Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (48 page)

Two factors emerged that evening which were to govern the decision-making process in the early stages of the Falklands War. The first was the readiness of the Royal Navy. The second was the resolution of the Prime Minister.

The Royal Navy was expecting the unexpected ahead of any other part of the government. Admiral Leach and the Commander in Chief of the Fleet, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, had been taking a prescient view of the developing situation on the Falklands for over a week, ever since it had first been mooted in Whitehall that submarines might have to be despatched to the South Atlantic as a precautionary measure. The Admirals and their staffs had used the week to work up much larger contingency plans, a move which was made easier by the participation of many British warships in a large NATO exercise already taking place off Gibraltar. So Sir Henry Leach’s remarkable confidence in the Royal Navy’s preparedness to despatch a task force was well founded. It was based on some clever forward thinking and planning for a fleet that was already at sea on the NATO exercise.
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Fortified by the report given to her by the First Sea Lord, Margaret Thatcher was decisive and resolute. She immediately authorised the Navy to prepare the task force to sail, subject to the approval of the cabinet the following morning. But for all her ringing endorsement of the Leach plan, when the meeting ended and she was left alone in the room with John Nott, the Prime Minister asked: ‘Can we really do this, John?’

The Defence Secretary was far from certain, given the general doubts that were being expressed in his department by everyone other than the First Sea Lord.

‘I just don’t know yet, Prime Minister’, replied Nott. ‘I’ve had no formal advice. But these Islands are 8,000 miles away, and we can’t be sure that we can handle the logistics.’

‘John, we must!’
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was the response.

Her firmness set the tone during the hectic meetings and preparations of the next forty-eight hours. Events were moving so fast that big decisions were taken on the hoof by military chiefs reporting directly to the Prime Minister. The civil service, apart from the No. 10 private secretaries, were largely out of the loop. Margaret Thatcher had an instinctive trust in the professionalism of the armed forces, and she urged them on with a resolution that they found inspirational.

For all her decisiveness, the Prime Minister’s confidence was far from impregnable in those early days as the risks were pointed out to her. On Friday 2 April, the landing of the Argentine invasion force on the Falklands was confirmed. Outwardly the business of peace-time government was continuing as usual at No. 10. According to her diary, Margaret Thatcher was scheduled to host a lunch for university vice-chancellors. The Minister of State for Higher Education who had arranged it, William Waldegrave, assumed that the event would be cancelled. Not so. Over lunch in the small dining room, Margaret Thatcher explained to the great men of academia how they should run their universities, all the time reading urgent notes on the Falklands brought in by private secretaries. The vice-chancellors departed, looking somewhat shell shocked. Alone in the room with Waldegrave, the Prime Minister gripped his arm and confided, ‘William, the problem is we shall have no proper air cover’.
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The political situation at home initially looked almost as fragile as the military prospects on the islands. The House of Commons was recalled for an emergency debate on the morning of Saturday 3 April. Before the sitting began, Conservative back-benchers met in a crowded upstairs committee room. The mood was indignant. As one of the sixty or so MPs present, I well recall the number of times phrases like ‘national humiliation’, ‘day of shame’, ‘catalogue of missed warnings’, ‘guilty men’ and ‘hour of infamy’ rang through the air. Several older colleagues spoke of the dangers of ‘another Suez’. One lone voice said it had been a black day ‘but one which could yet end in glory’.
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But the overall tone was almost entirely negative and critical. The Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, who took notes throughout, left the room looking shaken. The same was true
of the Prime Minister, whose car was booed as it passed through the gates of the Palace of Westminster.
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Margaret Thatcher had recovered her composure by the time she rose to speak in the debate. She knew from an overnight opinion poll that 60 per cent of the public were blaming her for allowing the debacle to take place. She was aware that some of her back-benchers were now calling for ministerial blood. Even some senior figures in the government were ridiculing the idea of recapturing the Islands. The Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, joked on the day after the invasion that Britain was at war but that it would ‘probably be over by tea time’.
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Another cabinet minister harbouring doubts was John Biffen. As he was a good friend I chatted to him shortly before the debate began and asked him what he thought. ‘This will be our poor man’s Vietnam’, was his sardonic reply.
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It was, to put it mildly, a disconcerting response. It later emerged that on the previous day the Prime Minister had gone round the cabinet table asking every one of her colleagues if they supported sending the task force. All said yes apart from Biffen. Although he was the sole dissenter there were several others who supressed their misgivings. Margaret Thatcher enjoyed saying in later life that the cabinet were ‘rock solid – afterwards’.
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The Prime Minister struck the right notes of gravity and decisive action when she opened the debate. It seemed a somewhat low-key speech, perhaps because she was tired and also because hers was almost the most moderate voice on that morning of high emotion. Just how high those emotions were running became apparent from the roar of approval that went up from all parts of the House when she condemned ‘this unprovoked aggression by the Government of Argentina against British territory. It has not a shred of justification and not a scrap of legality.’
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Another thunder of ‘hear, hear’ greeted her crucial announcement: ‘A large Task Force will sail as soon as all preparations are complete. HMS
Invincible
will be in the lead and will leave port on Monday.’
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With the possibility of war now looming, Parliament went into patriotic overdrive. The Leader of the Opposition, Michael Foot, soared to heights of impassioned eloquence as he proclaimed it was Britain’s ‘moral duty, political duty and every other kind of duty’
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to repel the Argentine invaders. From his bellicose speech, and from almost every other contribution to the debate, the overriding impression was that the House of Commons had become united in
its determination to reverse the Argentine seizure of the Islands by British military force.

