Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  By October, when the City of London organized a military parade to celebrate victory, even some of Mass Observation’s more sceptical correspondents had come round. Having originally questioned the cost of the war, Carol Daniel watched the parade on television and felt ‘touched when the crowd burst into “Rule Brittianer [sic]”’. Similarly, Lesley Hughes, who had initially been ‘horrified when our Task Force set sail’ and had been so ‘deeply depressed’ by reports of casualties that she went to the doctor, actively ‘looked forward to seeing the Victory March’. It was a ‘glory to watch’, she wrote, ‘and I felt very proud of our forces … I was moved to tears when I saw the old Chelsea Pensioner in full regalia openly weep. And I also sobbed my heart out when the crowd joined in with “Rule Brittania [sic]”.’ ‘All my workmates and the over thirties who I talk to on CB believe we should have gone,’ wrote Peter Hibbitt, ‘and they are glad we won.’22

  The biggest winners, apart from the islanders themselves, were ‘our boys’. The decades since the Second World War had not been kind to Britain’s armed forces, who had seen their budgets eroded, their numbers cut and their reputation damaged by the conflict in Northern Ireland. Many younger people shuddered to think of Britain as a warrior nation; some felt embarrassed by its imperial history. But now all that was forgotten. ‘In defeating aggression,’ declared George Gale, ‘our forces have sustained us and enhanced us and all we stand for.’ It had been a ‘genuinely uplifting experience’, wrote Max Hastings, to join the nation’s fighting men on the road to victory. ‘After so many years in which we have heard and said so much about British failure in so many areas of our national life, in the past few weeks I have been exposed to almost unbroken generosity, spontaneous kindness, patience [and] comradeship towards a common aim.’ His readers never doubted it. After 1982, polls showed enormous public support for the armed forces. Peter York even announced that ‘army surplus’ was now the height of fashion. A few years earlier, people would have thought him insane.23

  The other obvious winner was the woman at the top. Given her eagerness to cut defence spending, few senior officers had previously seen Margaret Thatcher as a natural ally. Yet as the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Terence Lewin, wrote afterwards, the service chiefs were unanimous in their ‘enormous admiration’ for her ‘determination and leadership’, as well as her ‘support and decisiveness when we needed difficult decisions’. Lewin himself had ‘absolutely no doubt’ that because of her grit and efficiency, ‘many lives were saved and the job was finished more quickly’.24

  Further down the chain of command, Mrs Thatcher’s star shone even more brightly. Here, as so often, the fact that she was a woman mattered enormously. ‘She felt a maternal, almost a romantic identification with the men whom she was sending into battle,’ explains Charles Moore, ‘and they responded with a chivalrous devotion, a desire to protect her as a woman and as an embodiment of national spirit’. After she hosted a celebratory dinner that autumn, her guests’ letters brimmed with admiration. ‘If I may say so, during our days in the South Atlantic, some of them pretty dark, it was good to feel that we had your resolution and the backing of Great Britain behind us,’ wrote Colonel Mike Scott, who had commanded the Scots Guards at Tumbledown. ‘None of us, on the ground in the Falklands, of whatever rank, ever had any doubts or worries about the hand on the helm back at home,’ agreed Brigadier Julian Thompson. ‘I think that you saw on Tuesday the depth of respect and, if I may say so, affection which we have for you.’ And when she rose to speak at a celebratory lunch for the victors at the Guildhall, even she was taken aback by her reception. ‘Suddenly, before she could say anything,’ Thompson recalled, ‘there was a standing ovation from the floor, started by the boys. The other politicians couldn’t believe what was happening. When Mrs Thatcher had quietened everyone down, she said, “It is I who should be down there, thanking you.”’25

