Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography (118 page)

Once the invasion was a known fact, the Cabinet met for a second time. The most important decision before colleagues, said the Prime Minister, was whether or not to put the fleet to sea. By doing so, it was not automatically committing to operations: ‘It keeps open options.’ Ministers asked Leach, who had been summoned to attend the meeting, about the military difficulties. He said the services were ‘never confident in the face of air threat [which would be a particular problem when landing on the Falklands], but with anti-air capability we could provide, I would feel confident of success.’ Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, summed it up: ‘Do we hit back, or cringe?’ But Mrs Thatcher preferred to revert to the immediate: ‘We have to decide whether to tell the fleet to sail, and say so in the House tomorrow.’ (It had been agreed that, as had not happened since the Suez crisis of 1956, the House should sit on a Saturday, and debate in full, rather than settle for the statement which Mrs Thatcher would have preferred.) Carrington said: ‘I rather doubt whether our speeches are credible if we don’t tell the force to sail.’ ‘We should lose a vote of confidence if we don’t sail,’ said Michael Heseltine, ‘but we don’t know where we are going.’
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Mrs Thatcher asked the opinion of each Cabinet minister in turn. Only one, John Biffen – ‘a little runt of a man’ in the view of Henry Leach
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– was brave enough to say that he was against the despatch of the Task Force.
*

‘It was a very bad day for the Foreign Office,’ Luce admitted, ‘and the machine appeared to collapse.’
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The Foreign Office had provided the Prime Minister with a memorandum, written by John Weston
^†
of its defence department, which enraged her. The memo was bleak. It claimed that Britain would not be supported in the Security Council if it used heavy force, the European allies could not be depended on, and it could not be assumed that
the US would ‘remain unambivalent … They did not support Anglo-French military action in 1956.’ If Britain got the islands back, they would be difficult to hold, the paper went on, and anyway, ‘Unless the 1,800 islanders were manifestly being subjected to inhumane treatment by Argentine occupying forces, it would be hard to persuade people that the game was worth the candle.’
⁷⁰
This was the document Mrs Thatcher was referring to when she wrote in her memoirs that the Foreign Office advice received that day ‘summed up the flexibility of principle characteristic of that department’.
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King Charles Street also sent her a draft for her speech the following day which she considered inadequate. It did not mention the despatch of the Task Force. At 9.30 p.m., Mrs Thatcher rang Luce to tell him it was ‘appalling’ and to discuss various points. He offered to come round to her, ‘but she preferred to rewrite it herself in the night.’
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In fact, the drafting was done by Whitmore and Coles who simply, for lack of time, divided the work in half. Whitmore drafted the key words about the aims of the Task Force – the repossession of the islands, the removal of the Argentines and the fulfilment of the wishes of the islanders. ‘The words were considered very carefully.’
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At first they thought of aiming at the ‘restoration of British sovereignty’, but decided that it was safer and more accurate (since sovereignty had not been removed by the invasion) to use the phrase ‘British administration’. Mrs Thatcher was under great strain. At one point during the speech preparation, she realized that all the GMT hours she had been working with in the draft had been wrongly computed against Argentine time. ‘She almost visibly collapsed,’ remembered John Coles. ‘Whitmore calmed her down beautifully.’
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*

