Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Not everybody, of course, was equally gung-ho. The Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, one of the great champions of bien-pensant opinion, thought the very idea of fighting for the Falklands ‘preposterous and disproportionate’. To regard the islanders’ rights as paramount was ‘romantic and far-fetched’. Britain simply did not have the strength to build a ‘world safe for South Atlantic sheep-shearers’, so the only solution was to negotiate a face-saving deal. Above all, the enfeebled British military had no chance of winning. ‘Perhaps’, he wrote, ‘the Prime Minister has a daring and unconventional plan, but it isn’t going to be as simple as recapturing the Iranian Embassy. Unfortunately the Falkland Islands are not in Knightsbridge.’11

  Among Mass Observation’s correspondents, there were several sceptics. Carol Daniel thought the operation a waste of money: if the Falkland Islanders wanted to ‘call themselves British’, then ‘they should live in Britain not an island off the coast of Argentina’. Lesley Hughes felt sickened that anybody should die for the islands, especially the ‘young lads of the Navy, Army & RAF who are so loyal to their country’. ‘How would I feel if it were one of my lads,’ she wrote. ‘What’s it all about. It’s a power struggle.’ And Mary Richards could not forgive the government for letting it happen in the first place. ‘If Mrs Thatcher had spent more time on things that matter and less time figuring how to get the last penny out of us,’ she explained, ‘it would never have happened, it’s just bad politics.’ Only younger people could welcome war, because they had no idea how terrible it was. ‘I talked to two working men of my age group yesterday,’ she wrote on 23 April: ‘they had terrible memories of the last war and like me hope nothing too bad comes of this. It is rare that men talk about the last war but they said they can never forget.’12

  But voices like these were heavily outnumbered. ‘Yes it was mishandled from the start,’ wrote Margaret Bradshaw. ‘Yes we should act. Fight.’ In Darlington, Susan Gray recorded that most people felt ‘we had to fight’, because the alternative would be ‘appeasement’. And in Lancaster, Jenny Palmer, who was deeply opposed to the war, was very conscious of being in a tiny minority. ‘We have to fight, don’t we,’ said her chiropodist, a widow in her late fifties, ‘because the Russians will step in if we don’t.’ The next day, Jenny was on a shopping trip when she overheard a group of elderly men talking about the crisis. ‘She’s a grand lass,’ one said of Mrs Thatcher, to general approval. ‘We’ll show ’em we’re British, eh?’13

  At his lorry depot in Basildon, Peter Hibbitt canvassed eight of his colleagues. ‘Their collective opinion, which agrees with my own, is that there is nothing to negotiate about,’ he reported. ‘Perhaps our view is coloured by all being able to remember to some degree Neville’s bit of paper at Croydon airport.’fn1 Unlike Mary Richards, he thought older people were much more robust than their weedy, ‘pacifistic’ juniors. ‘In my own little circle’, he wrote, ‘the old Dunkirk/Blitz spirit is re-emerging.’ As for what Britain should do next, he had it all worked out:

  We should start by retaking South Georgia, which would give us a long range forward base. We should then blockade by air and sea the Falklands themselves, shooting down or sinking as necessary, and then follow this up with a large scale assault and attacks on Argentinian mainland military and naval installations …

  If we ‘bottle out’ of taking any direct actions, then we abdicate as a world power. We should then reduce our armed forces to a Home Guard and a few Home Defence fighter squadrons. Redundant servicemen could be retrained as morris dancers, potters and basket weavers, in fact any quaint pacifist pastime, perhaps we could then be a world power in tourism. Maggie has already seen us off as an industrial power.

