The Iron Lady

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 dress 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.