Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (47 page)

The new arrivals in the cabinet were kindred political spirits who shared the Prime Minister’s convictions. Nigel Lawson, who had been hugely influential in the junior post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury, was given his own portfolio as Secretary of State for Energy. Norman Tebbit, razor sharp in tongue and mind, replaced Prior. The most surprising promotion was that of Cecil Parkinson. Although almost invisible to the watchers of political form because he travelled so much as a junior trade minister, he had caught Margaret Thatcher’s eye by his charm, competence and good looks. He replaced Peter Thorneycroft as Chairman of the Party and was given the right to attend the cabinet as Paymaster General.

Other ministers who were moved included Patrick Jenkin to Industry, Norman Fowler to the Department of Health and Social Security, and David Howell – a demotion – to Transport. Baroness Young replaced Soames as Leader of the House of Lords. She was the only woman ever appointed to the cabinet by Margaret Thatcher, but she lasted a mere twenty months. Promoting women ministers never came high on the Prime Minister’s agenda.

This reshuffle reduced Margaret Thatcher’s vulnerability to rebellion from her own senior colleagues. She still did not have a majority of ‘true believers’ in her own cabinet. But she had said in the past, ‘Give me six strong men and true, and I will get through’.
⁵⁰
Now at last she had them.

Even though she had buttressed her position against internal revolts like the one that temporarily destabilised her grip on 23 July, external pressures were continuing to take their toll. By the turn of the year, interest rates surged back to 16 per cent and unemployment climbed above three million. On 26 January 1982, the day when this symbolically dreadful figure was announced, Margaret Thatcher had to face Prime Minister’s Questions in a House of Commons she knew would erupt with hostility towards her.

She made her final preparations for the ordeal with her Economic Affairs Private Secretary, Michael Scholar. He was no Thatcherite politically, but on this occasion his civil servant’s neutrality soared to the highest realms of admiration. He recalled:

As we sat there in her room at the House with the clock ticking towards 3.15, I could feel the heat coming from her body. I saw that she was perspiring. And I thought: ‘By God, this woman is brave. How I admire her courage to go out and face what will be a howling mob.’ I knew the worry she felt about the continuous rise, rise, rise in the unemployment figures. But she held her nerve.
⁵¹

Strong nerves were required in the country as well as in the Commons when the opinion polls declared Margaret Thatcher to be the most unpopular Prime Minister in living memory, with a rating of 25 per cent. Appalling by-election results were also deepening the Tory gloom. The Liberals won North West Croydon with a swing of 24 per cent. Shirley Williams overturned a Conservative majority of 18,000 to capture the blue-chip seat of Crosby in Lancashire for the SDP. The sudden emergence of third-party politics was complicating the mid-term picture. The prospects of the government holding on to power at the next election with an overall majority looked bleak. The received wisdom in Westminster, Whitehall and Fleet Street was that Margaret Thatcher would be a one-term prime minister.

REFLECTION

The year of 1981 was Margaret Thatcher’s darkest hour. Her economic strategy appeared to be failing. Her authority over her cabinet was crumbling. Her man-management of her colleagues was as dreadful as the blockbuster memorandum had portrayed it. The words ‘An unhappy ship’ were inadequate to describe the plummeting morale within the government.

Although she was shaken by the storm clouds that surrounded her, the Prime Minister did not lose her self-belief or her capacity for decisive action. The cabinet reshuffle of September 1981 was a major turning point in her leadership. It had two dimensions: sending out signals that she was sticking to a revolution in economics and starting a revolution of political attitudes.

The economic revolution was already starting to work by the spring of 1982, as the fruits of the 1981 Budget began to appear. The figures for GDP growth, productivity and lower inflation began to move in the right direction. Although unemployment remained stubbornly high, it was in fact peaking. Moreover, the country seemed more resilient than the cabinet in its attitudes towards the deep-seated problems that Margaret Thatcher was determined to solve.

These changing attitudes were reflected in the September 1981 reshuffle. Grandees, wets, and the ‘softly, softly’ approach to the unions were purged. Self-made men, hard-liners and tougher approaches were in the ascendant. It became clear that the Prime Minister had gained control of her cabinet. By her own certainty and by the lack of a coherent plan B, she managed to win a grudging national acceptance that there really was no alternative. TINA was alive and flourishing, even if far from secure in electoral expectations. That security was to come via the totally unexpected route of the South Atlantic.