  Sometimes it was easy to forget that he was a great enthusiast for Tony Benn.14

  For those who did not share the belligerent mood, the whole experience was deeply disturbing. The Sunday Times’s Hugo Young found it ‘strange and improbable and not a little mad’; the veteran columnist James Cameron, who had covered the wars in Korea and Vietnam, told Radio Four listeners he had never seen a ‘sillier, dottier, [more] insultingly fatuous episode’, a ‘bit of post-imperial exhibitionism that shows we have reached our dotage as a nation’. The crisis, thought Jonathan Raban, had brought out ‘all the crabbiness, the xenophobia … the hunch-shouldered go-it-alone-ism’ that he had left Britain to escape. Even the Conservative MP Matthew Parris, astounded by the ‘warlike streak’ in his constituents, felt as if ‘stranded on a sandbank, and almost completely alone’. When he told an audience in Matlock, Derbyshire, that he hoped for a negotiated solution, some hissed him, one man (‘a member of the party’, he wrote in disbelief) shouted ‘Boo!’ and another literally walked out. ‘I left Matlock really shaken,’ Parris recalled. ‘I had learned something about my countrymen which I will not now forget.’15

  Although the Falklands is typically remembered as a ‘Thatcherite’ war, the reality is more complicated. Many card-carrying Thatcherites were very anxious about fighting and would have preferred to reach a deal. Parris was astonished when, as the guest of honour at a meeting of the East Midlands Conservatives, Norman Tebbit told them that the Argentine troops looked like ‘callow youths’. If ‘a bit of willingness to negotiate’ could save their lives, Tebbit said, ‘he would be pleased to see the politicians try’. The reaction was a ‘baffled and complete silence’. As Parris wrote, he had ‘never been able to dislike him since’.16

  Behind the scenes, some of Mrs Thatcher’s closest advisers thought the war appallingly risky. Her retiring policy chief, John Hoskyns, was worried that ‘we are about to make almighty fools of ourselves’, and thought the war could wreck everything they had worked for. Most famously, Alan Walters regarded the operation as absurdly jingoistic, and pestered his colleagues with elaborate plans for bribing the islanders to emigrate, either to Britain or to New Zealand. One memo, recalled Ferdinand Mount, suggested giving them £1 million each. Even after the war was over, Walters presented Sir Geoffrey Howe with a plan to let Argentina buy out the sovereignty of the islanders, as in a ‘contested corporate takeover bid’. In Walters’s view, it would take just £50,000 apiece to persuade the islanders to vote for Argentine sovereignty. ‘It was certainly an ingeniously simple idea,’ Howe thought. But by this stage it would have been political suicide.17

  In the Commons, many Conservative MPs made no secret of their misgivings. On 6 April the Chief Whip reported that there were plenty of doubters. One backbencher told him that ‘when the blood of our own troops is shed … the country will forsake us’, while Chris Patten and Julian Critchley thought the ‘military difficulties may be insurmountable’. ‘We are making a big mistake,’ said Sir Ian Gilmour. ‘It will make Suez look like common sense.’18

  The next day, Alan Clark recorded that ‘people who should know better’ were stalking the Commons corridors, telling anyone who would listen that the whole thing was going to be a disaster. ‘It is monstrous that senior Tories should be behaving in this way,’ he wrote, blaming their ‘implacable hatred’ of Mrs Thatcher. ‘They are within an ace, they think of bringing her Government down. If by some miracle the expedition succeeds they know, and dread, that she will be established for ever as a national hero.’ The irony was that Clark had his doubts, too, but he was determined to keep them to himself. ‘If we are going to go,’ he wrote, ‘let us go out in a blaze – then we can all sit back and comfortably become a nation of pimps and ponces, a sort of Macao to the European continent.’19

  The Labour Party was no less divided. Some senior figures agreed with Michael Foot that the Argentine junta were fascists and must be fought. Yet to many of Foot’s friends, his red-blooded intervention had been deeply shocking. In Tribune, which considered the expedition ‘complete and utter madness’, a Sheffield academic sent Foot an open letter, calling it a ‘war of petty prestige and the crudest chauvinism’, and expressing amazement that he had joined ‘this tide of revived imperialist fervour’. Yet although Foot did tone do
wn his rhetoric, he never wavered in his belief that Britain was in the right. ‘Jingoism was not to be confused with the protection of our people,’ he told Labour’s National Executive. ‘We must be prepared to use force as we did in Borneo,fn2 otherwise Galtieri’s fascists would have won.’20

