The legal title to the Falkland Islands – las Malvinas in Spanish – has been disputed between Spain, France, Britain and Argentina for centuries and still remains debatable. Mrs Thatcher took her stand on the defence of British sovereignty: she was on stronger ground asserting the islanders’ right of self-determination. Situated just 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, but 8,000 miles from Britain, the islands were an anomalous legacy of imperial adventurism; it was natural that Argentina should claim them. But the awkward reality was that they had been colonised since 1833 by British emigrants who had built up a British way of life and developed a fierce loyalty to the British flag – as well as total dependence on the British taxpayer.
Successive British Governments had been discreetly trying to give away the sovereignty of the islands since at least 1965, so long as they could guarantee certain safeguards for the population. Since they were militarily indefensible if the Argentines chose to take them by force, the Foreign Office had concluded that the islanders’ practical interests would be better served by reaching an accommodation with Argentina than by living in a permanent state of siege. But the islanders stubbornly refused to be persuaded. There were only 1,800 of them, yet they enjoyed an effective veto on any proposals to transfer sovereignty between London and Buenos Aires.
By the time Mrs Thatcher came into office, the Foreign Office’s favoured solution was a ‘leaseback’ scheme by which Britain would have ceded sovereignty to Argentina in return for a ninety-nine-year lease which should protect the islands’ British way of life. Mrs Thatcher instinctively disliked the idea of handing over British subjects to foreign rule. Nevertheless she was persuaded to go along with the scheme if the islanders could be brought to agree. Unfortunately the Minister of State given the task of persuading the islanders was the chronically undiplomatic Nicholas Ridley. In July 1980 the islanders sent Ridley home with a flea in his ear; they then mobilised their substantial lobby in the House of Commons to savage the scheme when Ridley tried to sell it there. Mrs Thatcher needed no more prompting to scotch the idea; and Peter Carrington saw no need to press it.
In truth some form of ‘leaseback’ offered the only sensible solution unless Britain was willing to defend the islands by military force. But John Nott, sent to the Ministry of Defence specifically to make the sort of economies Pym had resisted, judged that naval warfare was the least likely form of conflict the country could expect to face in the last decades of the twentieth century. He therefore proposed, with Mrs Thatcher’s approval, to scrap one aircraft carrier, Hermes, and sell a second, Invincible, to Australia (leaving only one, the ageing Illustrious). As it happened these two ships provided the core of the task force which retook the Falklands in 1982; had the Argentines waited a few months longer before invading, they would no longer have been available.
After the war was over Mrs Thatcher proclaimed the victory as a triumph of her strong defence policy.‘By not cutting our defences,’ she asserted in a speech in her constituency, ‘we were ready.’1 This was simply not true. The cuts she had made had not yet taken effect. But the announcement of these cuts sent a clear signal to Buenos Aires that Britain had no long-term will to defend the islands. To make the message clearer still, Nott also announced the withdrawal of the ice-patrol ship Endurance from the South Atlantic. Her removal – as Carrington strenuously argued – was practically an invitation to Argentina to invade. But Mrs Thatcher threw her weight behind Nott. At the same time the British Antarctic Survey announced the closure of its station on the uninhabited dependency of South Georgia; and, most bitter of all for the islanders, the new British Nationality Act which passed through Parliament in the summer of 1981 – a measure aimed principally at denying the Hong Kong Chinese the right to come to Britain – casually deprived them of their British citizenship. No one could have guessed that a few months later Mrs Thatcher would be declaring the Falkland islanders as British as the inhabitants of Margate or Manchester.