19

The Falklands War I

The prelude

SABOTAGING THE LEASEBACK OPTION

Three weeks after becoming Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher invited her two most senior cabinet colleagues and their wives to Sunday lunch at Chequers. This was intended to be a celebratory occasion in the afterglow of election victory. It began in that spirit, for it would be difficult not to enjoy the company of four such agreeable guests as Willie and Celia Whitelaw, and Peter and Iona Carrington, with Denis mixing the pre-lunch gin and tonics.

Despite the good intentions of those present, the occasion passed into legend as the ‘thermonuclear lunch’.
¹
The trigger for the explosion was the subject of the Falkland Islands as raised by the Foreign Secretary.

While eating the first course, Lord Carrington, in his languid style of conversation, observed that one of the problems sitting on his desk was what to do about the Falklands. ‘I think we will soon be in trouble if we go on having meetings about them with the Argentines without saying anything at all’, he said. ‘One of the options which seems to me worth exploring is a leaseback arrangement similar to what we have in Hong Kong.’
²

The Prime Minister was not merely opposed to such a suggestion. She was appalled by it. She erupted in anger, and spent the next ten minutes denouncing the very idea of exploring a Hong Kong solution for the Falklands. ‘I remember her shouting, “That’s the trouble with your Foreign Office. Everyone in it is so bloody wet!” ’ Carrington recalled. ‘And it got worse. She banged on the table, and went on and on and how typical it was of me and the F.O. “to want to give away Britain’s possessions”.’

With the eyes of Lady Carrington and Mrs Whitelaw rolling in astonishment at this performance, it was Denis who cooled the temperature by saying to his wife: ‘I think you’re being a little extravagant, my dear.’
³

Despite this ‘thermonuclear’ attack at Chequers, Carrington persisted in his efforts to find a way round the Prime Minister’s objections. He wrote to her formally on 20 September 1979 saying that a form of leaseback was the best solution to the Falklands. She scribbled on the top of his letter, ‘I cannot possibly agree to the line the Foreign Secretary is proposing’.
⁴

Undeflected by this further rebuff, Carrington returned to the leaseback option at two later meetings of the Overseas and Defence committee of the cabinet in October 1979 and March 1980. Margaret Thatcher eventually gave some ground to the extent of allowing the Foreign Office to begin exploratory discussions with Argentina. Carrington allocated responsibility for this initiative to his Minister of State, Nicholas Ridley, who was believed to be a kindred spirit of the Prime Minister’s. She had spoken of him as ‘one of us’ in her opposition days after finding herself in agreement with the free-market views he expressed at meetings of the Economic Dining Club.

Having established this good rapport with his leader, Nicholas Ridley was disappointed not to have been made a Treasury minister. But Margaret Thatcher sugared the pill by telling him that she needed ‘one sound man’ in a department she regarded as notoriously weak.
⁵
She also told him that she mistrusted Carrington’s economic views and needed an ally ‘to keep him on the straight and narrow’. This amused the Foreign Secretary:

She had no idea what my views were on economics. They were practically non-existent! Also, she didn’t realise that in those days the F.O. hardly ever discussed economics. So, poor old Nick had nothing much to do until I asked him to take charge of the Falklands.
⁶

For Ridley, this was a poisoned chalice. Notoriously tactless in domestic politics, he showed similar lack of finesse on his first foray into international diplomacy. He was too blunt with the Falkland Islanders telling them with a hint of menace that they must ‘take the consequences’ of being unwilling to make a deal on sovereignty.
⁷
He was prematurely accommodating to the Argentines, provisionally agreeing a ninety-nine-year leaseback agreement with their Deputy Foreign Minister, Commodore Carlos Cavandoli, at secret talks with him in New York and Geneva.

When he reported this deal back to the OD committee, the Prime Minister was suspicious and nervous. She was recorded by the Cabinet Secretary as
saying, ‘My fear is an awful row from our backbenches’.
⁸
Regrettably she helped to turn her fear into a reality. For when Nicholas Ridley declared his negotiating hand in a statement to the House of Commons on 2 December 1980, he could never have guessed that the fierce opposition to his proposals had been orchestrated not only by the Falkland Islanders but also by the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary.

