The Iron Lady

way of a diversion to Goose Green – there was little doubt that they would get there; but the casualties could have been much greater had the Argentines put up more determined resistance. As it was, the last big blow to the British forces was the sinking of the troopship Sir Galahad at Fitzroy on 8 June, with the loss of fifty-one Welsh Guardsmen. The inadequately protected landing at Fitzroy was one perilous operation that went tragically wrong, giving a chilling glimpse of what might easily have been; but it did not delay the final push towards Stanley. Six days later the tin-roofed settlement was surrounded and the Argentine commander surrendered without need for a final onslaught.

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.