Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality (51 page)

The over-wrought language was perhaps an indication of the degree of Margaret Thatcher’s distress. She had been warned that casualties would be inevitable in the war, but this was her first major experience of them. She had
told her staff that the blow she most dreaded was the loss of a ship. Now she was bearing the burden of knowing that the
Sheffield
was the first British warship to be sunk by enemy action since the Second World War. Up until this moment, her experience of war had been confined to images. Suddenly she was confronted with its reality.

Retiring to the privacy of her flat under the eaves of Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher broke down in floods of tears. She was overwhelmed by what were perhaps maternal emotions over the loss of young lives. As she said through her sobs, the sailors drowned in the South Atlantic were about the same age as her twenty-two-year old son Mark, who was now with her in the sitting room. He and Denis did their best to comfort her. But after a while Denis grew tetchy in response to his wife’s overwrought reactions. ‘What are you making all this fuss for?’ he asked. ‘When there’s a war on you’ve got to expect things not to go right all the time.’
¹²

Mark had gentler and more sensitive reactions. He was staying at No. 10, so he sat up late with his mother, and rose with her too, awakened by the ringing of her bedside telephone at 5 a.m. The call from the duty clerk reported that the death toll from the
Sheffield
had risen to twenty. Seeing the impact on his mother, Mark brought her a cup of tea and sat in the bedroom with her in a time of silent emotion. ‘I could see that she was suffering’, he recalled. ‘I think it helped her to have a member of the family beside her sharing in her feelings. It wasn’t necessary to say anything.’
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MORE DIPLOMATIC WOBBLES

A few hours later, the Prime Minister called her full cabinet into emergency session on the morning of 5 May. Her ministers were also shaken by the sinking of the
Sheffield
. They had awkward military questions for Admiral Lewin, such as: Why were our ships so vulnerable to Argentine missiles? Was the task force too close to the mainland? Could a landing really be made on the Islands?

Most of the cabinet were reassured by the answers they received on these questions, although one minister, Patrick Jenkin, voiced the minority view that the sinking of the
Sheffield
meant that Britain should offer a cease-fire.

The loss of life over the
Belgrano
had increased the diplomatic pressure for a settlement, which was now coming from three combined sources – a peace
plan from Peru; its acceptance by Francis Pym; and its advocacy by the US State Department and the White House.

Margaret Thatcher reported to the cabinet that she had just received a message from President Reagan, which asked her to accept the Peruvian peace proposals. It had arrived at a bad moment, soon after she had been told that the
Sheffield
was on fire. She did not tell her ministers how angry she had been with the President of the United States for piling on what she later called ‘this constant pressure to weaken our stance’.
¹⁴

Affronted by Reagan’s demands to find a compromise, she sat down and composed a blistering reply that pulled no punches about her disappointment with him. This furious missive was never sent.

The draft in her own handwriting has survived in her private papers. It is revealing about the true anger of the Prime Minister’s mood during her most vulnerable period in early May. The main issue on which she parted company from the President and his Secretary of State was the Islanders’ right to self- determination. Margaret Thatcher wrote:

You say that your suggestions are faithful to the basic principles we most protect. I wish they were but alas they are not. The present proposals do not provide a right to self-determination, although it is fundamental to democracy and was enjoyed by the Islanders up to the moment of invasion. We asked that it should be included. The reply contained in Mr Haig’s letter to Francis Pym was that it could not because the Argentines would not accept it. So our principles are no longer what we believe, nor those we were elected to serve, but what the dictator will accept.
¹⁵

These words were cut out of the final version of the reply she sent to President Reagan because she was persuaded by cooler heads that it ‘revealed perhaps too much of my frustration’.
¹⁶
But even in its watered down form her response was a rebuke.

She complained about the US efforts to bulldoze Britain into compromise, making a personal appeal to Reagan as ‘the only person who will understand the significance of what I am trying to say’. Her message was the familiar theme that at stake were great issues of legal and moral principle. There could be no solution to the Falklands crisis that did not ‘provide unambiguously for a right to self-determination’.
¹⁷
She was not going to desert the Islands without establishing this right.

