by Andy McSmith
In 1982, no community under British rule was more welfare-dependent than the Falkland Islands. The cost of supporting it was a running sore for the Department of Overseas Aid, who were obliged to pay annually £850 per capita to the islanders. Even the Treasury does not know how much it cost to retake the islands and hold on to them in the years that followed, because the information is scattered between forty and seventy separate paper files,49 but it would include £624m added to the defence budget in 1983–4 to replace equipment lost or destroyed in the fighting and to maintain a garrison on the islands, plus £684m the following year, and £552m in 1985–6, making £1,860m in just the first three years.50 There was also a one-off bill of £500,000 in 1982 – nearly £3,000 per islander – to add to the already generous overseas aid they received.51 The smashed-up runway at the Port Stanley airstrip was repaired and extended. In place of the garrison of about twenty, they were granted a permanent air base at Mount Pleasant, employing up to 2,000 military and civilian personnel. So much cash went into developing fishing and tourism that by 1992 the islands had achieved self-sufficiency in everything but the huge cost of maintaining the garrison, which in 2008 worked out at about £150,000 per islander, per year. GDP had reached £75m or £25,000 per head by 2008. The 2006 census gave the population of the islands as 2,478, not counting the personnel on Mount Pleasant. More than 2,000 of them lived in Port Stanley, now a much enlarged village with 930 houses. Yet while Port Stanley has survived, the drift of the population out of the rest of the islands has not abated. In 2006, there were 363 people living in the outlying islands, all but 42 of them on the two main islands.
Another gainer was the Royal Navy, whose precious surface ships were saved from the scrapyard; HMS Endurance was given an extra ten years of active service. However, the greatest beneficiaries of all were Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Party, who had secured a poll lead that would see no fewer than 100 new Conservative MPs elected the following year, giving them the biggest parliamentary majority any party had enjoyed since the Second World War. The Falklands made an international celebrity out of Mrs Thatcher. She, of course, fully intended to put her new status to use. Speaking to a rally of Conservative Party activists in Cheltenham, less than three weeks after the Argentine surrender, she used the ‘Falklands Factor’ to warn the railway workers’ union to abandon industrial action and the NHS employers to drop their demand for better pay:
There is a new mood of realism in Britain. That too is part of the Falklands Factor. The battle of the South Atlantic was not won by ignoring the dangers or denying the risks. It was achieved by men and women who had no illusions about the difficulties. We faced them squarely and we were determined to overcome. That is increasingly the mood of Britain. And that’s why the rail strike won’t do.52
In January 1983, as the islanders marked 150 years of British rule, Mrs Thatcher descended for a three-day visit to ‘shabby shell-shocked Stanley’ – as the governor, Rex Hunt, termed it. ‘You were all marvellous,’ she told the surprised, delighted islanders. One of them, Mike Bleaney, standing nearby with his son on his shoulders, replied: ‘You didn’t do so badly yourself, M’am.’53 Her visit was no doubt a great morale booster on the islands; it also furnished great pictures for the voters back home.
