Margaret Thatcher’s ultimate hero was Churchill—just as one of Churchill’s was Napoleon. She was fourteen years old in that annus mirabilis of 1940 when she sat beside the radio in the upper room above her father’s grocery store listening to Churchill’s speeches during the Blitz and the Battle of Britain. Those years up to early teenage are very important in the political makeup of a statesman, indeed far more so than the late-teenage years that biographers tend to concentrate upon much more. For it is then when international events first impinge on the young consciousness, and lessons are consciously or subconsciously learned. Napoleon was fourteen when the American War of Independence was won against Britain, Churchill was twelve when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and Charles de Gaulle’s earliest political memories were of his father’s raging against the British over the Fashoda crisis on the Upper Nile.
Similarly, Margaret Thatcher was twelve years old when her parents, Alfred and Beatrice Roberts, took a young German Jewish girl into their home in 1938, just before Kristallnacht, so young Margaret was never under any illusions about the true nature of fascism. Alderman Roberts was a Methodist lay preacher who believed it was his community’s duty to give practical help to the persecuted of other lands regardless of race or religion, and by taking in that young Jewish refugee from the Nazis he almost certainly saved her life. She herself certainly thought so and was profoundly grateful to the Thatcher family for the rest of her days. It taught Margaret about the superiority of decisive practical action over mere hand-wringing and vapid moralizing, of the kind that all too many appeasers—in the 1930s and since—have been guilty. Critics and cynics who claim that Margaret’s philo-Semitism stemmed from political motives—as a member of Parliament she sat for the largely Jewish constituency of Finchley North—ignore this crucially formative influence on her.
Margaret Thatcher was only twenty-four in February 1950 when she doughtily fought the Dartford constituency in Kent for the Conservative Party, gaining much national media attention in the process. “She campaigned with energy and determination,” records a biographer, and cut the Labour majority from 19,714 to 13,638. Although she was not to enter the House of Commons until 1959, her path was set. It was not until the early 1970s, however, that she found her true cause in the free market economics and pugnacious patriotism that were to characterize her more than eleven years in the premiership after May 1979.
When in April 1982 the fascist junta that ruled Argentina—several members of which had been responsible for the disappearance and murder of tens of thousands of Argentinians in the 1970s—suddenly and without any warning invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, they failed to take into account the mettle of their opponent. No prime minister had taken Britain to war since Anthony Eden’s disastrous adventure at Suez over a quarter of a century before.
Whereas every British prime minister since Churchill would probably have tried to do a deal with the Argentinians, Margaret Thatcher had the courage to see the conflict in stark black-and-white terms, as a matter of duty and national honor about which no compromise was possible. (When the previous December the Foreign Office had suggested that she congratulate the Argentine junta on taking office, she replied that British premiers do not send messages “on the occasion of military takeovers.”)1 She was entirely unaffected by what has been termed “the policy of the pre-emptive cringe,” which had been the default position of successive British governments ever since the Suez humiliation.
Not everyone saw the Falklands in the stark, almost Manichean terms that Thatcher did. There were only eighteen hundred inhabitants of the islands, who led a hardscrabble, mainly agricultural existence in the rain-swept South Atlantic. Indeed, the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges famously likened the struggle to “two bald men fighting over a comb.”2 That would be fair were it not for the fact that there was also a matter of profound principle at stake: British territory had been invaded and the liberty of Britons violated. If Britain was to retain her honor and prestige in the world, this could not be allowed to stand.
For the Falklands had been a British colony since 1765; many families living there could trace their British ancestry back almost nine generations. The United Nations had stated in 1960 that the islanders’ self-determination was paramount, and their wishes had been made evident in several referenda in which 99.8 percent of them voted to remain British.
