The Iron Lady

by John Campbell

  During these climactic three weeks, when the fate of the task force, and of her Government, hung on events 8,000 miles away which were beyond her control, Mrs Thatcher lived on her nerves, barely sleeping, impatient for news, yet obliged to keep up as far as possible a normal round of duties and engagements. On the day of the San Carlos landing she was due to open a warehouse in Finchley: a date she had already cancelled once. ‘Of course,’ she told her daughter Carol, ‘all my thoughts were in the South Atlantic. I was desperately worried… But if I hadn’t gone to the function, people would have thought something was wrong – I had to carry on as normal.’33 On the way to the constituency she was told that the operation had started badly: three helicopter pilots had been killed. She was photographed climbing into her car, her face awash with tears, but tactfully the picture was never printed. Back at the constituency office, she rested for an hour and a half before another engagement. ‘Her exhaustion was almost complete.’ While she was there, however, the news came through that the bridgehead had been established at San Carlos Bay:

  For the second time that day the Prime Minister froze… and she stayed motionless for a full thirty seconds. Then her whole body came alive again with a huge jerk, as she said: ‘That’s it. That’s what I’ve been waiting for all day. Let’s go!’ The bustling practical Margaret Thatcher was back in action.34

  Back in Downing Street later that evening she was transformed. ‘These are nervous days,’ she told the crowd which had by then gathered, ‘but we have marvellous fighting forces: everyone is behind them. We are fighting a just cause, and we wish them Godspeed.’35

  The following days were intensely difficult for her. She only visited operational HQ at Northwood twice, first during the South Georgia action on 23 April, when her supportiveness and determination made a deep impression, and then at the very end, when she and Nott went to monitor the final hours of the campaign. In the latter stages she was very hyped up and sometimes, in the words of one member of the War Cabinet, ‘dangerously gung-ho’: she had to be restrained from ordering an attack on the Argentine aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo which at that stage would have been seen as a gratuitous provocation of world opinion, far worse than the Belgrano.36 Her impatience was reinforced by renewed American and UN pressure for a ceasefire. Once the beachhead at San Carlos had been achieved, still more once Goose Green had been taken, the Americans urged that Britain had made her point: to go on would merely be to inflict humiliation on Argentina. But Mrs Thatcher had no problem with that. It would have been ‘quite wrong’, she wrote in her memoirs ‘to snatch diplomatic defeat from the jaws of military victory’.37 Besides, she could not leave her troops stranded in inhospitable terrain halfway to Stanley. So she was ‘dismayed’ and ‘horrified’ when Reagan (prompted by Jeane Kirkpatrick) telephoned her again on 31 May, begging her to follow Churchill’s dictum of ‘magnanimity in victory’. So far as she was concerned the victory was not yet won.

  On 4 June Parsons had to use Britain’s veto to block a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire (while the Americans performed a humiliating ‘flip-flop’ and ended up facing both ways at once). Simultaneously at the G7 summit at Versailles Reagan presented new proposals for a UN peace-keeping administration, with US involvement to prevent the Argentines using it to swamp the islands with new immigrants. By now both the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence were becoming alarmed at the implications of a military victory which would commit Britain to defending the islands for an indefinite future. On 6 June Henderson even found Mrs Thatcher herself marginally more ready to consider a solution short of the restoration of full colonial rule. ‘I can’t say that she liked it, but she listened.’ Realising that there was a problem, however, she persuaded herself that the answer lay in the economic development of the islands. She toyed with the idea of a South Atlantic Federation of British dependencies, including Ascension, St Helena and South Georgia, which would attract Latin American investment, under US protection; but she still resented the need to show flexibility in order to secure American support. She insisted that she would be very reasonable – ‘provided I get my way’.38

  She finally got her victory on Monday 14 June. Just seventy-two days after the traumatic Saturday debate on 2 April she was able to tell a cheering House of Commons that white flags were flying over Port Stanley39 – though the official Argentine surrender did not come until some hours later. She then returned to Downing Street where the crowd sang ‘Rule, Britannia!’.This was the defining moment of her premiership. While careful to share the credit with the commanders who had planned the campaign and with ‘our boys’ who had executed it so heroically, there was no mistaking her determination to extract the maximum political dividend for herself and her Government. In the flush of victory, recriminations about the responsibility for letting the Argentine invasion happen in the first place were easily brushed aside.A commission of inquiry, chaired by the veteran mandarin Lord Franks, had to be set up, with a carefully balanced team of senior privy councillors and civil servants to look into the course of events leading up to the invasion. But it was inconceivable that its report – delivered the following January – would seriously criticise the victorious Government. From the humiliation of 2 April Mrs Thatcher had plucked a national and personal triumph; she had gambled dangerously but she had hit the political jackpot and no one could take her winnings from her now. ‘A Labour Government,’ she told Foot scornfully,‘would never have fired a shot.’40 Over the weeks and months following the Argentine surrender she had no compunction about exploiting her victory for all it was worth.

