No Such Thing As Society

by Andy McSmith

  South America at that time was a playground for military dictators, and of all the murderous and unstable regimes in the continent, Argentina’s was one of the worst. The country had been under direct military rule since March 1976, when President Isabel Perón, third wife and widow of Juan Perón, was bundled off to exile in Spain. Even before that coup, Marxist revolutionaries, union organizers and other left-wing activists had begun ‘disappearing’ without trace. In 1979, Amnesty International calculated that the number of ‘desaparecidos’ abducted, tortured and possibly killed by government agents in four years could be as high as 15,000. This grisly operation seems to have begun with the tacit approval of Washington, where the Republican administration certainly believed that a military takeover was preferable to a Marxist revolution; but Democrat President Jimmy Carter, who took office in 1977, was more particular about human rights. By 1979, the junta felt the need to try to improve its international image by releasing some prisoners and reducing the rate at which new victims disappeared. It also supplied bookshops across Europe with complimentary copies of a book called The Strategists of Fear, by a well-known French historian and anti-communist, Pierre de Villemarest, which attributed Argentina’s bad reputation to poison being spread by rich Jews living in Buenos Aires, aided by their co-religionists in Europe and their contacts in the White House.7

  In 1981, this much criticized regime suddenly found itself back in the sunlight because Ronald Reagan had taken office in Washington. His foreign policy adviser during the election had been Jeane Kirkpatrick, author of a theory that differentiated between ‘totalitarian’ and ‘authoritarian’ dictatorships according to whether they interfered with or permitted free enterprise. Whereas the Nicaraguan government was totalitarian, the Argentina junta was merely authoritarian. Relations between Buenos Aires and Washington were suddenly so good that there was talk of Argentina being the first South American government to supply troops to fight insurgents in El Salvador.

  Also in 1981, the British made two announcements the significance of which was over-interpreted in Buenos Aires. Going against advice from the Foreign Office, John Nott, the defence secretary, decided as an economic measure to scrap the only naval ship patrolling the South Atlantic. At about the same time Home Secretary William Whitelaw introduced an immigration bill to prevent the residents of Hong Kong from flooding into Britain as the colony prepared to be returned to Chinese rule, which also incidentally deprived 800 Falkland islanders of their British citizenship. Each minister had his reasons independent of the Argentine claim over the Falklands, but in Buenos Aires it seemed that Britain had lost interest in its South Atlantic dependency, especially when British MPs who visited Argentina showed less interest in the islands than in helping to re-equip the Argentine navy, which of all the branches of the Argentine military was the one pushing hardest for the recovery of Las Malvinas. Back in England, the Tory MP Neville Trotter indicated to his local newspaper that there might be work for the Tyne shipyards building warships for Argentina. He declared, ‘The Navy are very pro-British. They have a British atmosphere.’8

  On December 1981, Argentina swapped one military junta for another, headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri. The head of the navy, Admiral Jorge Anaya, gave his support on condition that the junta reclaim the Falklands, by diplomacy or by force, before the 150th anniversary of the British occupation. Talks between British and Argentinian diplomats resumed in New York. In March 1982, a group of Argentinian scrap-metal dealers landed on South Georgia, an island 800 miles southeast of the Falklands, which Argentina also considered to be part of its sovereign territory. The dealers had a contract from a Scottish firm to clear away scrap whaling material littering the island. They raised the Argentine flag, refused to observe the normal courtesy of contacting the island’s chief magistrate, and generally behaved as if they were on home soil. The British government decided that military intervention was required. HMS Endurance, which was supposedly on its last voyage, was dispatched from Port Stanley, with thirteen Royal Marines and nine men from the Falklands garrison, and reached South Georgia’s main settlement, Grytviken, on 24 March. A week later, having seen off the scrap-metal dealers, the ship headed back towards Port Stanley, and so was in neither one place nor the other, but uselessly at sea, when Argentinian troops landed on the Falklands. The junta had not intended to launch its attack yet, but fearing that the precipitous action of the scrap-metal dealers would have alerted the British, they brought forward the date.

