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’.34
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.35
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.36
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.37
If there were any doubts after that they were dispelled by a third member of the family, Charles Douglas-Home. As editor of The Times, he wrote a hostile leader attacking the Foreign Secretary, which was published on Monday 5 April. For Carrington, it was the final straw. A few hours later he insisted on tendering his resignation. ‘I think I was doing the Prime Minister a favour’, he said. ‘Someone had to carry the can, and I thought it was right that it should be me.’†38
Margaret Thatcher was aghast at his decision. To this day opinions are divided on whether he was right or wrong to go. Carrington was not to blame for the Argentine invasion. He had done his best to pursue the leaseback option within weeks of taking office. He had minuted three warnings about the dangers in withdrawing HMS Endurance from the South Atlantic. He would have played a much firmer hand in the diplomatic manoeuvres that preceded the war than his successor Francis Pym. If there had to be ministerial bloodletting, John Nott was the obvious candidate, particularly after his catastrophic speech in the 3 April Commons debate. He too offered his resignation, but the Prime Minister could not afford the departure of two such senior colleagues. So Carrington, out of noblesse oblige, went; Nott, out of political necessity, stayed.
After Carrington had fallen on his sword, Margaret Thatcher had to choose a new foreign secretary. She had a brief flirtation with the idea of appointing Julian Amery, whose right-wing views were in tune with her own, and whose robust speech in the emergency debate had struck a chord in all parts of the House. But more cautious counsels from Willie Whitelaw prevailed. Although she had little regard for the judgement or the steel of Francis Pym, who had disappointed her as a wet and as an unimpressive Defence Secretary, she gave the job to him. As she later observed, she discovered she ‘had exchanged an amusing Whig for a gloomy one’.39 Worse than his gloom was his temperament. He had suffered one nervous breakdown during his parliamentary career and was notorious for his mood swings.
Unlike Carrington, Pym had no rapport with the Prime Minister. While admiring his good war record honoured by his Military Cross, she disliked him for the condescendingly snobbish attitudes she felt he had shown towards her in the past. Their awkward relationship was further soured by the undercurrents of press and parliamentary opinions that Pym would be her likely successor at No. 10 if the Falklands mission ended in failure. For all these reasons the new Foreign Secretary was in the uneasiest of partnerships with the Prime Minister as they contemplated the prospects for the war to which Parliament had committed them.
SEEING OFF HAIG
One of the most vivid images at the start of the Falklands War was the sailing of the task force on Monday 5 April. As the grey hulls of the aircraft carriers HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes and their accompanying escort of destroyers and frigates slipped their moorings and headed out to sea from Portsmouth harbour, it was clear to many that if these warships returned without achieving the retaking of the Falkland Islands it would mean the end of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister.
She recognised this reality. There is no evidence that she gave any particular concern to her personal position. It was restoring Britain’s honour that motivated her actions. She was old enough to remember the fiasco of Suez in 1956, when a military force to recover the canal had been despatched and humiliatingly withdrawn without its objectives being achieved. The retired Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his memorable epitaph on the Suez failure: ‘I am not sure I would have dared to start, but I am sure I should not have dared to stop.’40
These Churchillian words were quoted several times by Margaret Thatcher to Ian Gow in the week she ordered the despatch of the task force. From the day she received full parliamentary backing for her bold move, nothing less than the return of the Falklands to British administration and sovereignty would do. She never faltered in this purpose. Moreover, from the beginning she saw clearly that diplomatic compromise was likely to be impossible for either side. If General Galtieri and his junta backed down without securing Argentine sovereignty over Las Malvinas they would fall. If the task force returned without restoring British rule to the Falklands, she would fall. Understanding these high stakes, she did not weaken in her conviction that there was no credible alternative to war, even though she had to pay lip service to the quest for a negotiated settlement.
The Prime Minister had to work hard to keep political, domestic and international public opinion on her side. Inside her own party at Westminster the number of dissenting voices started to increase after the task force sailed.