Negotiations with Argentina continued at the United Nations in New York. But with any discussion of sovereignty off the agenda, the Foreign Office had no cards to play. Reading the signals, the new Argentine junta headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri calculated that a swift seizure of the islands in the late summer of 1982 would present Britain and the world with a fait accompli. With a reduced navy, in the worst of the South Atlantic winter, there was no way Britain could have recaptured them even if she had wanted to. A few diplomatic protests and perhaps some half-hearted United Nations sanctions would have been the end of the matter. The humiliation might well have forced Mrs Thatcher’s resignation, but no successor would have attempted to reverse the coup. The Argentines were actively planning the operation from January onwards. As so often happens, however, the intended timetable was upset by accident. At the beginning of March an Argentine scrap-metal merchant with a legitimate contract to dismantle a disused British whaling station on South Georgia landed without specific authorisation and raised the Argentine flag while his men went about their business. Carrington persuaded Mrs Thatcher that this was exactly the sort of thing Endurance existed to prevent; she agreed to send Endurance with twenty marines from Port Stanley to South Georgia to throw the intruders off. This in turn provoked the Argentines to accelerate their preparations.
The Saturday debate
Mrs Thatcher was genuinely outraged by the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. First, she had never believed that the Argentines, after all their blustering, would actually resort to anything so crude as military seizure. Second, she was outraged that anyone could seize British territory and think they could get away with it: it was a measure of the decline in Britain’s standing in the world – the very decline she had come into office to reverse – that someone like Galtieri should imagine he could twist the lion’s tail. Third, her human sympathies were immediately engaged by the thought of the islanders subjected to the daily indignity of foreign occupation. All these reactions expressed themselves over the following weeks in high-principled appeals to the great causes for which Britain was prepared to go to war. It was not just for the 1,800 Falklanders that she was prepared to fight, but for the principles of self-determination and democracy against dictatorship and naked aggression; the restoration not merely of Britain’s national honour, but of the rule of international law.
All these emotions – of shock, anger, shame and sympathy – she undoubtedly felt deeply and instinctively. But she was also well aware, from the moment on 29 March when it suddenly became clear that the Argentines were seriously bent on invasion, that the unpreventable loss of the islands posed a desperate threat to her personal position and the survival of her Government. For two days she was seriously worried. Travelling to Brussels for an EC meeting, she and Carrington agreed to send three submarines south immediately; but these would take ten days to reach the islands. They sailed too late to deter; and in fact the news of their sailing only encouraged the Argentines to go ahead. In desperation Mrs Thatcher turned to the Americans. First, Carrington asked Secretary of State Alexander Haig; then she herself asked President Reagan to try to persuade the invader to stay his hand. On 1 April Reagan had a fifty-minute telephone conversation with General Galtieri, but failed to shift him.With ecstatic demonstrators already on the streets of Buenos Aires it was too late for the junta to back down. The Argentine flag flew over Port Stanley the next day.
But by then the decision to send a naval task force had already been taken. At a famous meeting in her room in the House of Commons on 31 March Mrs Thatcher was given the advice she wanted to hear – that, given the political will, the navy could recapture the islands. The man who gave this advice should not even have been at the meeting. The military advice was gloomy until the First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, arrived with a very different story. Leach had bitterly opposed the shrinking of the navy. He had lost the battle within the MoD; but the Falklands crisis offered a heaven-sent opportunity to prove his case. He now gatecrashed the conclave at the Commons – in full dre
ss uniform – telling the Prime Minister that, despite the difficulties, a naval task force could be assembled in a matter of days which could recapture the islands if they were indeed seized.
This was the advice Mrs Thatcher needed if she was to survive. There was, of course, no certainty that the navy could deliver what Leach promised. Sending a task force to retake the islands would be an enormous gamble: the problem, if it really came to fighting, would be assembling adequate air cover to permit an opposed landing. But the essential thing was that Mrs Thatcher had something positive to announce when the House of Commons met – for the first time on a Saturday since Suez in 1956 – on the morning after the invasion was confirmed.