The impending general election was perhaps already won by then. Certainly, once those happy images had been seen back home, the Labour Party did not stand a chance, though during the campaign they tried to knock the shine off her image as a war leader. Neil Kinnock called for an inquiry into the sinking of the Belgrano and Denis Healey accused Thatcher of ‘glorying in slaughter’, but given that the Labour Party had called for and supported military action, their protestations sounded feeble. A more effective attack, because it was so unexpected, came from Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, who during the war had defended the principle that sometimes military force was necessary and justified. When he presided over the official thanksgiving service in St Paul’s Cathedral, instead of the victory celebration that the Conservatives demanded Runcie and other clerics insisted that the service should be on the theme of peace. ‘War is a sign of human failure, and everything we say and do in this service must be in that context,’54 Runcie said in his sermon. Mrs Thatcher attended, but reputedly left fuming. That afternoon, Denis Thatcher was escorting some paratroopers on the terrace at the House of Commons: ‘The Boss was livid,’ he told them. So was the Tory MP Julian Amery, who said: ‘I was very shocked. There were no martial hymns like Fight the Good Fight and Onward Christian Soldiers, and there were none of the great prayers. I thought it was a deliberate counterattack against the mass of opinion of this country on the part of the pacifist, liberal wet establishment.’ Fellow Tory Sir John Biggs-Davison thought: ‘it was revolting for cringing clergy to misuse St Paul’s to throw doubt upon the sacrifices of our fighting men’.55
Mrs Thatcher’s government allowed no bad news stories from the Falklands to spoil the sweet taste of victory. It was essential, for instance, that no one should know that four of the British dead had been killed by ‘friendly fire’. On 6 June, as troops were landing on East Falkland, a Gazelle helicopter was dispatched to Goose Green to collect two passengers. Seven minutes later, it was shot down, killing everyone on board. An inquest held in Southampton in December was told that it had been hit by an Argentine missile. This was not true, as the Ministry of Defence well knew; fragments found at the scene showed that the fatal missile was a Sea Dart fired from HMS Cardiff The truth was quietly slipped out in answer to a written question in the Commons four years later.56 When the navy eventually held an inquiry in November 1986, it established that the helicopter did not have its identification system switched on, so the navy assumed, without checking, that it must be Argentinian. The findings were kept secret until the Ministry of Defence released them in July 2008.57
Another incident quietly passed over was the killing of an unarmed Argentinian PoW, Suboficial Primero Felix Artuso, the first fatal casualty of the war. He was killed almost a week before the sinking of the Belgrano, when it still seemed possible that the crisis might be resolved without further bloodshed. When the task force retook South Georgia on 25 April, they captured a damaged submarine, the Santa Fe, and ordered its Argentinian crew to move the vessel the next day, under the eyes of armed British guards. The Argentinians were so pleased that no one had been hurt in this first encounter with the British that they were friendly and chatty, but the man guarding Artuso, in the lower control room, could not understand a word his prisoner was saying. He used sign language to tell Artuso not to touch a lever that the guard believed controlled the submarine’s torpedoes. His gesticulations must have bemused Artuso, because he was actually pointing at a lever that controlled the ship’s buoyancy. Artuso was given an order by telephone to switch on the air system, and made straight for the very lever that he had been banned from touching. The guard shot him five times. The navy held an immediate inquiry and exonerated the man who fired the shots, while mildly criticizing his commanding officer. Their findings were also held back for 25 years.58
Another shocking internal report that was withheld from the public for a quarter of a century was into the seaworthiness of the SS Atlantic Conveyor. This ship was laid up in Liverpool when the Falklands were invaded and was rapidly converted into a ferry ship and aircraft carrier. On 25 May, it was hit by two Exocets. Three crew members died in the fire and nine drowned. The Board of Inquiry discovered that its firefighting equipment was inadequate and that its internal communication system was so ‘rudimentary’ that ‘at least six people were below decks when the missile struck, completely unaware that the ship was at emergency stations’.59 Evidently, there was also a scramble for the life-raft s, which might explain why more men died in the sea than in the fire, but even when the report was declassified in 2007 the description of what happened as the men struggled to safety in the chilly water was blanked out.