  As for the officials who worked beside her during the ten-week campaign, they unanimously agreed that she deserved the credit. It is often said that the war transformed Mrs Thatcher’s faults into virtues, her stubborn rigidity becoming steadfast resolve. But it is also true that under immense pressure she raised her game. Gone were the lectures and tirades. Conscious of her military inexperience, she did her homework and listened respectfully to advice. She moved carefully and deliberately, always conscious of the risks; but if the military needed a swift decision, she never hesitated. Her Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, John Coles, previously a sceptic, was enormously impressed by her ‘courage and clarity’. ‘Without her,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘I doubt that the Task Force would ever have sailed, or even if it had that it would have fought.’26

  In just ten weeks, Mrs Thatcher’s public reputation had been transformed. She had always been seen as a fighter, but now commentators and cartoonists saw her as Boadicea defying the Romans or Elizabeth I rousing her troops at Tilbury. Abroad, she was universally seen as the embodiment of strong leadership, the personification of British courage and bloody-mindedness. ‘Now, as a result of events in those bleak and remote islands, Mrs Thatcher is the most powerful and secure leader in Europe,’ said the Wall Street Journal. The West German weekly Der Stern depicted her as a second Churchill, chewing on a cigar and flashing a V for victory. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung drew her as Britannia, holding the Union Jack aloft.27

  And at home, for virtually the only time in her premiership, she briefly transcended party politics to become a genuinely unifying patriotic figure. ‘If things had gone wrong it would have been known as Thatcher’s War,’ said the Mirror, which had spent the last three years damning everything she stood for. ‘But now things have gone right nobody should deny her the credit … The scale of her triumph, in both military and political terms, is amazing.’ ‘People can now finally see the point of Mrs Thatcher and feel more comfortable with her,’ agreed the Spectator’s Alexander Chancellor. ‘Set beside the Falklands conflict, even her economic policies appear no longer harsh but courageous.’ At Westminster she reigned supreme. Alan Clark thought she had more ‘freedom of action’ than any Prime Minister since Churchill. And in the Guardian, Peter Jenkins wrote that she was ‘soaring high on the wings of victory’. If an election were held that summer, he admitted, ‘she would be queen of all’.28

  In later years, historians often talked of a ‘Falklands factor’. On the left, the war is seen today as a radical turning point, rescuing a doomed Prime Minister from inevitable defeat. And on the face of it the evidence is very striking. At the end of 1981, Gallup had put the Conservatives on just 23 per cent, behind both Labour and the Alliance. Many commentators thought the next election would produce a hung parliament; very few believed Mrs Thatcher could win a majority. And even though the Alliance’s fortunes had ebbed in the first months of 1982, Roy Jenkins’s sensational victory in Glasgow Hillhead showed that it was far too early to write it off.

  But then came the war; and by the time it was all over, the political landscape looked very different. With every week, voters had flooded back from the Alliance to the government. After the recapture of South Georgia, the Conservatives had surged to more than 43 per cent. By the time the Argentines surrendered, they had reached 49 per cent, which would have seemed frankly incredible only months earlier. Other polls told a similar story. At the beginning of 1982, barely one in four voters had approved of the government’s record; by the end of May, half of them did so. And Mrs Thatcher’s own standing was completely transformed. By early June her personal approval rating had climbed to 53 per cent. By contrast, Michael Foot’s rating had sunk to just 14 per cent – the lowest figure for any party leader in history.29

  Yet despite the conventional wisdom that the Falklands radically redrew the electoral picture, the reality is more complicated. As we have seen, the Tories had been climbing back into contention even before the war began. With every slow, painful step towards economic recovery, their fortunes were improving. Just before the Argentines had landed on South
Georgia, they were already on 31½ per cent, their best figure since 1979. Indeed, back on 7 May, the third anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s election, The Times’s David Watt had argued that the Falklands crisis was distracting attention from the fact that her government was now in remarkably good shape, with a united Cabinet, falling inflation, rising house prices, a buoyant stock market and improving business confidence. The public, he wrote, was ‘getting used to a right-wing government’. The arguments about economic policy had died down, and on matters such as law and order and industrial relations, her instincts clearly matched public opinion. ‘People admire her’, Watt wrote, ‘even if they do not like her’ – and this before her troops had fired a shot.30