The fall-back position that the despatch of the fleet was a diplomatic bargaining chip rather than an instrument of retaliation evaporated during the debate. The one or two voices that entered caveats about the difficulties of waging a war across 8,000 miles of ocean were given a rough ride. ‘Let us hear no more about logistics – how difficult it is to travel long distances’, declared Sir Edward du Cann, Chairman of the 1922 Committee. ‘I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour. I am clear that that is safe in the hands of my right hon. Friend.’
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Margaret Thatcher was seen to be nodding at this implication that the war and the nation’s honour had been personally entrusted to her. In the next speech, Enoch Powell made the same point in memorably chilling language.

The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the ‘Iron Lady’. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation, and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.
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Margaret Thatcher’s body language as she heard Enoch Powell’s challenge was a combination of nodding and squirming. Watching her, I sensed at the time that his thrust had gone deep. If she ever had any doubts about crossing the Rubicon to war, they were removed by the House of Commons on that Saturday morning. Some commentators subsequently described the parliamentary mood as ‘jingoistic’, ‘gung-ho for war’ and completely ‘over the top’. But as one who was present in the chamber throughout the debate, I had no doubt that MPs from every corner of the political spectrum were reflecting the feelings they had already heard voiced in their constituencies. The country would not settle for anything less than the eviction of the Argentine invaders from the Falklands. As a result there was remarkably little difference in the tone of the speeches, whether they came from the unilateralist left (Michael Foot) or the imperialist right (Julian Amery). It was a genuinely British response to an outrage against British people by a foreign dictatorship in violation of
international law. Margaret Thatcher had reflected those attitudes and her instincts were confirmed by a united Parliament. She had swung all parties behind her decision to send a task force. But as Enoch Powell had hinted, any weakening in this resolve would put her own political future in peril.

In the hours immediately following the debate, the patriotic unity of the public speeches in the chamber was diluted by many expressions of private cynicism in the corridors and committee rooms of the Palace of Westminster. ‘She’ll be out if she don’t deliver what she promised, and she’ll be in for a long time if she do’,
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was the opinion of Alec Woodall, the Labour MP for Hemsworth. He was an ex-miner, a staunch old Labour patriot and a personal friend as my House of Commons pair.

Another interesting opinion that afternoon came from Nicholas Ridley. I found him sitting morosely in the smoking room nursing an outsize brandy.

‘I blame the Tory Right’, he grumbled. ‘But for them we could have avoided this bloody mess.’

‘Do you include Margaret in “them”?’ I asked.

‘Yes she was part of it. But now we’ve got to back her to the hilt.’
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In some Tory circles there was less straightforwardness, and more vindictiveness. The disaster of the debate had been the winding-up speech of John Nott, who seemed to lose his nerve and the high ground of the argument. He made the great mistake of attacking the previous Labour government for alleged inconsistencies in their earlier handling of the Falklands. After many interruptions, which he did not handle well, he sat down amidst raucous calls of ‘Resign!’ – some from his own back benches. This was rough stuff for a government on the brink of committing the nation’s armed forces to a war, but worse was to come.

Immediately after the debate ended, Margaret Thatcher convened a meeting of senior ministerial colleagues in her House of Commons office behind the Speaker’s chair. Although John Nott was shaken by the mauling his speech had received a few minutes earlier, he was calm in comparison to some others present, notably Willie Whitelaw, described as being ‘in a frightful flap’, and the Chief Whip, Michael Jopling, who excitably reported that the party was ‘in a state of chaos’,
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with rebellions and resignations of the whip imminent. Margaret Thatcher agreed with her Chief Whip’s suggestion that the best way to steady her parliamentary troops would be to call an immediate party meeting in Committee Room 10, to be addressed by both the Defence and Foreign Secretaries.

This was a misjudgement. The meeting, which along with over a hundred Tory back-benchers I attended, began in the atmosphere of a lynch mob, as unprecedented boos and catcalls greeted the entry of the two cabinet ministers. Even when the hysteria subsided, the tone of the questioning was subversive. Alan Clark caught the atmosphere in his diary when he wrote contemptuously about ‘the predictable front men making their coded statements whose real purpose was to prepare the way for a coup if events should lead to humiliation or disaster’.
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I drew different conclusions from this tense gathering. The ‘predictable front men’ identified by Alan Clark were vocal, but their circumlocutions made them sound weak and unreliable. Moreover, by that mysterious process of character analysis, which the House of Commons performs on its members, some of the most hostile speakers had long been identified as third raters. By contrast, there were well-respected colleagues speaking up quietly and sensibly for the task-force strategy. But they were in a numerical minority.

Carrington answered questions capably at this meeting, but misread the signals from it. As a peer, he had the disadvantage of not being able to know the characters and reputations of his Commons questioners. Schooled only in the genteel politeness of the Upper House, he was unnerved by the rough and tumble of the elected representatives’ rudeness. He was being attacked by men of straw but was unable to differentiate them from the colleagues who carried weight. So instead of shrugging off the often silly criticisms of his department, he became despondent.
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Over the weekend, Carrington consulted his friends on whether he should resign. The Prime Minister wanted him to stay, and said so in her usual forthright manner. Over lunch at Dorneywood on Sunday 4 April, the Home Secretary offered the same advice, but less forthrightly. ‘Oh, you know Willie. He tried to dissuade me – but not too hard’, recalled Carrington.
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Another elder statesman who advised him to remain in his post was former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Lord Home. But his support was unwittingly undermined by his wife. Just after he thought he had persuaded Carrington to stay, he left the room to go to the lavatory. Elizabeth Home entered. Carrington asked what she thought he should do. ‘Oh well, Alec has told me that if he was in your position he wouldn’t have the faintest hesitation but to resign’, blurted out Lady Home.
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