Perhaps the most serious question of all was whether or n
ot the sinking of the Sheffield could have been avoided. The lengthy report by a Board of Inquiry was peppered with comments such as ‘at this point, matters started going severely wrong’; ‘Sheffield, perhaps lulled into a sense of security by the false alarms and subsequent inactivity still did not carry out acknowledged and practised procedures’; and ‘if all the right reactions had been taken very quickly indeed and particularly if chaff had been fired . . . it might have been possible to frustrate this determined and very professional Super Exocet attack’.60 The clear implication is that the Sheffield’s crew underestimated the Argentines and carelessly allowed their ship to be destroyed. Sandy Woodward’s memoirs suggest that he would have had some of the crew court-martialled, but was overruled because there was to be no ‘souring the general euphoria’.61
There was also the strange, sad tale of an eighteen-year-old private, Philip Williams of the Scots Guards, for whom the war did not end until seven weeks after the Argentinian surrender. He was a stretcher-bearer during the battle for Mount Tumbledown and was either knocked out or got lost. He wandered about in atrocious weather, sleeping in a shepherd’s hut, and saw no one other than dead Argentinians, until he stumbled into a remote farmhouse on 1 August. His family had been told that he was dead. His return was reported worldwide, first as a good-news story, until it became apparent that he was not in a fit mental state to act out the role of a returning hero. A whispering campaign then began. Somebody tipped off the Daily Mirror that the teenager would face a regimental inquiry ‘that could lead to a court-martial’.62 That did not happen, but he returned to Chelsea Barracks isolated, vulnerable and a target for bullies. He went AWOL, had a breakdown and was discharged.63
Another young Scots Guard, Alexander Findlay, also acted as a stretcher-bearer on Tumbledown. He saw one friend shot in the throat, and a fellow stretcher-bearer cut in half by a mortar. He stayed in the army, though he was so traumatized that his wife found him one day hiding in a fox hole that he had dug in the garden. In 1990, when he was serving in Northern Ireland, he had had too much to drink, pulled a gun, threatened to kill two fellow soldiers, threatened suicide, fired into a television set and surrendered. Instead of sending him for treatment, a court-martial sentenced him to two years in prison.64
In November 1988, after some hesitation, the BBC broadcast the play Tumbledown, the story of Lieutenant Robert Lawrence, a Scots Guard who had half his brain blown away by a bullet in the final battle of the war. The film, which combined fact and fiction, was based on Lawrence’s account of the treatment he received back in Britain. Paralysed on one side of his body and confined to a wheelchair, he was an ugly sight that the government, he believed, wanted to hide away. ‘The government seemed to do their best to massage and manipulate the images of the war to ensure they did not show the real costs of it and the real harm it had done,’ he said, in one interview.65 Other wounded survivors backed his account, but the army and the Ministry of Defence were offended by it. The film was dropped from the schedules in 1987, in case it impacted on the general election. One twelve-second sequence was cut on the army’s insistence and the rest went out in May 1988 to a storm of controversy. The fire was inadvertently given fuel by the film’s director, Richard Eyre, who admitted in a question and answer session that it was ‘deeply political’, which gave a Home Office minister, Lord Renton, occasion to denounce the film in the House of Lords as ‘the product of a pacifist who has declared that all his work is subversive’.66 John Stokes, a Tory MP said:
I cannot think why it was written and why the BBC put it out. I can only think that the underlying point is to undermine the sacrifices and heroism which enabled us to repossess the Falkland Islands. It is, in my view, another example of the BBC stabbing the nation in the back.67
One claim made for the Falklands is that it brought democracy to Argentina by bringing down the junta – not that Margaret Thatcher had any general objection to Latin American military dictators, as she demonstrated through her enduring friendship with Chile’s murderous ruler, General Augusto Pinochet.68 Actually, the age of military dictators in South America was coming to an end, anyway. Ecuador reverted to civilian rule in 1979; Argentina in 1983; Uruguay in 1984; Brazil in 1985; Chile in 1988; and Paraguay in 1989. The most that could be said about the Falklands War is that it may have nudged Argentina a little further up the queue. While a democratically governed Argentina is unlikely to launch a sudden attack on the islands, it has not surrendered its claim to them, and the billions that the UK government has sunk into the islands has not shortened the 8,000-mile journey from London to Port Stanley. The problem has been suppressed but it has not been solved.
CHAPTER 7
DARLING, WE’RE THE YOUNG ONES
In the second half of 1980, a few specialist cinemas in big cities were showing an unusual film called The Secret Policeman’s Ball, In the second half of 1980, a few specialist cinemas in big cities were showing an unusual film called The Secret Policeman’s Ball, which was no more than a stage show recorded on celluloid, made cheaper by the fact that none of the performers was paid. John Cleese performed with Peter Cook, who had once been his mentor. Three of the Monty Python team reprised a famous sketch in which four Yorkshiremen competitively boast about their deprived childhoods, repeating the catchphrase ‘you were lucky’. The fourth role was filled by a twenty-four-year-old graduate with a degree in electrical engineering, who later took to the bare stage alone to perform a simple but very funny routine: pretending to be a schoolmaster reading the roll call. He had a rubbery face, flawless timing and a strange way of emphasizing the letter ‘B’ – which, it would emerge years later, was the result of having to battle against a stutter. He also had a mock bored, bad-tempered air that made his audience scream with laughter at lines such as ‘Nibble, leave Orifice alone!’ Most of the live audience cannot have known who he was, but by the time the film was on release most of those whose who saw it would have recognized the face, if not the name. It was Rowan Atkinson.