  On Wednesday evening, 31 March, John Nott was disturbed in his Commons office by the breathless arrival of intelligence officers bearing intercepted messages that showed that the Argentine navy was at sea, heading for the Falklands. Nott went straight along the corridor to Margaret Thatcher’s room, where a meeting was convened with civil servants and two junior foreign ministers. After what had happened to Ridley, Thatcher knew that she could expect a very rough reception from the Commons if, as feared, the Argentinian troops were disembarked on East Falkland, but no one in the room had a sensible suggestion as to what she could do next, other than ring Ronald Reagan.

  That might have been all that resulted from the indecisive meeting in Mrs Thatcher’s Commons office had a messenger not looked in to announce that there was an admiral in full dress-uniform in the corridor. It was First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff , Sir Henry Leach, or ‘First’ as he was known, who had scuttled over to Parliament hoping to speak to the prime minister. He had been held up by a policeman in the central lobby and might have got no further had a government whip not passed by and stopped to ask why he was sitting alone on a bench in the corner. ‘First’ was on a mission. His life had been devoted to the Royal Navy, and now that he was senior enough to have to deal with politicians, he judged them solely by their commitment to the senior service. Francis Pym, Thatcher’s first defence secretary, had ruined his relationship with her by opposing all cuts in the defence budget, but had still not been nearly zealous enough to satisfy Sir Henry. When Sir Henry’s secretary informed him that Pym had been shifted sideways and replaced by John Nott, in January 1981, Sir Henry’s response, recorded in his memoirs, was: ‘“Well,” I replied, “at present we have a charming man but one for whom decision making does not seem to come easily. I know nothing about Nott, but it must be a change for the better.” How wrong I was.’9

  Sir Henry was not the only senior naval officer who had learnt to despise Nott. The Second Sea Lord Admiral Cassidi, would not speak to him but ‘just scowled’; the Vice-Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Staveley talked to him often enough, but Nott thought he was stupid.10 Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, who would command the Falklands battle group, thought that ‘John Nott possessed the cold heart of the career banker.’11 Right-wing Tory MPs agreed. Alan Clark spluttered in his diary about ‘that fucking idiot Nott, and his spastic “Command Paper” which is effectively running down the entire Royal Navy to keep the soldiers in Rhine Army happy’.12

  The admirals, obviously, loved their impressive, expensive ships that patrolled the surface of the sea, whereas Nott, like Ridley, was an unsentimental Thatcherite, and a banker, looking for the most cost-effective way to defend the UK. The only war in which he could envisage the Royal Navy being involved was against the Soviet Union. Surface ships were vulnerable to Soviet submarines and, in Nott’s estimation, they were the least cost-effective weaponry the services possessed. There was also the book-keeping question of how to account for Trident. Nott reckoned that since Trident was carried in submarines the entire cost should come out of the navy’s budget. The navy called him the ‘hatchet man’ and briefed against him to any journalist who would listen, including Hugo Young of the Sunday Times, who wrote: ‘In more reflective moments, First would muse, “I don’t think I actually hate John Nott – but then perhaps I am not a hater.”’13

  Now Sir Henry had a chance to get his own back. A war in the Falklands would have to be fought with surface ships; it was exactly the sort of operation that would be rendered imposs
ible when Nott’s economies came into effect. Once admitted to Mrs Thatcher’s room, Sir Henry told her that in forty-eight hours he could assemble a task force large enough to take on the Argentinian navy. He also exceeded his authority by telling her that they not only could retake the islands but, in his view, they should. It was the sort of talk she wanted to hear. ‘Margaret, very much an impressionable lady, was always impressed by men in uniform,’ Nott claimed, in his account of the meeting.14 First was given the go-ahead.