  Clearly she could not make a habit of exalting her own contribution – she attracted a good deal of criticism when she took the salute at a victory parade through the City of London, usurping, many thought, a function that was properly the Queen’s – but over the summer she lost no opportunity to beat the patriotic drum. ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,’ she claimed in a speech at an open-air rally on Cheltenham racecourse on 3 July. ‘Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’41

  Margaret Roberts had always been a flag-waving British patriot. From the very start of her career as a young Tory candidate in Dartford in 1949, her speeches were full of the ambition of restoring British ‘greatness’. Thirty years later she entered Downing Street passionately committed to reversing the sense of national ‘decline’. She had relished fighting Britain’s corner against the rest of the EC at Dublin and Strasbourg; she hated lowering the flag on Rhodesia. But nothing gave her such an opportunity to wrap herself in the Union Jack as did the Falklands. The symbolism and language of military leadership gave her patriotism a new resonance. A Prime Minister in war – with a real enemy, troops committed, ships being sunk, lives lost – is a national leader in a way that he or she can never be in peace. Most other contemporary British politicians would have been uncomfortable in the role of war leader: Mrs Thatcher instinctively embraced it, enthusiastically identifying herself with ‘our boys’ and glorying unashamedly in the combat, the heroism and the sacrifice of war. Victory in war lent her an iconic status as a national emblem matched by none of her predecessors, with the single exception of Churchill.

  It also transformed her political prospects. Despite the precedent of Churchill in 1945, it was now practically impossible that she could lose the next election, whenever she should choose to hold it. Only six months earlier she had been the most unpopular Prime Minister in polling memory, her Government divided and her party facing wipeout at the hands of a two-pronged opposition. By March there had been some recovery, but just a week before the invasion of the Falklands Roy Jenkins had won the Hillhead by-election to keep the SDP momentum rolling; the electorate was still divided equally between the Government, Labour and the Alliance. Both opposition parties had had a difficult war – Labour increasingly critical but constrained by Foot’s initial support for the task force, the Alliance (despite David Owen�
�s best efforts) looking weak and irrelevant. By July Mrs Thatcher’s personal approval rating had doubled (to 52 per cent) and the Conservatives had left the other parties scrapping for a distant second place – which is how the position remained up to June 1983. Mrs Thatcher was not only virtually guaranteed a second term in Downing Street; after three years of battling her own colleagues, her authority within the Tory party was suddenly unassailable.

  The Falklands war was a watershed in domestic politics, leading directly to the unprecedented domination that Mrs Thatcher established over the next eight years. As well as hugely boosting her authority and self-confidence, the experience of war leadership encouraged autocratic tendencies which had hitherto been contained. In particular the speed and convenience of working through a small War Cabinet led her increasingly to by-pass the full Cabinet in favour of decision-making through hand-picked ad hoc committees and her personal advisers. Meanwhile, the conviction that it was only her firmness which had brought victory encouraged her belief that a refusal to compromise was the only language foreigners understood.

  The Falklands gave Mrs Thatcher a unique opportunity to become a truly national leader. Matthew Parris was one Tory MP who hoped that she might now ‘emerge as a bigger person; she will acquire mercy; she will find grace’.42 Unfortunately it had the opposite effect. Victory in the South Atlantic exacerbated her worst characteristics, not her best. After 1982 she used her augmented authority to pursue more self-righteously than before her particular vision of British society, and to trample on those groups, institutions and traditions which did not share it. Having routed the external enemy, she was soon looking for enemies within on whom she could visit the same treatment.

  The war undoubtedly enhanced British prestige in the world, though possibly to a lesser extent than Mrs Thatcher wished to believe. It certainly confirmed the high professional reputation of Britain’s armed forces: the Americans frankly contrasted the success of the Falklands operation with some of their own forces’ bungled efforts in Lebanon and Iran, and British military advisers found themselves in demand around the world to train foreign armies. It also increased Mrs Thatcher’s personal visibility on the international stage: her status as a global superstar, mobbed by crowds wherever she went, reflected credit, or at least heightened interest, back on Britain. But the world was as much amazed as it was impressed by the lengths Britain was prepared to go to recapture the Falklands. Mrs Thatcher invoked fine principles of defending democracy and standing up to dictators, investing the war with high global symbolism that went down well in Berlin, Hong Kong, Gibraltar and other threatened enclaves. But to many elsewhere the Falklands seemed a cause too petty to justify the expense of lives and treasure.