But she remained capable of the tart expression which was her version of wit. That day, the Cabinet had decided to freeze Argentine assets in Britain. Late at night, John Kerr, Geoffrey Howe’s private secretary, realized that there were not enough Lords of the Treasury around to sign the Order in Council required to act fast, so he took the necessary paper to the Prime Minister herself, because of her formal title of First Lord of the Treasury, for signature. ‘Thank God someone in Whitehall still knows what to do,’ Mrs Thatcher told him. Kerr pointed out that if Britain took Argentine money, Argentina would take British. ‘I don’t think this is the time for points like that, do you, John?’ said Mrs Thatcher.
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In a broadcast to the Argentine people that night, General Galtieri explained that the British ‘lack of goodwill’ in negotiations had made the
invasion of the Malvinas necessary. The South Georgia incident had finally proved this. ‘With Christian faith I pray’, he said, that Britain would now understand its error. He invoked ‘the protection of God and his holy Mother’ and exclaimed, ‘Glory to the great Argentine people. May this be God’s will.’ For all the vainglory, aggression and machismo of Argentine behaviour, Galtieri’s position was not completely incomprehensible. It must indeed have seemed to Buenos Aires that negotiations in which the British always happily held out the possibility of conceding sovereignty and yet never did so were a dishonest game. And the junta could have been forgiven for concluding, from Britain’s economic weakness and actions like the planned withdrawal of
Endurance
, that the will to resist Argentina was absent. In letting the invasion build up, Britain had failed to understand the mentality of a military dictatorship and had taken too little care for the Falkland Islanders. But Argentina had made a greater error: it did not understand the powerful interaction between the sympathy due to the plight of the islanders, who saw themselves as British, and the power of the British Parliament when roused.

Parliament met on Saturday 3 April 1982 in a state of high emotion, stirred up by a furious press. It was widely believed that the Royal Marines at Port Stanley had been ordered to surrender without a fight. This was not the case but the government did not have clear information at that point.
*
It had frighteningly little that it could say with confidence. Carrington and others were right that the government could not survive the wrath of MPs if it were not able to announce that the fleet would be ready to sail on Monday. Given the scale of the disaster, some clear and immediate military response was the minimum required. Mrs Thatcher opened the debate. Alan Clark recorded that she spoke at first ‘very slowly but didactically’ but later, when being barracked, ‘She changed gear and gabbled.’
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She was not derailed by the interruptions, but she failed to rouse her own benches. The Prime Minister related the series of events that had led to disaster and set out the position: ‘I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government’s objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment.’
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These words bound her from the
beginning, as she intended they should. They set an irreducible minimum. Mrs Thatcher ended her speech with sentences which reflected the feeling on both sides of the House and brought the matter home: ‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown.’ They had the right to choose and preserve their British way of life and Britain must ‘do everything that we can to uphold that right’.
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Luckily for Mrs Thatcher, Argentina’s junta was, in the eyes of the Labour leader Michael Foot, a semi-fascist regime, and so he found it much easier to expend his contempt on it than if it had been left wing. The attack on the islands had been a ‘foul and brutal aggression’, Foot told the Commons, and he dismissed the idea that Britain’s position was in any way imperialist. He attacked the government’s unpreparedness, but refrained from a personal assault on ministers, and accepted the sending of the Task Force. It was Enoch Powell, understanding Mrs Thatcher’s mentality, who issued her with the most arresting challenge. She was known as ‘the Iron Lady’, he said. ‘In the next week or two this House, the nation and the right honourable Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.’
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Alan Clark noted in his diary, when reflecting later on the debate, ‘how low she held her head, how
knotted
with pain and apprehension she seemed as he [Powell] pronounced his famous judgment’.
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It was this sense of being put to the test, by Parliament, nation and her own conscience, which Mrs Thatcher carried away from the debate. John Coles noticed that it was Powell’s remark which stuck: ‘She came back to her room afterwards, and that was what was in her mind.’
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John Nott, who wound up the debate for the government, was frequently absent from the Chamber before his speech, accumulating the latest fragments of information, and this was held against him by the MPs who crowded into it. When he came to speak, he was, in the words of Alan Clark, ‘a disaster. He stammered and stuttered and garbled … He refused to give way; he gave way; he changed his mind; he stood up again; he sat down again. All this against a constant roaring of disapproval and contempt.’
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Mrs Thatcher’s speech had not been a triumph of oratory, but she had held the line and refrained from partisan politics. Nott made the ‘terrible error’
⁸³
of attacking Labour in the course of his self-justification. It was, Mrs Thatcher privately remembered, ‘a lousy speech’,
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and he lost the House. As early as December the previous year, Nott had privately decided to leave politics, feeling that his career had been damaged by his behaviour in resisting and then accepting defence cuts, including that of the carrier
Invincible
, but Mrs Thatcher had refused to let him go.
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Perhaps he felt that he was getting his comeuppance: certainly his heart was not in it any longer, and he was ‘unnerved’.
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Nott, with Carrington, whose speech in the House of Lords had, as is customary in the Upper House, been courteously received, then had to appear before an impromptu meeting of the 1922 Committee (and Conservative peers), proposed by the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling. They were assailed. Jopling remembered the backbenchers ‘baying for blood’.
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Ian Gow attended, and scribbled Mrs Thatcher a note of proceedings, with each MP’s contribution recorded and attributed. He came round to her room in the Commons immediately after the meeting, telling her how bad things had been, particularly for Carrington. His written record, of which what follows is a small part, slips into capital letters at moments of high stress.