Ian Gow mounted a discreet operation. ‘Are you sound on the Falklands, Jonathan?’ he asked me the day before Ridley’s statement. Like most back-benchers, I did not realise there was an issue on this obscure colony to be sound or unsound about. ‘Then I suggest you have a word with Amery’, said Ian with a knowing twinkle. ‘He knows the score.’
⁹

Julian Amery, a former Foreign Office minister and son of Winston Churchill’s Colonial Secretary, Leo Amery, was one of the last bastions of the imperial mindset surviving in the House of Commons of the 1980s. His inside information about the Falklands was interesting, as he was well briefed on the recent deliberations of the OD Committee of the cabinet. According to Amery’s account, Nicholas Ridley had presented his Falklands leaseback proposal to OD and had narrowly got it through, thanks to support from Lord Carrington and the Defence Secretary, Francis Pym. However, the Prime Minister had strong reservations. Although expressing them forcefully, she had only managed to insist that any final decision must be subject to the consent of the Islanders, whose wishes must be ‘paramount’.
¹⁰
This was a blocking card equivalent to the ace of trumps. Even so, she remained anxious. So she asked her Parliamentary Private Secretary to approach Julian Amery and other like-minded colleagues to make sure that the Islanders’ views were well represented when Nicholas Ridley made his statement to the House.

Ian Gow did his job well. Fortified by this nudging from No. 10, Julian Amery organised one faction of the parliamentary revolt against Ridley’s plan. Other factions were put on full alert by the Falkland Islands’ lobbying office in London, which had supporters in all parties at Westminster. The result was that when Nicholas Ridley made his statement he was savaged by an ambush led by angry Tories such as Julian Amery, Sir Bernard Braine, Peter Tapsell and Viscount Cranborne. They were backed by senior opposition Privy Councillors Douglas Jay and Peter Shore (Labour), Russell Johnston (Liberal) and Donald
Stewart, the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party. All of them vigorously opposed the government’s policy.

Sitting in the House that afternoon, I had never before seen such a mauling of a minister. The noise levels of hostile barracking were at full volume. Nicholas Ridley did not help his case by using a sarcastic tone when soft answers might have turned away wrath. But his pitch had been queered. Not a single government back-bencher had been encouraged by the whips to support him, and several had been briefed to attack him. At the end of thirty minutes worth of virulent questioning of his statement amidst repeated appeals for ‘Order!’ from the Speaker, leaseback was well and truly sunk.

‘I think the PM will be well pleased’,
¹¹
boomed a cheerful Julian Amery, as we walked out of the chamber together. She probably was. Amery talked openly about the guidance he had been given by Ian Gow. It was not the first or the last example of how Margaret Thatcher sometimes undermined her ministers by surreptitiously getting her aides to brief against them.

The collapse of the leaseback deal sent its own message to the military junta in Buenos Aires. In an erratic way they were already flexing their muscles over
Las Malvinas
, as they called the Falklands. Now they deduced that Britain lacked the will and the means to defend the Islands by military force. Failure to disabuse the Argentines of this impression was a mistake for which Margaret Thatcher was partly responsible. She had insisted on substantial defence cuts in 1981, appointing a new Defence Secretary, John Nott, to implement the reductions in the defence budget that his predecessor Francis Pym had avoided by threatening resignation.

She did not take enough interest in the strategic implications of Nott’s cost-cutting plans. He decided that his axe would fall on the surface fleet. The expensive aircraft carriers
Hermes
and
Invincible
were to go. A more political decision was the scrapping of the Royal Navy’s ice patrol ship in the South Atlantic, HMS
Endurance
. Its decommissioning saved only £3 million but the symbolism of this cut was diplomatically disastrous. As Carrington warned in three separate minutes to Nott, the withdrawal of
Endurance
’s minor military capabilities (two helicopters, twenty Royal Marines and four Ack-Ack guns) might be interpreted as a strategic weakening of Britain’s commitment to the Islanders.
¹²

Margaret Thatcher did not intervene in these Ministry of Defence versus Foreign Office exchanges about HMS
Endurance
. She was dismissive of the ship’s
military capabilities, saying that it could only go ‘pop, pop, pop’
¹³
to Ridley’s successor, Richard Luce. On 9 February 1982 she endorsed the withdrawal of
Endurance
when answering a Parliamentary Question from her predecessor, Jim Callaghan. He had handled a previous episode of sabre-rattling by the Argentines in 1977 by sending a submarine to the Falklands. Eventually, Margaret Thatcher followed his example on 28 March 1982, with a similar order to the Navy, but by then it was a case of too little, too late.