Although the Prime Minister was resolute in her refusal to consider diplomatic compromises that eroded British sovereignty or the Islanders’ right to determine their own future, she gave more credence to the Peruvian peace plan than she admitted at the time. This was partly because of the American pressure, and partly because she had been listening to a Peruvian back channel operated by her friend and speech writer Professor Hugh Thomas.

Hugh Thomas was an expert on Latin America and an acclaimed author of books on Cuba, Mexico and the Spanish Civil War. He had extensive contacts across the South American continent, and enjoyed a close relationship with the Prime Minister of Peru, Manuel Ulloa Elías. Throughout April and most of May, Thomas and Ulloa telephoned each other every day. The important messages from these conversations were reported directly to Margaret Thatcher by Hugh Thomas, who in turn relayed her thoughts to his high Peruvian source.

This back channel stayed secret, but it became known to Washington. The US State Department was so concerned by this that they despatched the Minister at the US Embassy in London, Ed Streator, to talk to Hugh Thomas. As the two men knew each other socially, Thomas was unsurprised by the contact, but became startled when Streator began asking him about his regular communications with Manuel Ulloa. ‘How do you know about them?’ asked Thomas. ‘We are a global power’, was Streator’s reply. When this was passed on to Margaret Thatcher, she told Hugh Thomas, ‘Ring me at Chequers. They listen in less, there.’
¹⁸

If the Americans had been listening to the dialogue between the British and Peruvian prime ministers, as conducted through Hugh Thomas, they would have receive only limited encouragement. But Margaret Thatcher took the Peruvian proposals more seriously than she acknowledged in her memoirs. Intriguingly, she showed some willingness to agree to the idea of what was called an ‘Argentine Resident’ in the Falklands. This would have been the equivalent of the British Resident in the Gulf, a former diplomatic posting to the Trucial Oman States. Because it had no legal impact on sovereignty, the idea had little appeal in Buenos Aires. But it did show that the Prime Minister was willing to give some ground. She was getting a better understanding of the Argentine junta’s mindset from the Peruvian Prime Minister’s nocturnal phone conversations with Hugh Thomas (‘sometimes with the unmistakable sound of castanets in the background’)
¹⁹
than she was from her own Foreign Office. On
one occasion she asked Thomas why Manuel Ulloa was so well informed and insightful about the inner workings of the junta. ‘Prime Minister, you have to realise that like every successful Peruvian, he has an Argentine second wife’, was the reply.

One of the more dramatic products of the Peruvian back channel came on the night of 2 May, when Manuel Ulloa telephoned Hugh Thomas to report that the
General Belgrano
had been sunk. Thomas immediately called Margaret Thatcher (who was out at a dinner), and passed on this news to her Principal Private Secretary. ‘Are you sure he said it had been
sunk
?’ asked Clive Whitmore. Apparently, No. 10 knew that the
General Belgrano
had been hit by the torpedo attack from HMS
Conqueror
. But the first confirmation of the cruiser’s sinking came from the co-operative Peruvian Prime Minister. Back channels have their uses.

Through more conventional diplomatic channels, the Peruvian peace plan began giving Margaret Thatcher a serious problem. Not only was she being pressurised by President Reagan to accept it. Her Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, returned from New York on 4 May with a renewed determination to secure a cessation of hostilities. The basis on which Pym advocated a peace deal was effectively a revised version of the ‘Haig Two’ proposals, which had already been rejected by the Prime Minister and the war cabinet.

The revisions were slight, but this time they had the imprimatur of President Fernando Belaúnde of Peru, who was Argentina’s closest ally in Latin America.

At a meeting of the full cabinet on 5 May, Pym received a more positive response than he had been given when the war cabinet turned down almost the same package on 23 April. Margaret Thatcher herself remained ‘deeply unhappy about the US–Peruvian proposals’.
²⁰
But her cabinet, by a counted majority of twenty to two, wanted the talking to continue. So, biting her lip she had to tell the House of Commons the following day that the government was making ‘a very constructive response’ to the Peruvian initiative.
²¹
Her words on the printed page of the official report are deceptive for her tone could hardly have been less constructive. She was also visibly dismayed by the cheers of left-wing Labour MPs at this apparent reversal of her uncompromising stance. For the next few hours the Prime Minister’s strategy on the Falklands was on a knife edge.