  Of course it was disproportionate. The final casualty count was astonishingly low – 255 British servicemen killed, 777 wounded (and about one-tenth of those permanently disabled). This was actually fewer than were killed in the first five years of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’; but it was still a high human price, and it could easily have been much higher.[g] The material cost was six ships and twenty aircraft lost. The immediate financial cost has been reckoned anywhere between £350 million and £900 million, the longer-term expense of replacing lost vessels, ordnance and equipment at nearly £2 billion. Another £250 million was spent over the next three years on extending the runway at Port Stanley and improving the islands’ defences, quite apart from the expense of keeping a garrison on the Falklands for the foreseeable future. Altogether the cost of the war and its immediate aftermath was around £3 billion.43 It would have been cheaper to have given every islander £1 million to settle elsewhere. This was an ironic outcome of a crisis whose origins lay in the MoD’s plans to cut defence expenditure. Moreover, those cuts themselves had to be substantially reversed. The sale of Invincible to Australia was cancelled, and the navy’s complement of frigates and destroyers was restored to fifty-five. If Sir Henry Leach had an ulterior motive in proposing sending the task force on 31 March he was resoundingly successful. By recovering the Falklands the navy saved itself. But from the global perspective of British strategic defence policy, the war was a disastrous diversion from sanity. Its outcome was to preserve in perpetuity, at vastly increased expense, the anomaly which successive British governments, including Mrs Thatcher’s, had been trying to offload.

  Having staked her political destiny on the recovery of the islands, Mrs Thatcher could not subsequently admit to any doubts that they were worth it.44 She invested the homely names of Goose Green and Tumbledown with the glamour of Alamein and Agincourt; and in January 1983, accompanied by Denis and Bernard Ingham, she made the long uncomfortable flight by VC-10 to Ascension Island, then on by Hercules bomber to Port Stanley to receive the islanders’ gratitude in person. She reverently walked – in most unsuitable shoes – over the hallowed ground where her boys had fought and died, while Denis memorably characterised the islands as ‘miles and miles of bugger all’ and longed for a snifter in the Upland Goose.45 The return journey was even more uncomfortable, since their intended Hercules developed engine trouble. The replacement, hurriedly made ready for them, offered light or warmth, but not both. Mrs Thatcher chose light, huddled herself in as many blankets as could be found, and settled down to read the Franks Report into the causes of the war.

  The Falklands was a war that should not have happened. Politically and diplomatically it arose from a sequence of miscalculations. Actuarially it was a nonsense.Yet once diplomatic blunders had created an unstoppable momentum for war, it cannot be denied that it was, in its way, magnificent – in part because the cause was so ludicrous.

  Mrs Thatcher saw recapturing the Falklands as a matter of honour – her honour as well as the nation’s honour – which could not be ducked without lasting national shame. Having determined to accept the challenge, the manner in which she and her forces carried it through was an astonishing feat of will, courage, skill and improvisation, a legitimate source of national pride. Generally speaking, Thatcherism was a utilitarian philosophy which subjected every aspect of national life to rigorous accountancy and undervalued what could not be costed. The Falklands war was the one great exception on which money was lavished unstintingly for the sake of an idea, an obligation, a conception of honour. Many would have preferred the coffers to have been opened for some other cause nearer home. But overall the public approved, believing that the war – like landing on the moon – was something which had to be done, without regard to cost, and took pride that it was done supremely well. It was unquestionably Mrs Thatcher’s finest hour. She never achieved that moral grandeur again.

  14

  Falklands Effect

  The emergence of Thatcherism

  WITH the successful conclusion of the Falklands war, Mrs Thatcher’s position was transformed. She could now look forward to almost certain re-election whenever she chose to go to the country. There was some speculation that she might cash in on the euphoria of victory by calling a quick ‘khaki’ election in the autumn. But that, she told George Gale in an interview for the Daily Express, would be ‘basically wrong. The Falklands thing was a matter of national pride and I would not use it for party political purposes.’1 This was humbug. In fact, she had no scruple about claiming the war as a specifically Conservative – indeed Thatcherite – achievement.

  But she realised that to call a snap election would have looked cynically opportunist and might have backfired. Besides, it was unnecessary. Why should she cut short her first term just when she had finally secured her dominance? She could carry on for nearly two more years if she wished, to the spring of 1984. Her preference, she hinted was to go on to the autumn of 1983.2 That gave her another full parliamentary year to reap the political harvest of her enhanced authority, and time to show some clear economic results from the pain of the last three years.

  In the meantime something like normal politics resumed, and the Government could still be embarrassed by the unexpected. On 9 July there occurred an incident, trivi
al as it turned out, that was potentially almost as humiliating as the seizure of the Falklands. An intruder named Michael Fagan not only broke into Buckingham Palace, but found his way into the Queen’s bedroom and sat on the end of her bed; fortunately he was unarmed and harmless, and she coolly engaged him in conversation until help arrived. (The Duke of Edinburgh, the public was fascinated to learn, slept in another room.) But the implications were alarming. It turned out that it was not the first time that Fagan had broken into the Palace. If security at the Palace was so poor, was it any better at Downing Street and Chequers? ‘I was shocked and upset,’ Mrs Thatcher told George Gale. ‘Really I was very, very upset… Every woman in this country was upset because we all thought, oh lord, what would happen to me?’3 Willie Whitelaw accepted responsibility as Home Secretary and initially felt he must resign. Having already lost Carrington, however, Mrs Thatcher could not face losing Whitelaw too, and persuaded him to change his mind. Whitelaw’s popularity in the House protected him. Security at the Palace was tightened, and the bizarre episode passed off with no lasting political damage.