Earlier in the year a confusing series of events had been unfolding in the South Atlantic. They included more threatening noises from the junta; an unauthorised landing by Argentine scrap-metal dealers on the island of South Georgia on 20 December 1981; a suspiciously anodyne session of Anglo-Argentine talks at the UN in January 1982; and some aggressive editorials in the Buenos Aires newspapers demanding the return of
Las Malvinas
.

These signs of trouble were complacently misinterpreted by the Foreign Office. The Prime Minister did not have her eye on the ball either. But on 3 March she did annotate one telegram from the British Embassy in Buenos Aires, reporting on Argentine press speculation with the words, ‘We must make contingency plans’.
¹⁴
Yet neither she nor anyone else in her government did anything to follow this up for the next three weeks. This was an omission which seemed of low significance in Whitehall but it had high consequences in Argentina. For the month of March was the last window of opportunity in which any moves or messages of deterrence could have been sent to the military junta. Alas nothing was done.

PARLIAMENT’S WAR

Margaret Thatcher was caught off guard by the junta’s preparations to invade the Islands. In the last days of March she began to focus on the signs of impending hostilities. On Sunday 29 March, she sent two nuclear-powered submarines and two frigates to reinforce HMS
Endurance
, which was on one of her last patrols before decommissioning. But the submarines would take two weeks to reach the South Atlantic. The Prime Minister was worried, but she still did not believe an invasion was imminent.

Her false optimism was shattered when, on the evening of Wednesday 31 March, she received a call in her office at the House of Commons saying that
the Defence Secretary wanted an immediate meeting to discuss the Falklands. The news brought by John Nott was shattering. He reported that the Argentine Fleet had put to sea and was likely to invade the Islands by Friday 2 April. ‘If they are invaded, we have got to get them back’, declared the Prime Minister, only to be told that in the view of the Ministry of Defence the Falklands could not be retaken once they had been seized. For her, this was a shameful prospect.
¹⁵

The gloom of the meeting deepened, partly because most of those attending it were indecisive junior ministers. Lord Carrington was away in Israel so the Foreign Office was represented by Humphrey Atkins and Richard Luce, both briefed to propose well-meaning but ineffective diplomatic moves. The Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin, was visiting New Zealand so military advice was transmitted through two pessimistic civilians – John Nott and the MoD’s Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Frank Cooper. They advised that the Islands, once seized by the Argentines, could not be recaptured. Margaret Thatcher expressed her feelings of outrage, but they were feelings made more painful by her growing realisation of impotence.

Then, like a dramatic moment in a play, a surprise intruder took centre stage and changed the plot. He was Admiral Sir Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. For reasons of MoD protocol, he had not been asked to attend the meeting. But once he heard it was taking place he decided he was coming anyway, so he turned up at the House of Commons, arrayed in the splendour of the First Sea Lord’s full dress uniform,
^*
which he was wearing for a ceremonial dinner later that evening.

A hiatus occurred at the St Stephens entrance to the House of Commons when the Admiral’s medals, out of sight beneath his overcoat, set off the metal detector alarms. An inflexible police constable insisted on detaining the First Sea Lord for twenty minutes in a side room. Rescued by Ian Gow, he eventually reached the Prime Minister’s office in a foul temper. ‘He erupted into the room’, was how Sir Antony Acland, Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, described the Admiral’s entry.
¹⁶

After the Prime Minister had summarised the discussion so far she asked Sir Henry Leach what the Royal Navy could do. ‘I can put together a Task Force of destroyers, frigates, landing craft and support vessels. It will be led by the aircraft carriers HMS
Hermes
and HMS
Invincible
. It can be ready to leave in forty-eight hours’, replied the Admiral, assuring her that such a force could retake the Islands.
¹⁷
‘Not only can we do it, we will be the laughing stock of the world if we don’t do it’, declared Sir Henry. His certainty contradicted the pessimism of the military options the Prime Minister had been given a few minutes earlier by the Defence Secretary. She seized on the optimistic scenario because the First Sea Lord’s strategy was just what she wanted to hear. It transformed the dynamics of her meeting.