PACKED MEETING.

Buck
. MOST DISTURBING. MOST WORRYING …
Griffiths
. Best loyalty we can show is frankness. Credibility of Conservative Government here – APPLAUSE …
Hogg
. MUST RECOVER SOVEREIGNTY. Unless we do Party will not hold loyalty …
Stokes
. Working men appalled at what has happened … smell of appeasement about the FO …
Waller
. They should resign.
Colvin
. NO RESIGNATIONS NOW …
Lord
Onslow
. SINK THE WHOLE FLEET.
Aitken
.
DECLARE WAR AS FLEET SAILS
.
Lloyd
. WHY THE HELL WERE WE NEGOTIATING.

Against these assaults, Gow records the rather murmured responses – ‘accept political situation for our party is bad’, ‘we have no money’, ‘geography is difficult’, ‘misunderstandings’ – of Nott and Carrington.
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Carrington, who had never been elected to anything and had never had a good relationship with the parliamentary party, was badly shaken. So was Nott. Both edged towards resignation, Carrington indicating as much to Mrs Thatcher in her room after the meeting. Worried about Carrington’s state of mind, Jopling got Whitelaw to invite him for lunch at his official residence, Dorneywood, the following day, and they thought they had persuaded him to stay.
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Carrington also went to call on Lord Home for advice. Face to face, Home tried to persuade him that he should stay, but when Carrington left the drawing room to go to the lavatory, Lady Home met him in the passage and told him: ‘Alec says if he were in your position,
he wouldn’t have any hesitation about going.’
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The Foreign Office had failed either to foresee or to avert the invasion of British soil. Rumours spread of a very hostile leading article which would appear in
The Times
the following morning. There was a sense that Carrington must now fall on his sword and assume responsibility. Although advised by Cecil Parkinson that the departure of Carrington was unfortunately necessary,
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Mrs Thatcher was most reluctant to see him go. Apart from anything else, she felt exposed.
*

But by Sunday night Carrington’s mind was pretty much made up, and the leading article in
The Times
on Monday morning, just as tough as rumoured, finally decided him. ‘How can I stay’, he asked a protesting Michael Palliser, ‘when I cannot defend my policy in the Commons?’
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Luce followed Carrington’s suit, and resigned as soon as he could; so did Humphrey Atkins. John Nott was furious that no one had told him in advance that Carrington was to resign. He felt himself in an impossible position and begged Mrs Thatcher that he be allowed to go too. She refused, saying, by her own account, that she ‘could not possibly accept when the Task Force was on the ocean’.
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The true reason for Mrs Thatcher’s determination to keep him was political: she feared that the departure of the only other Cabinet minister apart from herself who had been involved in the debacle would leave her own position vulnerable. Even without Nott leaving, the departure of Carrington and his colleagues emphasized her isolation in her own mind. ‘I felt totally bereft, I felt deserted, very lonely,’ she told Richard Luce years later.
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