The 1980s was the best decade that British television comedy has ever had. One sharp new comedy series followed another in an explosion of inventiveness that raised young comedians to the status of rock stars. Their trade was no longer dominated by old troopers such as Morecombe and Wise or Spike Milligan, who had spent years perfecting a live act before they were exposed to a mass audience. The new comedians were on radio and television when they were barely out of university, operating in a liberated regime that allowed them to act like adolescents and make jokes about subjects that their parents found either embarrassing or too serious to be laughed at. Anything from the lavatory, to race, sex and Margaret Thatcher were suitable sources for humour. This meant that the ‘alternative’ comedians, as they were known, did not need scriptwriters who could devise the kind of elaborate wordplay of The Two Ronnies, or the professionalism that went into Morecombe and Wise’s dance routines. Alternative comedy assumed a high level of education in its audience, and relied on sharp social observation and energetic delivery. There had been no very notable additions to the nation’s comedians since the Monty Python team of ten years earlier, until suddenly Rowan Atkinson, Rik Mayall, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Nigel Planer, Ade Edmondson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Ben Elton, Harry Enfield and many more tumbled into the public eye, becoming the idols of a generation.
To begin with, there was Not the Nine O’Clock News, the show that made stars out of Atkinson and three other unknowns. It was the brainchild of John Lloyd, a Cambridge graduate with a law degree, who had gone into radio hoping to be a performer or a scriptwriter, but ended up as a producer and discovered a valuable talent for manoeuvring his way through the internal politics of the BBC. Since most producers were much older than Lloyd, he was the one that young comics wanted to work with. He had produced more than 100 radio shows, including The News Quiz and Quote Unquote, and helped Douglas Adams with the original radio version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when in 1979, still aged only twenty-eight, he asked fo
r an opportunity to move to television. The BBC was then good at turning out tame satire for a mass audience that off ended no one, such as Open All Hours or The Good Life; Monty Python’s Flying Circus was anarchic, but never hurtful. When the Python team decided to risk causing offence by poking fun at the New Testament, they did it on film. Television viewers were permitted to watch studio debates about whether Life of Brian (1979) was funny or merely offensive, but there was no suggestion that the film itself was suitable to be beamed into the home. Mike Yarwood, the leading mimic of the 1970s, was so gentle in his impersonations that Harold Wilson willingly appeared on a chat show with him, while Denis Healey used to impersonate Yarwood’s impersonation of him.
As Yarwood’s career collapsed, into the breach came the situation comedy Yes Minister, launched in 1980 with Paul Eddington as Jim Hacker, an incompetent, cowardly cabinet minister, terrified of decisions and obsessively trying to find out whether people thought he was doing well or badly. He was manipulated at every turn by Sir Humphrey, his permanent secretary, played by Nigel Hawthorne. The writers, Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, mined the diaries of Richard Crossman, a former Labour cabinet minister, for comic inspiration. ‘There was nothing in it that you couldn’t have found if you read the Crossman Diaries from cover to cover,’ Lynn confessed. He added: ‘We made politics comprehensible in human terms and we also made people realize that politicians cannot do what they want to do. It had a traditional comedy formula, too, of the servant who is more able than his master – the same formula as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.’1 The show won awards, year after year. Mass audiences loved it, but its most avid fans, generally, were civil servants and career politicians because it was accurate enough to be recognizable while not cruel enough to be upsetting. Lord Allen of Abbeydale, former permanent secretary at the Home Office, praised the spoof diaries of Jim Hacker as ‘rather more accurate than Dick Crossman’s’.2 Margaret Thatcher particularly liked the way that, without ever mentioning her even obliquely, it played to her self image as a lone fighter up against a hidebound establishment and spineless ministers.