The Iron Lady

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

She made a point of writing personally to the families of all the men who died. She later claimed, without irony, that her own anxiety when Mark was lost in the Sahara earlier that year gave her an insight into what the Falkland mothers were going through. (‘I was lucky,’ she told Miriam Stoppard in 1985. ‘They weren’t.’) ¹³ The old hands around her – not least Denis, who had served in Italy in 1943 – 5 – all had to console her at times with the reminder that casualties were inevitable. Once the casualties started, however, they only made her more determined to finish the job.

Her sex was really beside the point. What made Mrs Thatcher a successful war leader – apart from the quality of the forces under her command and a large slice of luck – was the clarity of her purpose. She had an unblinking single-mindedness about achieving her objective and an extraordinary simple faith that because her cause was right it would prevail. In war, as in economics, it was this moralistic certainty, not her gender, which set her apart from her male colleagues, enabling her to grasp risks they would have baulked at. In the messy trade-