  On the hard left, this confirmed that Foot was just a Tory. Ken Livingstone’s Labour Herald refused to use the word ‘Falklands’, and insisted that the ‘only credible claim to sovereignty of the Malvinas is that of Argentina’. ‘A tide of jingoism is sweeping the country,’ Livingstone’s friend Jeremy Corbyn told a Hornsey Council meeting. ‘It is a nauseating waste of money and lives … The whole thing is a Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business.’ But by far the most outspoken public face of opposition to the war was, inevitably, Tony Benn. It was ‘very foolish’, he wrote, for Foot to have backed the expedition. The Falklands were ‘a colony we grabbed years ago from somebody and we have no right to it’, while ‘some 1800 British settlers do not constitute a domestic population whose views can be taken seriously’.fn3

  Benn thought Britain should cede the islands to the United Nations while talks took place, even though this would leave the Argentines in possession. And although the polls suggested that the public wanted action, he knew better. ‘A majority of the British people are against the war with Argentina,’ he recorded, ‘but the media are preventing that view becoming apparent.’ To some of his Labour colleagues, this simply proved he had lost his marbles. The soft-left Birmingham MP Jeff Rooker took great pleasure in quoting Benn’s speech a few weeks earlier about the merits of Marxism, in which he had explicitly endorsed the right to ‘take up arms … to defeat a foreign invasion, or repel those who have successfully occupied a part of our territory’. And his old ally Eric Heffer had no time for Benn’s position at all. ‘Was Tony in favour of fascist regimes taking over?’ he demanded at a meeting in mid-May. ‘The people were not with us – the majority wanted the Task Force to go … The Shadow Cabinet didn’t like jingoism, but we would have been called the Munich Party if we’d done nothing.’21

  The biggest losers from the war were the Alliance. On 25 March, Roy Jenkins had won a sensational victory in the Glasgow Hillhead by-election, reinforcing his claim to lead the SDP. His disciples rubbed their hands with anticipation at his return to the Commons, but the Falklands crisis was a disaster for him. While David Owen’s patriotic enthusiasm went down very well with the general public, the former President of the European Commission, a ‘soft man in tough times’, seemed utterly out of his depth. As Frank Johnson wryly put it, Jenkins was a one-man Switzerland, ‘prosperous, comfortable, civilized and almost entirely landlocked. His only previous contact with the high seas has been in various good fish restaurants.’

  In the Commons, Jenkins seemed at once pompous, nervous and painfully uncomfortable. On television he was almost comically stiff and portentous, more at home in 1882 than 1982. In truth, he hated the war and was baffled by the public mood. It was absurd, he said later, to treat the Falklands campaign ‘like a latter-day recapture of Khartoum by Kitchener’. But in some ways, that is precisely what it was: a flag-waving campaign to restore the nation’s honour, fought in a far-off land of which most people knew nothing. Indeed, since Britain could hardly claim to have been fighting for self-determination at Khartoum, Jenkins’s historical analogy was singularly ill chosen. The truth is that, like many other self-consciously liberal, cosmopolitan people, he was completely at odds with the great majority, and he never managed to disguise it.22

  There was, inevitably, a class dimension to the Falklands debate. The Guardian’s Peter Jenkins wrote later that it had divided the nation between the ‘educated middle classes and the patriotic working classes’, though quite a lot of the former supported the war, too. He had ‘few friends or acquaintances who supported the war or knew people who did’, but canvassers in local elections ‘found few working class households who were against it’. And there was also a pronounced cultural dimension. In many ways the public reaction was a perfect example of the old schism between what Michael Frayn called the Guardian-reading Herbivores, ‘who look out from the lush pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages’, and the Express-reading Carnivores, who believed that ‘if God had not wished them to prey on all smaller and weaker creatures without scruple he would not have made them as they are’. On the one hand, the citizens of the world; on the other, the people.23

  The most entertaining glimpse of the nation’s divisions was a book entitled Authors Take Sides on the Falklands, inspired by a volume published during the Spanish Civil War. Why authors should have had anything worthwhile to say about the Falklands is an intriguing question. In any case, the editors received 106 contributions, of which fifty-nine opposed the government line, thirty-nine supported it and eight were neutral. Of the contributions opposed to the war, many were frankly extraordinary. Brian Aldiss ‘would like to see the islands sink below the waves’. John Arden believed the war had been deliberately engineered to ‘replenish some of the international reputation lost by Britain’ during the Belfast hunger strikes. Alan Brownjohn believed the war was an ‘electronic rehearsal’ for an imminent nuclear conflict. The poet David Gascoyne sent in a splendidly pompous essay, ending with the terrifying words ‘I now append a short poem …’ And another poet, Michael Horovitz, suggested that both armies be compelled to put on neutral uniforms before being randomly reshuffled. If that failed, a dedicated ‘area of the planet’ should be set aside for people who wished to carry on fighting. Alas, he lamented, ‘this will get slagged as Utopian dreaming’.24