Yet there are still some people today who believe that the Falklands should belong to Argentina, regardless of the wishes of their inhabitants. In 2012 the actor Sean Penn wrote an article in the Guardian demanding that the United Kingdom renounce her sovereignty over the Falklands.3 Many Guardian readers probably supported what Penn was suggesting, and back in 1982 there were others in the decision-making bodies of the British state who were similarly willing to ignore the unanimous and oft-repeated desire of the islanders to remain British. “In the eyes of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,” notes one study of the conflict, by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins, “they could not possibly weigh heavily against British policy towards South America, a continent of 240 millions.”4 Because the islands were more than 8,000 miles from Britain but only 400 miles from Argentina—which called them Las Malvinas—the British Foreign Office was prepared to consider ceding sovereignty over them with a form of lease-back agreement, in order for Britain to stay popular with Latin America. But they had not reckoned with a prime minister among whose sayings was “If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything, wouldn’t you, at any time? And you would achieve nothing!”5
In one sense, Margaret Thatcher was herself partly responsible for the decision of General Leopoldo Galtieri, the head of the junta, to invade the Falklands. Defense cuts had led the Ministry of Defence to withdraw the ice-patrol vessel HMS Endurance, which had been purchased from Denmark in 1967, at the end of its 1981–82 tour, producing a saving of more than $2.5 million a year. Margaret Thatcher had supported the Ministry of Defence over this. It is believed that the Argentine junta saw the withdrawal of Endurance as an indication that the British were in the process of climbing down from their international commitments to their colonies. The cost of the Falklands War eventually came to more than $7 billion: Rarely has the truth been more starkly displayed that relatively high defense spending represents good value for money, because combat is always far more expensive than deterrence.
The junta’s decision to invade the islands on Friday, April 2, 1982, was not finally made until Wednesday, March 31, only two days earlier, but the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) did manage to warn Thatcher and the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, on Sunday, March 28, that Argentine naval and equipment movements, and naval and diplomatic Easter leave cancellations, implied that they might. As they left for a European Union meeting in Brussels, Thatcher and Carrington discussed SIS’s warning, from which the Joint Intelligence Committee had nonetheless concluded that no invasion was imminent. Together, they agreed to send three nuclear submarines south, including HMS Conqueror. Even though the submarines sailed at the impressive average speed of 23 knots, the first one still could not take up station off the Falklands capital, Stanley, until April 12, and so were unable to affect events in the short term.
On March 31 signals intelligence showed SIS that an Argentine fleet had put to sea and an attack must be expected within forty-eight hours. In a four-hour meeting in Mrs. Thatcher’s room in the House of Commons at 7:00 that night—with Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence Sir Frank Cooper being summoned from a dinner party to attend—they reviewed the reports and the Joint Intelligence Committee’s view that invasion was still by no means a certainty. The British ambassador to Washington, Sir Nicolas Henderson, took the intelligence reports to President Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who asked his CIA liaison officer, “Why have I not been told of this?” At 9:00 P.M., Mrs. Thatcher telegraphed President Reagan to ask him to warn Galtieri off British sovereign territory, but Galtieri refused to take Reagan’s call.
Most of the seven men in the PM’s room at the House of Commons counseled caution. One hesitates to generalize about matters to do with gender, but for an historian it is hard not to sympathize at least in part with the thrust of Rudyard Kipling’s poem about how “the female of the species is deadlier than the male”—as it happens, one of Margaret Thatcher’s favorite poems. Boudica, Elizabeth I, Catherine de Medici, Catherine the Great, Maria Theresa, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher: The witness of history is virtually uniform in the willingness of female decision makers to fight, once they have decided the cause is just and/or necessary.
At the meeting in the prime minister’s room, the Foreign Office representatives said that Mrs. Thatcher should give the Argentinians no excuses by being provocative. Secretary of State for Defence Sir John Nott pointed out all the logistical difficulties of carrying out an operation eight thousand miles away from the home base. Once sent, it was pointed out, any task force would be politically very hard to recall. It would involve putting almost all of Britain’s naval forces in one basket, would cost Britain a fortune (during a bad recession), would be unpopular internationally, could strain relations with the United States (whose ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, was known to favor the Argentinians), and there was of course always the danger of suffering defeat at the hands of Argentina’s large surface fleet, four submarines, armed forces entrenched on the islands, and their two hundred modern warplanes flown by brave and resourceful pilots.