The House met in a mood of high jingoistic outrage, but she was equal to it. When even Michael Foot – popularly seen as a sentimental old pacifist – was demanding a military response to wipe away the stain of national humiliation, Mrs Thatcher was not to be outdone.[e] The Argentine action, she declared bluntly, ‘has not a shred of justification nor a scrap of legality’. Accordingly ‘a large task force will sail as soon as preparations are complete’. HMS Invincible would be in the lead and would be ready to leave port on Monday.2
A task force ready to sail in forty-eight hours was more than the Government’s most excited critics could have hoped to hear. The announcement regained Mrs Thatcher the initiative. Her mixture of moral indignation and uncompromising belligerence perfectly matched the mood of the House and of the country. There was still considerable anxiety and some muttering among dissident Tories who hoped that the crisis would destroy her. But from the moment the first ships of the task force – eventually comprising a hundred ships and 26,000 men and women – sailed from Portsmouth on 5 April amid scenes of Edwardian enthusiasm, Mrs Thatcher identified herself emotionally with ‘our boys’ and skilfully rode the wave of jingoism and national unity.
Yet if the announcement of the task force enabled her to recover the initiative, the House still craved a scapegoat to purge the sense of national disgrace. First, John Nott winding up the debate in the chamber, then Peter Carrington in a committee room upstairs, were savaged by furious backbenchers scenting blood. Carrington, unused to the rough manners of the Commons, determined to resign. Having warned repeatedly against the withdrawal of Endurance, his department bore less immediate culpability for the invasion than the MoD – or the Prime Minister. But a mixture of noblesse oblige and lordly disdain – the former prompting him that someone should carry the can and the latter that it might as well be him – made up his mind to go. Carrington’s self-sacrifice was quixotic but it had exactly the desired effect, satisfying the need for someone to be seen to take responsibility so that the Government and the country could unite behind the task force.
Losing Carrington, whom she both liked and trusted – even if she did not always act on his advice – was nevertheless a blow, compounded by the fact that she was obliged to promote one of her least-favourite colleagues, Francis Pym, to take his place. Pym’s elevation was ironic, not just because she disliked and thoroughly distrusted him, but because it was he who had fought for the defence budget in 1980 when she had been intent on cutting it. Yet she was now the Warrior Queen while he was cast as the voice of inglorious appeasement.
Britannia at war
On finding herself unexpectedly plunged into a possible war for which she had no training or preparation, Mrs Thatcher very sensibly sought advice. She invited Sir Frank Cooper to the upstairs flat at Number Ten for Sunday lunch. Cooper recalled: ‘We had a gin and she asked me “How do you actually run a war?”’
I said ‘First you need a small War Cabinet; second it’s got to have regular meetings come hell or high water; thirdly, you don’t want a lot of bureaucrats hanging around.’3
She duly formed a small War Cabinet – officially the South Atlantic sub-committee of the Overseas and Defence Committee (ODSA) – to handle both the military and the diplomatic aspects of the crisis. It comprised Pym and Nott as Foreign and Defence Secretaries and Willie Whitelaw as deputy Prime Minister. The fifth member was Cecil Parkinson, chairman of the Tory party, chosen for his smooth presentational skills on television but also as a dependable supporter of the Prime Minister. Geoffrey Howe was excluded since the cost of the operation was not to be a factor. For the next ten weeks this group, plus Admiral Sir Terence Lewin (Chief of the Defence Staff), Frank Cooper and other officials, met at Number Ten every morning at 9.30, and at Chequers at the weekend.
As the conflict escalated, however, Mrs Thatcher was careful to cover her back by securing the endorsement of the full Cabinet for every major decision, starting with the sending of the task force. This was one of the very few occasions when she went round the table counting heads: only John Biffen openly dissented.4 Throughout the crisis, indeed, Mrs Thatcher showed herself – as Peter Hennessy has written – ‘almost Churchillian in the punctilio she showed to Cabinet and Commons’.5 She even introduced a second weekly meeting, every Tuesday after the meeting of the War Cabinet, to keep the full Cabinet informed of developments.
