket.’181 He worried about moving outside the air defence umbrella now established at the beachhead and felt his logistical difficulties were not understood at Northwood. Thompson had always to bear in mind that the Task Force had only ‘one shot’. It was not like Normandy in 1944, where reinforcements could correct a big setback. If his troops took a terrible hammering, that would be that.