At that crucial meeting, only Mrs. Thatcher was instinctively averse to the cautious approach. But then reinforcements arrived in the sharp, spare, no-nonsense form of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord and chief of the navy staff, who has been described as “very much an admiral’s admiral.”6 The Royal Navy has a long tradition of straight-talking admirals. One might instance the earl of St. Vincent, who famously said during the Napoleonic Wars: “I do not say the French cannot come, I only say they cannot come by sea.”7 Or Admiral Lord Cunningham during World War II, who, when told that it would be very costly to evacuate the British Army from Crete, replied: “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.”8
Admiral Leach had arrived by helicopter from Portsmouth, where he had been carrying out an official engagement and was, therefore, wearing the full-dress admiral’s uniform, giving him further authority in a room full of civilians. His arrival completely changed the tenor of the meeting, greatly to Thatcher’s benefit. She asked him if he could mobilize a task force to liberate the Falklands if they were invaded. Leach said he could, and by the weekend—the meeting was taking place on a Wednesday night—and he added that the navy not only could but should respond to an invasion. When Thatcher asked him what he would do if he was the Argentine admiral, Leach replied, “I would return to harbour immediately.”9 Thatcher seized on this with her characteristic forcefulness whenever she saw a political opening. The Royal Navy fleet was put on immediate alert. A senior Ministry of Defence official later joked, “Every one of Leach’s commanders would have been shot if those ships had not been ready to sail by the weekend. Leach knew that not just the Falklands were at stake.” For what else was at stake was the Royal Navy’s reputation, the survival of the Thatcher ministry, and, at a much deeper level, the country’s honor. This was something that was instinctively grasped by Margaret Thatcher, who, without approval from either Parliament or even her own cabinet, that night ordered Leach, “The task force is to be made ready.”10 It did indeed set sail that Sunday, April 4. In the meantime, President Reagan spoke to Galtieri for an hour, impressing on him Mrs. Thatcher’s resolve to resist any invasion. He offered his vice president, George Bush, as a mediator, but was refused.
There had been almost no Royal Navy contingency planning for a campaign such as one to recapture the Falklands, which had featured very low on the list of likely Cold War conflicts. This was possibly why no ultimatum was given to Argentina, or indeed any direct message made by Britain before the invasion itself. At dawn on Friday, April 2, the Argentinians landed and imprisoned the populations of the capital, Stanley, and other places. The day before, the island’s governor, Rex Hunt, had summoned two British officers—the two majors in charge of eighty marines—and told them, “It looks as if the buggers mean it.”11 The marines were overwhelmed by forces one hundred times their number, and, although some shots were fired, they were ordered by Hunt to surrender. This was felt to be a humiliation back in Britain, but there was no practical military alternative, as the geography of the islands provided no cover for guerrilla action.
The British cabinet immediately went into emergency, indeed almost continual, session. Mrs. Thatcher now required total support from a cabinet that over many other issues over the past three years had all too often withheld it from her. So in order to identify and hopefully neutralize dissent, she went around the cabinet table asking for the views of each minister in turn, rather than allowing the more forceful of them to proffer a collective view. They said that the naval task force should not be sent if it was only going to be turned around again in midocean. No cabinet minister thought that the outcome would be war: Everyone assumed either that the crisis would be dealt with diplomatically via Washington or that the Argentinians would back down unilaterally. As Deputy Prime Minister Willie Whitelaw said, if the fleet was stood down once it had sailed but without a deal, the government would have to resign over the national humiliation. Thatcher got the support of her cabinet on the basis that once it had sailed, the task force would expel the Argentinians from the Falklands either by force or by the threat of it.
The House of Commons had not sat on a Saturday since the Suez crisis, but it was recalled for Saturday, April 3, when Mrs. Thatcher announced, “A large Task Force will sail as soon as preparations are complete,” and that her government’s object was “to see the Islands returned to British administration.”12 During that debate, Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell referred to the sobriquet “Iron Lady” that the Russians had bestowed on her, and said that in the coming weeks Thatcher herself, the House of Commons, and the rest of the world “would learn of what mettle she is made.”
On Monday, April 5, Carrington and two other Foreign and Commonwealth ministers, Humphrey Atkins and Richard Luce, resigned under the principle of collective responsibility, even though Atkins and Luce had not been responsible for the policy toward Argentina or the withdrawal of Endurance. Thatcher appointed the liberal Tory MP Francis Pym in Carrington’s place, and almost instantly regretted it. She also set up a small war cabinet consisting of herself, Whitelaw, Pym, John Nott, and Cecil Parkinson, the chairman of the Conservative Party. Parkinson gave her a 3–2 majority against the liberal Tories—then known as the Wets in British public school speak—in case things turned difficult. Whitelaw, the leading Wet, recalled shuddering every time he thought of Suez during the Falklands crisis.
In the UN Security Council, Britain was in a difficult position. Sir Anthony Parsons, the British ambassador, moved Resolution 502, demanding the “immediate withdrawal” of Argentine forces, but although he could count on the support of the United States, France, Ireland, and Japan, he knew that the Communist bloc of China, Russia, and Poland could be relied upon to vote against. The Latin countries Spain and Panama openly supported Argentina. That meant Parsons had to win over all five of the other members—Jordan, Togo, Zaire, Uganda, and Guyana—in order to win the two-thirds majority necessary for the resolution to pass, and he had only forty-eight hours in which to do it.