  Before dawn on Friday, 2 April, the Falkland islanders had a noisy awakening. One recalled:

  From the front window we could see an awe-inspiring stream of tracer shells arcing from somewhere in the harbour. Shouting, screaming and the sound of machine gun fire permeated the crisp air. The Royal Marines were having a hell of a battle at Government House. The radio once again crackled into life. Argentines had manned the studio and waved their guns. Suddenly, edicts were being read by the Argentines: ‘We want no bloodshed’ etc. Too late . . . The time flew by. As suddenly as it began it was all over. The marines and Falklands Islands Defence Force volunteers had been rounded up. The governor had surrendered and later was deported with his family. Huge Argentine navy vessels anchored triumphantly in the harbour, busy unloading men and seemingly endless supplies of dust-coloured Mercedes Benz military vehicles . . . The roads hadn’t seen so much traffic.15

  In London, the Foreign Office waited anxiously for news, but heard nothing. At 11 a.m., a minister assured the House of Commons that the invasion had not begun, when in fact it had, but bad weather had prevented the radio message from Port Stanley from getting through until the captain of a vessel carrying out a survey in the Antarctic picked up a ham radio broadcast from one of the islanders, and passed the message to the Foreign Office. The diplomats’ first reaction was to downplay the crisis. They were concerned that if the British government overreacted someone might be killed, that there might be repercussions for British expatriates in Argentina or that there would be damage to Britain’s position internationally. This was consistent with the fears felt by some of the islanders, such as Jim Burgess, a carpenter from Port Stanley, who told The Times: ‘There will be a bloodbath here if the navy tries to recapture Stanley. If they try to take Stanley, they will destroy Stanley. Everything is made of wood here. Half a dozen fires and a good wind and the town will be gone for ever.’16 But such words of caution were to be ignored. The tone was not set by the people who understood the problem but by the House of Commons, which met for a three-hour emergency session the following morning.

  For MPs to be called back from their constituencies on a Saturday morning is rare indeed. The last time had been on 3 November 1956, during the Suez crisis. The very fact of being back in Parliament on this unusual day created a sense of momentous crisis reminiscent of the national humiliation Britain had suffered during Suez. The competition among the tabloids to out-jingo one another had already begun, with the Labour-voting Daily Star taking an early lead. ‘Britain must go into the Falkland Islands now and throw the invading Argentinians into the sea’ was the opening paragraph of its editorial.17 The Sun was the first to raise the possibility of a nuclear strike on Argentina – in a report stating that there had been a spontaneous demonstration outside the Argentine embassy in London by youths singing ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina, We’re going to Nuke You’.

  For Margaret Thatcher, that Saturday Commons debate was ‘the most difficult [she] ever had to face’.18 For Michael Foot and other opposition politicians, it was an opportunity. After eighteen miserable months leading a divided, fractious Labour Party, Foot at last had an opening to reprise the role he had played when he was young: excoriating the Tories for appeasing fascist dictators. He declared:

  The people of the Falkland Islands have the absolute right to look at us at this moment of their desperate plight, just as they have looked to us over the past 150 years. They are faced with an act of naked, unqualified aggression, carried out in the most shameful and disreputable circumstances. Any guarantee from this invading force is utterly worthless.

  The islanders had been betrayed, he said, and words were insufficient to absolve the government of the charge of betrayal; it required deeds.19

  With hindsight, this was one of the most foolish speeches Foot ever made, but at the moment of delivery, it seemed to be his finest hour, perhaps the one occasion when he looked like a leader who could truly lead the nation. The next speaker, Edward du Cann, an eminent Tory MP who chaired the highly powerful 1922 Committee, thanked Foot for the way ‘he spoke for us all’. Alan Clark thought that Foot was ‘excellent’, in contrast to ‘poor old Notters’, who ‘stammered and stuttered and gabbled, faltered and fluttered and fumbled . . . against a constant roaring of disapproval and contempt’.20 At the end of the three-hour debate, Labour’s defence spokesman, John Silkin, in a slip of the tongue, referred to Michael Foot as ‘the leader of the nation’; when barracked, he remarked with utter confidence, ‘he soon will be’.21