  Among the saner objections, the prevailing theme was sheer horror at the resurgence of patriotic feeling. Peter Cadogan was shocked to have ‘discovered the meaning and scale of British tribalism’. Margaret Drabble thought the war a ‘frenzied outburst of dying power’. Kathleen Raine deplored the ‘unlooked-for upsurge of the worst kind of imperialist jingoism’, while Polly Toynbee claimed that ‘after the first taste of blood’, the government had discovered ‘the joys of singing Rule Britannia to the accompaniment of rising opinion polls’. (Actually, much of the government’s surge in the polls came before the first casualties, not afterwards.) And as so often, one of the most memorable contributions came from Salman Rushdie, riding high after winning the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children (1981). The war was ‘xenophobic militarism’, he said, ‘the politics of the Victorian nursery; if somebody pinches you, you take their trousers down and thrash them’. ‘The huge support given by the British people to this war doesn’t need much discussion,’ he added loftily. ‘I wish only to say that it has made me feel ashamed.’25

  The authors who supported the government were a similarly eccentric bunch. Kingsley Amis thought the very question ‘How, in your view, should the dispute in the South Atlantic be resolved?’ betrayed a left-wing bias. Roald Dahl believed that ‘excessive socialism seems to have nurtured a flabby and idle breed of people who would rather compromise than fight’. Francis King, a pacifist in the Second World War, had now lost his faith and supported the Task Force, as did Spike Milligan, Alan Sillitoe and Muriel Spark. Mary Renault demanded to know whether France would be justified in seizing the Channel Islands (‘Do you really think the issue controversial? You surprise me.’) And Patrick Moore claimed that if the Argentines were allowed to ‘get away with it’, then ‘Gibraltar would be the next to go – followed, possibly, by the Isle of Wight’.

  But the most striking contribution of all came from Jilly Cooper, writing after the end of the war. ‘All I can say is I think Mrs Thatcher was magnificent, our troops even better,’ she wrote. ‘I’m desperately sorry for the families of all those who died on both sides. But I have to confess some of those Argentinian officers are so frightfully good-looking one might almost enjoy being taken prisoner by them.’26

  While Jilly Cooper fantasized about the pleasures of
an Argentine prison, the most influential newspaper in Britain had no doubt that the Falklands was the great moral battle of the age. The deputy editor of the Sun, Roy Greenslade, had been on holiday in Malta during the invasion. When he went into the office on Monday morning, he found it on a war footing. The news editor was wearing a naval officer’s cap and insisted on being called ‘Commander’, while a giant map of the South Atlantic had been pinned up beneath the newly installed portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Greenslade told his colleague Wendy Henry that he thought the whole business ridiculous. She laughed. ‘Be careful, pet,’ she said, ‘that’s a very unpopular view to hold round here.’27

  Four years after overtaking the Mirror, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun was the most popular paper in the country, with an estimated 12 million readers, the vast majority of them working-class and many of them under 30. The key to its success was its brash, shameless, fun-loving populism. It had no time for stuffy patricians or sneering snobs, and had famously thrown its weight behind Mrs Thatcher, who offered ‘FREEDOM to run your life as YOU want to run it’. But at the turn of the 1980s the Sun had come under pressure. Its formula was looking stale, sales had dipped and the Mirror was mounting a comeback. Worse, the Express group had launched an aggressively populist tabloid of their own, the Daily Star. Billed as a ‘socialist Sun’ for the northern working classes, the Star offered a similar formula of punning headlines and topless women. Its ethos, said its editor, was ‘tits, bums, QPR and roll-your-own fags’. He forgot to mention bingo, which added hundreds of thousands of extra sales. For the first time, the Sun was worried.28