Parsons managed it. France had to put pressure on Togo and Mrs. Thatcher needed to telephone King Hussein of Jordan directly. He put the betting at 6 to 4 against that the Russians would use their Security Council veto, but despite severe Argentine pressure over grain sales, they did not, because ideologically they did not want to be seen siding with an authoritarian right-wing regime against a democracy. Mrs. Thatcher, though no fan of the United Nations, could henceforward state that “all the Argentinians need to do is honour UN Security Council 502.” This she did very regularly throughout the coming fraught days and weeks.
General Haig did his very best on behalf of peace with shuttle diplomacy between the soon-to-be combatants, but found that the Argentinians would not permit any element of self-determination for the Falkland Islanders in the future and refused to allow the Argentine flag to be hauled down there under any circumstances. In his meetings with Haig, Admiral Jorge Anaya of the junta said that Britain had no stomach for a fight, that democracies could not sustain casualties, and that the task force could not operate once winter came to the South Atlantic. On the third point, though certainly not on the first two, he was probably correct.
Mrs. Thatcher could, therefore, see no possibility of a peaceful solution in the days that the task force sailed south. She announced what she called a total exclusion zone two hundred nautical miles around the Falklands inside which any Argentine ships would be liable to being sunk without warning. Meanwhile, the chiefs of staff were warning the cabinet of possibly high losses and casualties, and even a possible 50 percent attrition rate in the latest addition to advanced military technology, Harrier Jump Jets. They also warned of the dangers posed by the French-made Exocet missiles that the Argentinians had recently bought. Fortunately, both Francis Pym and Willie Whitelaw had both won military crosses in the Second World War and were able to remind the rest of the war cabinet that part of the duty of chiefs of staff was to be excessively gloomy to politicians before battle was joined.
On April 25, South Georgia Island, which had also been invaded by Argentina, was liberated without loss by seventy-five Special Air Service (SAS), Special Boat Service (SBS), and Royal Marines. It required a direct attack, and afterward a bewildered Argentine officer complained to the SAS commander, “You’ve just walked through my minefield!”13 In London, Mrs. Thatcher came out of No. 10 Downing Street and to the waiting press keen to ask questions she merely said, “Rejoice, just rejoice.”14
Yet even at that crucial stage, not all Britons were rejoicing, or solidly supporting the use of force to liberate the Falklands, because they thought Mrs. Thatcher too bellicose and saw the United Nations as the ultimate arbiter for war and peace. A leading Labour Party politician, Tony Benn, and the Labour Party chairman campaigned against it and thirty-three Labour MPs voted against it in Parliament; the Trades Union Congress called on the government not to engage in military action; the three most senior figures in the Liberal Party stayed noticeably silent; the BBC featured a program on those Tories who were opposed to military action. A straw poll estimated that a majority of senior civil servants opposed sending the task force, including those in the Treasury, Foreign Office, and Cabinet Office. Most dangerously, Francis Pym was putting forward dovish views in the war cabinet while sounding hawkish in Parliament. (Margaret Thatcher took exquisite revenge on one occasion by asking him to defend to the full cabinet a controversial decision to which he had been adamantly opposed in the war cabinet.)
On the afternoon of May 1, the commander of the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror reported that he had sighted the 12,240-ton Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, which was escorted by two Exocet-armed destroyers, zigzagging in and out of the total exclusion zone. The Belgrano was providing aircraft direction for the Argentine air force and so posed a clear and present danger to any future British military operations on the islands. On the morning of May 2, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin went to the war cabinet meeting at the prime minister’s country house, Chequers, to seek permission to sink her at once, even though at the time the Belgrano was some forty miles southwest of the zone. There was a full discussion and Mrs. Thatcher gave the order to sink her, with no minister dissenting. At some danger to herself, HMS Conqueror fired three Mark 8 torpedoes from two thousand yards at 3:00 P.M., two of which hit and sank the Belgrano, with the loss of 323 Argentine lives. It was the first major loss of life of the war and is still controversial today, but it demonstrated that the British were not bluffing and that, in the words of Hastings and Jenkins, “the seizure of the Falklands would be met by whatever level of force proved necessary to repossess them.”15
Later in the war there were British losses, such as the sinking of the type 42 destroyer HMS Sheffield by an Exocet missile launched from the air on May 4, the first Royal Navy vessel sunk in action since World War II. Twenty crew members were killed. (As the rest were waiting to be rescued from the ship after the attack, Sub-Lieutenant Carrington-Wood led the crew in singing the Monty Python song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”) On May 25—Argentina’s national day—tremendously brave Argentine pilots attacking under heavy fire also sank HMS Coventry, with a further loss of twenty lives with twenty-nine wounded. These attacks left Margaret Thatcher visibly pained and desolate; on each occasion she retreated to her upstairs room at No. 10 and personally wrote letters in longhand to the parents of each of the servicemen killed. In all, she had to write 255 such letters. “The Falklands marked her soul and mine,” her husband, Denis, was to say.16
Yet for all the international, national, emotional, and media pressure on her, Mrs. Thatcher resolutely stuck to the cause of liberating the islands. She also refused to add to the pressure on the land commander on the spot, Lieutenant General Sir Julian Thompson, to break out early from the beachhead he had established at San Carlos Bay. On May 25, by which time five ships had been sunk, she told a group of Conservative women that “there can be no question of pressing the force commander to move forward prematurely.”17 When two days later Thompson did break out toward Stanley and Goose Green, she was relieved to be able to announce the fact to the House of Commons.