  The ‘debate’ was almost over before the Speaker called anyone who dissented from the general belligerence. The first note of caution came from a Conservative MP named Raymond Whitney, a former diplomat and chairman of the backbench committee on foreign affairs, who suggested that being led by the attitudes of tabloid writers and ‘the people in the pubs’ was not always the highest form of courage, an inference that outraged his fellow Conservatives. He was interrupted no fewer than six times in a ten-minute speech, each time by a right-wing Tory. When he refused to give way to any more, John Biggs-Davison, the MP for Epping Forest, rose to demand of the Speaker: ‘If defeatism of this kind is to be spoken, should it not be done in secret session?’ Struggling to be heard above the commotion, Whitney replied: ‘It’s not a question of defeatism – it is a question of realism.’22 Whitney, incidentally, was also on the right of the Tory party; he thought that CND was run by Communists and believed in good relations with anti-Communist regimes.

  After that lead from the Commons, it was no surprise that the first opinion poll, broadcast by ITV on the Monday night, 5 April, showed that 70 per cent of the public thought the distant islands worth fighting for, even if that meant sinking Argentine ships and putting British lives at risk. Only 5 per cent thought they were no concern of Britain.23 A quarter thought that Margaret Thatcher should have resigned, but that was hardly surprising, given her general unpopularity. For the present, her position was secure, which was more than could be said for either Minster of Defence John Nott or Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, who were identified by the Daily Express as the ‘guilty men’. Carrington and the department he headed came in for particularly ferocious attack. ‘If he has not the grace to resign, she should sack him,’ said the Daily Mail. Both ministers offered Thatcher their resignations. She prevailed upon Nott to stay, but Carrington did not need the job; he was the sixth baron in his line and a landowner, Humphrey Lyttleton had been his fag at Eton; and he was fed up with being traduced for something that was not his fault. ‘I have been responsible for the conduct of the policy; I think it is right that I resign,’ he informed Thatcher, by letter. Two junior foreign ministers who could less afford to lose their positions went with him. The Sun celebrated their departure with an editorial that took up a whole page attacking the Foreign Office as a ‘nest of appeasers’, but James Reston, of the New York Times, observed, with more wit: ‘The British are not very good at holding their empire together, but at least their officials know what to do when they let the side down; they resign in style and retire to their houses in the country.’24

  Carrington’s departure took some of the political pressure off Thatcher and seemed to sober up the Labour Party front bench. Having goaded Thatcher into going to war, they now woke up to the possibility that she might do just that – and that people would die. The Daily Mirror argued consistently, from the day the task force set sail, that the islands were not worth fighting for and that the islanders could be paid to settle somewhere else. The L
abour Left took the same line, with Tony Benn, in particular, arguing forcefully for the recall of the task force. When the Commons debated the Falklands again on the Monday, Denis Healey argued so insistently for a negotiated solution that the right-wing Labour MP Bob Mellish wanted to know what he was proposing the task force should do if it reached the Falklands before a settlement had been agreed – should it turn around and go home? He did not get a straight answer.25

  As the task force made its slow way to the South Atlantic, the US administration made strenuous efforts to resolve the conflict between its two allies. The US Secretary of State Al Haig flew thousands of miles in every direction trying to find a means to prevent war. If American diplomacy had taken its normal course, it would have tilted in favour of the Argentinians. Successful US governments from Franklin Roosevelt onwards had treated the former British Empire as an anachronism that was not worth defending. The Reagan administration would demonstrate this the following year by sending US marines to overthrow the Marxist government of Grenada, in October 1983, without troubling to consult the British government, although Grenada was a former British colony and a member of the Commonwealth. The first priority of US foreign policy during the Reagan era was to eradicate or contain any left-wing movements in Central or South America, and in this struggle the Argentine junta was a valuable ally. As Argentinian troop-ships were heading towards the Falklands, Jeane Kilpatrick, now the US Ambassador to the United Nations, had dinner with her opposite number from Argentina, and did not mention the Falklands. From this the junta naturally deduced that the Americans were not interested in a quarrel over some sparsely inhabited South Atlantic islands. They were shocked to discover that they were wrong when Ronald Reagan, having been spoken to by Margaret Thatcher, phoned Galtieri, but by then it was too late to call off the invasion without a serious loss of face.