The streamlined command structure worked extraordinarily smoothly, mainly because Mrs Thatcher got on well with the military top brass. Before March 1982 she had had very little to do with the armed forces – though the drama of the SAS’s ending of the Iranian Embassy siege in May 1980 had given her a brief, exciting taste of what they could do.[f] But once she had stopped worrying about their cost, she greatly admired their dedication and professionalism. She trusted the military, and they in turn trusted her not to let them down halfway through the operation. They too remembered Suez.
Nor was it only the top brass she admired. She established an even more remarkable rapport with the men who would actually do the fighting. Just as she identified with the aspirations of suburban home-owners whom she called ‘our people’, so a part of her reached out, adopted and idealised the tough young soldiers, sailors and airmen who became ‘our boys’. She had first used the phrase in 1978, referring to the troops in Northern Ireland, but only took to doing so regularly and possessively during the Falklands campaign.7 The forces recognised ‘Maggie’ as a politician with a difference, a fighter like themselves who actually understood them better than the would-be peacemakers, who sought a diplomatic settlement to prevent the loss of life which would be inevitable in retaking the islands by force. They had not been training all their lives to have their one chance of action denied them.8 To the men in the South Atlantic ‘Maggie’ was not just a civilian Prime Minister playing politics with their lives. She was a leader they were proud to fight for ‘with a passion and loyalty’, the military historian John Keegan has written, ‘that few male generals have ever inspired or commanded’.9 Less intensely, the public at home recognised that she was no longer just another politician: the war transformed her from a bossy nanny into the breast-plated embodiment of Britannia.
From her teens Mrs Thatcher had idolised Churchill. She often invited ridicule – and infuriated the Churchill family – by suggesting a totally unwarranted familiarity with ‘Winston’. Whether standing up to the Soviet Union or defying the wets in her Cabinet, she did not shrink from casting her struggle in Churchillian terms. At the time of the 1981 budget she stiffened her resolve by reading Churchill’s wartime speeches and reciting them aloud to her staff.10 She visited Churchill’s underground war rooms beneath Whitehall before they were opened to the public. She could never have dreamed that she would have the chance to play Winston in reality. But the Falklands invasion gave her – on a minor scale – that opportunity. Eagerly, as if she had been in training for this moment all her life, she adopted a Churchillian rhetoric of Britain alone fighting for liberty, Britain standing up to the dictators, everything subordinated to the single aim of victory. ‘Failure?’ she declared grandly in one television interview, this time quoting Queen Victoria: ‘The possibilities do not exist.’11 She summoned the spirit of 1940 and, remarkably, by the power of her conviction and the heroism of her sailors and soldiers,
she lived up to it.
In one way Mrs Thatcher’s inexperience of war was a positive advantage. Practically every senior politician, soldier and diplomat involved in the Falklands was convinced that no male Prime Minister, except perhaps Churchill, would have done what she did – ordered the task force to sail and then backed it to reconquer the islands, accepting the certainty of casualties if it came to a shooting war. Most of the men around her had personal experience of war. Whitelaw and Pym both had the Military Cross; even the owlish Nott had served as a professional soldier with the Gurkhas in Malaya. A man, they all believed, would have been more vividly aware of what war involved. Admiral Lewin warned Mrs Thatcher that there would be casualties. She hated the idea, of course; but she accepted the inevitability so long as the navy and the army judged the risk proportionate to the goal. Fighting, after all, was what the forces were for.
When casualties occurred, however, she probably felt them more deeply than her male colleagues. Several of her closest confidants have described her ‘acute distress’ at the news of losses. Ronnie Millar was with her when she was told of the sinking of HMS Sheffield, just before she spoke to the Conservative Women’s Conference on 29 May. She tensed, turned away, clenched her fists, struggled for control and quietly wept; then she composed herself and proceeded to make her speech, calmly and with dignity, but cut to twenty minutes.12
The Iron Lady Page 25