“Mrs Thatcher is under great pressure to get [Port] Stanley,” a staff officer at the command unit at Northwood wrote in his diary at this time. “Every day that Stanley is not taken is another country lost to world opinion. We can’t risk losing another ship or the Cabinet may not be able to resist pressure for a ceasefire.”18 There were several important battles to come, including the Battle of Goose Green and the night attack up Mount Tumbledown, the latter of which has been described as the toughest battle of the campaign. These and other such victories on the field led to the success that Margaret Thatcher and Admiral Leach had had the confidence to predict all those nerve-racking weeks earlier.
The Falklands taught Mrs. Thatcher that she needed her own office who could feed her information that she felt she was sometimes not receiving from departments of state, such as the Foreign Office and other ministries, which she felt distrusted her naturally combative instincts. “I’m jolly well realizing that I need a department,” she said during the conflict. “I have no department and therefore I have to rely on third-hand hearsay, and I don’t like it.”19 She had an inherent distaste for governmental “institutions” such as the Foreign Office, believing that they ossified thought, protected privilege, and removed incentive. Later she was to rely more on talented special advisers, people such as Sir Charles—later Lord—Powell, who she knew gave her independent advice largely unvarnished by the assumptions of the Foreign Office.
On Monday, June 14, at 10:15 P.M., the prime minister rose from her seat in the House of Commons to announce: “Our forces reached the outskirts of Port Stanley. Large numbers of Argentine soldiers threw down their weapons. They are reported to be flying white flags over Port Stanley.”20 The House of Commons erupted with cheers of relief and joy. Enoch Powell, who in the House of Commons debate at the start of the conflict had said that the conflict would show what mettle the Iron Lady was made of, told the House, “It shows that the substance under test consists of ferrous metal of the highest quality, that is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes.”21
When she returned home to Downing Street that evening, exhausted but elated, Margaret Thatcher was kept awake by the crowds outside her door singing “Rule Britannia!” throughout the night. As the fleet returned to Portsmouth over the following days, vast crowds turned up to welcome home every ship, as towns and villages competed to honor their local servicemen and -women.
Her victory in the Falklands gave Mrs. Thatcher the confidence to take on the many nonmilitary challenges of her premiership. In the miners’ strike of 1984–85, the aftermath of the assassination attempt on her by the IRA in October 1984, the demands for a rebate from Brussels’s budgetary demands, the struggles over deregulation and denationalization, and her reaction to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, it is possible to discern the lesson of the Falklands War—that resolute action against antagonists solidified support far better than appeasement—being put into practice time and again.
“Today we meet in the aftermath of the Falklands Battle,” Mrs. Thatcher said in a speech on July 3.
Our country has won a great victory and we are entitled to be proud. This nation had the resolution to do what it knew had to be done—to do what it knew was right. We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag. . . . We fought for our own people and for our own sovereign territory. Now that it is all over, things cannot be the same again for we have learned something about ourselves—a lesson which we desperately needed to learn. When we started out, there were the waverers and the fainthearts. . . . The people who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did. Those who believed that our decline was irreversible—that we could never again be what we were. There were those who would not admit it . . . people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but—in their heart of hearts—they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage, and in resolution.22
It was true, and much of the credit for it must be put down to the ability, courage, resolution, and sheer leadership qualities of the most remarkable Englishwoman since Queen Elizabeth I.