  The most detailed analysis of the Falklands factor, published in the British Journal of Political Science, suggests that it has been enormously exaggerated. Even without the war, the combination of falling taxes, lower interest rates and rising consumer spending meant that the Conservatives were always likely to surge in the polls during the spring and summer of 1982. If the war made a difference, it was simply to accelerate a recovery that was already underway, and to strengthen the image of unbending certainty that Mrs Thatcher had been projecting for years. But of course this makes for a less dramatic story than one in which a failing Prime Minister was rescued from disaster by war in the South Atlantic. And it suited her opponents to pretend she had been saved only by the war, because then they could write her off as an extremist aberration, delivered from oblivion by a twist of fate. The alternative explanation – that millions of people actually supported her policies and genuinely preferred her to the alternatives – was too dreadful to contemplate.31

  Yet something had changed. Everybody said so. ‘Britain has said something to itself,’ declared The Economist, for which the war represented a ‘sort of cultural revolution’, making it fashionable once again to love and fight for your country. In Whitehall, John Coles thought the war had fostered a ‘new sense of vigour and achievement, a feeling that Britain had not lost its former capacity for action in defence of freedom’. At the Centre for Policy Studies, the conservative historian Hugh Thomas told Mrs Thatcher that ‘with this defeat of the Argentines you have turned the tables too on the defeatism, negativism & spirit of withdrawal in our own country’. And in The Times, Simon Jenkins wrote that the war had brought back ‘national self-respect and a reinvigorated belief in Britain’s skill and efficiency’, banishing for good the hysterical pessimism about a divided, ungovernable nation.32

  In Mrs Thatcher’s mind there was no doubt that the war had changed everything. Later, talking to Woman’s Own, she tried to put it into a wider context, harking back, as so often, to the experience of standing alone against the Nazis:

  Not since World War II had we had to undertake such a big operation … In those 37 years we had gone from being a great Imperial power to being a Commonwealth … So we had to prove to ourselves again that we could do it, and this time we did it in a way more alone than ever before.

  You ask if the national pride that was so evident at the time of the Falklands campaign can be maintained. I think it will be. Because it’s always there in the hearts of our people. I’ve always known and felt it was there.

  You see, what the Falklands proved was that we could still do it, and do it superbly. There was a feeling of colossal pride, of relief that we could still do the things for which we were renowned. And that feeling will stay with us for a very long time.

  A year later, she welcomed the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Downing Street. He was on typically gloomy form. The West, he said, was weak, and ‘the young did not seem to be prepared to defend their country’. At that, Mrs Thatcher jumped in. ‘Our young people were ready to do this,’ she corrected him. ‘They had gone eight thousand miles to defend the Falklands. There was a new pride in Britain.’33

  That word ‘pride’ was crucial. Among the general public, said the Guardian, there was immense ‘pride in the professionalism of our troops. Pride that Britain can still kick back hard at those who kick us. Pride in the buoyant headlines and feeling of adventure.’ For the Daily Mail’s Robin Oakley, the war was one of those ‘moments which can lift a nation’s mood and alter its history’, marking the ‘restoration of Britain’s pride and self-confidence’. Even Tony Benn recognized that there had been a profound shift in the way that people thought about their country. ‘I feel somehow that we are at a real turning point in politics,’ he wrote at the end of July. ‘I can’t quite describe it. The military victory in the Falklands, Thatcher’s strength, the counter-attack of the right of the Labour Party on the left, the fact that unemployment has weakened the unions, make me feel more than ever before that I need to pause and think and work out a new strategy.’ He had been living ‘in a dream world believing it wasn’t really happening … I feel we have just come to the end of an era.’ Another controversial prophet of national decline put it more concisely. ‘A change has come about in Britain,’ wrote Enoch Powell. ‘We are ourselves again.’34

  This is Mac in the Daily Mail, two days after the Argentine surrender (16 June 1982).