Some ten days after the 2 April Parliamentary debate, Chief Whip Michael Jopling sent a note to the Foreign Secretary reporting that he had sounded out twenty-eight MPs on their reactions to events in the Falklands. Twenty-one of them were out of tune with the Prime Minister’s instincts. They ranged from Robert Rhodes James (‘Is hopelessly defeatist, depressed and disloyal’) to Ken Clarke (‘Hopes nobody thinks we are to fight the Argentinians’) to Marcus Kimball (‘Let the Argentinians have the Falklands with as little fuss as possible’) and Ian Gilmour (‘We are making a big mistake. It will make Suez look like common sense’).41
Such wobbles in her own ranks coupled with considerable scepticism in Washington and other allied capitals meant that despite her view that war was inevitable, Margaret Thatcher had to maintain an elaborate façade of pretence that she was keeping the diplomatic options open.
This was made easier by an unexpected triumph for Britain at the United Nations. One day after the invasion, the UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Sir Anthony Parsons, succeeded in obtaining the necessary two-thirds majority in favour of UN Security Council Resolution 502, which condemned the Argentin
e invasion and called for the withdrawal of the occupying troops pending a diplomatic solution. The final vote, from Jordan, that ensured the passing of UN Security Council Resolution 502 was secured by Margaret Thatcher’s personal appeal in a last-minute telephone call to King Hussein.42
The Security Council Resolution strengthened Britain’s moral position. The parliamentary indignation in London had initially been compared by a US State Department official to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.43 Now it was ratified as an internationally important stand of high principle against aggression. Margaret Thatcher was no great admirer of the UN, but now she was grateful for the legitimacy it had conferred on her decision to send the task force. ‘All the Argentines have to do’, she repeated many times, ‘is honour UN Security Council Resolution 502.’44 It was an irony that the Foreign Office professionals of whom she was so often suspicious dealt her a winning hand in the battle to persuade the world of the rightness of her cause.
Despite having scored such a quick victory at the United Nations in New York, Margaret Thatcher had greater difficulty in winning hearts and minds in Washington. Ambivalence and confusion were reigning within the Reagan administration over the Falklands. The State Department saw Argentina as a key ally in its strategy to roll back communism and socialism in Latin America. Influenced by the pro-Argentine US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, there had been considerable sympathy for the junta’s demand for sovereignty over the islands. On the night of the invasion, Kirkpatrick had dined as guest of honour at the Argentine embassy, an engagement which infuriated the Prime Minister when she heard about it.45 But whatever some voices in the State Department were saying, Margaret Thatcher believed that President Reagan himself would be unequivocal in his support for Britain. He was not. Although he had tried to be helpful a few hours before the invasion by making what turned out to be an ineffective telephone plea to General Galtieri, Reagan seemed reluctant to tilt US policy one way or the other in this quarrel between two allies.
As he headed off for an Easter vacation in Barbados at the home of his old Hollywood friend Claudette Colbert, the President remained non-committal about the Falklands crisis. At a meeting of the National Security Planning Group on 7 April, Reagan talked the problem over with most of his top foreign-policy team including Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and National Security Advisor Judge William Clark. According to one of those present, NSC staffer Jim Rentschler, the President said, ‘It seems to me we have an opportunity to do some good here. The main thing we have to do is to get these two brawlers out of the bar.’46 However later in the meeting, under pressure from Jeane Kirkpatrick not to favour the British, Reagan responded, ‘Look, I would love to stay friends with Argentina but I think our first loyalty, our first order of business if worst comes to worst, is to side with the Brits’.47
With the meeting ending hurriedly because the President, casually dressed in a blazer and sports shirt, was visibly anxious to get away to Barbados, the decision was taken that the Secretary of State should set off on a peace mission. In a move designed to imitate Henry Kissinger’s famous shuttle diplomacy between the Arabs and Israelis in the mid-1970s, Haig proposed that he should visit London and Buenos Aires in order to negotiate a settlement between the two capitals.
Displeased by this indication that the United States was appearing to take a neutral stance towards the conflict, the Prime Minister nevertheless agreed to welcome Haig as a friend and ally, but not as any kind of mediator. However, within hours of his arrival in London the Secretary of State made it clear to the Prime Minister that he had indeed come to mediate. She was having none of it.
Over dinner at No. 10 on the evening of 8 April, Haig unveiled his settlement plan. As he chain-smoked underneath two paintings of Nelson and Wellington that had been displayed especially for this occasion on the Prime Minister’s instructions, the US Secretary of State attempted to persuade her to accept some form of what he called neutral ‘interim administration of the Islands’. This vague proposition involved establishing a Canadian or American presence if the Argentines withdrew their troops, while negotiations about sovereignty continued. According to the diary of Jim Rentschler who accompanied Haig to the No. 10 dinner, Margaret Thatcher listened to these proposals and then exploded.