The collapse of her strategy was averted by the machismo of the junta in Buenos Aires. Had they accepted the Peruvian plan, Margaret Thatcher would have been on the ropes, for she would have been pushed into a messy compromise which failed to secure her key objectives of restoring British sovereignty and administration to the Islands. But fortunately for her, the junta had become emboldened by the sinking of the
Sheffield
and upped the ante. Instead of doing a deal with President Belaúnde, the Argentine Foreign Minister Nicanor Costa Méndez criticised the details of the Peruvian plan and wanted further negotiations in New York.

During a stormy debate in the House of Commons, a disappointed Francis Pym said that but for the junta’s intransigence there could have been ‘an immediate cease-fire’. He was given a rough ride by his back-benchers for going on to say, ‘If one phase of diplomatic effort has been brought to an end … another phase is already under way in New York’.
²²

Margaret Thatcher well understood that she had been passing through a forty-eight-hour period of political peril for her own survival. She was furious with Francis Pym for bouncing her into a semi-endorsement of the US–Peruvian proposal. It would have meant the end of British sovereignty over the Falklands, some form of UN trusteeship administering the Islands and a climb down from her high principles for the long-term governance of the colony would have to be shared with Argentina. She had come perilously close to being forced to sign up to this.

One trusted aide in whom she confided her fears and her fury was her PPS, Ian Gow. He in turn passed them on to a number of trusted back-bench friends, who included Tony Buck, Alan Clark, Jim Spicer and myself. That was one of the reasons why Francis Pym was greeted with groans and cries of ‘No’ when he said that another phase of diplomacy would continue in New York. But even allowing for Ian Gow’s orchestration of it, there was always a strong body of parliamentary opinion which felt that a settlement anywhere near the Peruvian or indeed the American terms would be a defeat for Britain and its prime minister.

The Americans however had not given up. On 13 May, Ronald Reagan telephoned Margaret Thatcher in what must have been one of the most acrimo- nious conversations ever to take place between a US president and a British prime minster. The call began agreeably, with Reagan saying that he understood that the negotiating positions between the two sides were now quite close.
Thatcher firmly told him that this was not the case and gave him a detailed explanation of the British position. Detail was never Reagan’s strong point. He moved on to say he was worried about rumours that British forces were planning an attack on the Argentine mainland. Not true, he was told. Then he asked Margaret Thatcher to hold off on further military action to give more time for the UN to devolve the negotiations. This was too much for her. ‘Argentina attacked our ships only yesterday’, she retorted. ‘We cannot delay military options simply because of negotiations.’

Reagan’s next ploy was to comment that international opinion might see the conflict as a David versus Goliath struggle with Britain in the role of Goliath. ‘This could hardly be true at a distance of 8,000 miles’, was her riposte. Then she lambasted the President, asking if he would like Americans to live under a brutal dictatorship like the junta; pointing out the length of time that many of the Islanders had lived on the Falklands; and lecturing him on the strategic importance of the Islands if the Panama Canal was enclosed.

Margaret Thatcher called these exchanges ‘a difficult conversation’.
²³

President Reagan wrote more emolliently in his diary, ‘Talked to Margaret but don’t think I persuaded her against further action’.
²⁴

The British Ambassador to Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson, commented, ‘I can’t see Reagan getting on to her on the phone again in a hurry’.
²⁵

Although there was clarity from Margaret Thatcher, the Argentines were making their responses to the various settlement proposals as clear as mud. The junta consisted of fifty-four people divided into groups and sub-groups which frequently contradicted each other. The number of their interlocutors was multiplying too. To Haig’s considerable annoyance, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Perez de Cuellar, launched his own variation of the American and Peruvian proposals, while the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, had a private dialogue with Argentine diplomats about possible peace terms. This mixture of overtures gave the junta the opportunity to play one negotiation off against another, and also to play for time.