  The irony of all this was that, before the crisis began, most people did not even know where the Falkland Islands were. In a broad strategic sense the war was a sideshow, which made no discernible difference to the lives of the vast majority who applauded it. Yet in psychological and political terms its impact can hardly be overstated. For as John Campbell points out, people did not see it merely as a struggle for some obscure islands in the South Atlantic. They saw it as a question of principle, a matter of honour and a crucial test of national spirit.

  Context was everything. A self-confident economic superpower would probably have been able to shrug off the loss of the Falklands. But a nation that believed itself to be in deep post-imperial decline could never have done so. If Britain had failed to fight or had been defeated, thought John Coles, ‘the consequences … would have been profound. The moral shock, the humiliation, for a nation which has still not come to terms with imperial withdrawal, would have been unbearable. The national decline would have been irretrievable.’ It was, David Owen told a journalist years later:

  one of those moments when the whole way that a country sees itself can be changed. If we’d scuttled out of the Falklands … [it] would have been a huge defeat. These are the fundamental questions for a country. You have to decide, ‘Is this country still capable? Is this country played out?’ This was Thatcher’s call. And she called it correctly.35

  No event since the Second World War had a more lasting impact on Britain’s self-image. ‘It’s Great Britain,’ Mrs Thatcher told the cameras on the night of victory. ‘Today,’ said the Evening Standard a few hours later, ‘the Great is back in Britain.’ In the last few decades, that word ‘Great’ had rung hollow. When Eden was humiliated at Suez, when Macmillan saw his European bid vetoed by the French, when Wilson was forced to devalue the pound, when Heath was defeated by the miners, when Callaghan took his begging bowl to the IMF, Britain had looked far from great. And in most respects Mrs Thatcher’s first three years had been more of the same: strikes, bankruptcies, inflation, recession; unemployment, riots, hooliganism, Northern Ireland; failure, disaster, division, decline. For many of those involved in the Falklands drama, this history was always at the back of their minds. Max Hastings, for example, was tired of reporting on ‘one aspect or another of national failure’, and was itching ‘to record a national success’. Even Vincent Bramley thought that ‘we British had been kicked too often’, and felt proud to stand up at last ‘for our country and its beliefs’.36

  The Falklands War, then, was a genuine turning point, the first for forty years. It banished the ghosts of Suez, and marked the end of an era defined by post-imperial introspection. It even provided a new national myth to rank alongside D-Day, Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. In this respect, everything about it was perfect. No scriptwriter could have provided more endearing victims, a cast of harmless sheep
farmers who might have just walked out of The Archers; or more fiendish adversaries, a South American junta who specialised in torturing their own people. Indeed, the look and feel of the conflict might have been designed specifically for a generation who had grown up with The Dam Busters and Dad’s Army. The great spectacle of the Task Force ploughing through the Atlantic was perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of a seafaring people who had grown up with stories of Drake and Nelson. And the pictures of the little green figures with their enormous packs, trudging stoically across the windswept moorlands, played perfectly to the self-image of an indomitable island race, never happier than when the weather was miserable and the odds were against them. Once again Britain had been written off. Once again Britain had stood alone. Once again Britain had prevailed.

  ‘It was a war’, wrote Julian Critchley, ‘which seemed to belong to an age long before Thatcherism. It was a campaign that Kipling, or the Boy’s Own Paper, might have invented for readers of gripping yarns … the kind of war which people had thought could never happen again.’ It was a campaign that banished thoughts of riots, recession, crime and permissiveness. It rekindled the spirit of Nelson at Trafalgar, the Little Ships at Dunkirk, Churchill during the Blitz. It even drove unemployment off the front pages. And that, of course, was why it struck such a chord.37