‘Wooliness’, she spat contemptuously, her voice rising with indignation and high colour flushing in her cheeks.
I did not dispatch a fleet to install some nebulous arrangement which would have no authority … Interim authority! – to do what? I beg you, I beg you to remember that in 1938 Neville Chamberlain sat at this same table discussing an arrangement which sounds very like the one you are asking me to accept: and were I to do so, I would be censured in the House of Commons – and properly so! Britain simply will not reward aggression – that is the lesson we have learned from 1938.48
The lessons of appeasement were always at the forefront of Margaret Thatcher’s mind in her continuing dealings with Alexander Haig. If he faced an uphill task with her, he soon found he had a higher mountain to climb with the Argentines. From London he flew to Buenos Aires, where he thought he had agreed some concessions with one part of the junta, only to have them publicly sabotaged by another. But Haig persisted in a new demand, when he returned to Downing Street on 12 April, for Britain to accept a revised idea of an interim joint administration and to halt the task force while the details were worked out.
‘Unthinkable’, retorted the Prime Minister. ‘One simply doesn’t trust burglars who have tried once to steal property. No, Al, no, absolutely not, the fleet must steam on!’49
On 13 April, Haig left London with his mission in ruins. ‘He was obviously very depressed’, commented Margaret Thatcher, not entirely sympathetically.50 But the Secretary of State had identified from his talks in London the one British cabinet minister who might have some sympathy for the American peace plan. This was the Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, who Haig invited to Washington on 23 April. Tremendous pressure was applied to get Pym to accept yet another variation of the proposals for halting the task force, an Argentine withdrawal from the Islands and the setting out of an interim authority, which would now include representatives from the Argentine government.
To Margaret Thatcher’s horror, Francis Pym was persuaded to recommend that this package should be accepted. She regarded it as ‘conditional surrender’, above all because it did not restore either British rule or sovereignty. But Pym insisted that his recommendation should be discussed by the war cabinet, which had been set up three weeks earlier. Before this meeting took place at 6 p.m. on the evening of 24 April Margaret Thatcher met alone with her deputy, Willie Whitelaw, and told him that if the Foreign Secretary’s proposals were accepted, she would resign.51
Although Whitelaw backed his Prime Minister, the war cabinet was fraught and tense. Francis Pym, supported by a Foreign Office team, advocated the new proposals. He made a strong case for their acceptance, arguing that they could be presented as the American plan to avert war.
Margaret Thatcher realised the magnitude of the problem with which Pym’s recommendation confronted her. She was in serious danger of being isolated and defeated. To avoid this, she made an intensive study of the document known as ‘Haig Two’, which had reached her five hours earlier. She went through the text clause by clause as if she was a prosecuting counsel cross-examining each line of a dossier in meticulous forensic detail. Among the fiercest points of her interrogation she asked: Why had we not insisted on a minimum of self-determination for the Islanders? Why had we accepted almost unlimited Argentine immigration and acquisition of property on an equal basis with the existing Falklanders? How come we had accepted various terms, which had previously been rejected out of hand? Her mastery of detail was impressive, but Pym held his ground. Although the members of the war cabinet stayed on her side, it was clear that a menacing disagreement had built up between the Pr
ime Minister and the Foreign Secretary.52
The stalemate was broken by the Defence Secretary, John Nott. He made the suggestion that the British government should not respond to ‘Haig Two’. Instead, it should request that the draft be put to the Argentines first. If the junta accepted it, which Margaret Thatcher did not believe they would, then the ‘Haig Two’ document could be put before Parliament on that basis. Sir Nicholas Henderson, the British Ambassador to Washington, thought that Nott’s suggestion was a masterstroke, calling it ‘a finesse of which Talleyrand would have been proud’.53 The Prime Minister was not in the least proud of it but she temporarily and unhappily bowed to Pym’s pressure, allowing the diplomatic ball to fall into Argentina’s court.
The junta in Buenos Aires did not disappoint Margaret Thatcher. On 29 April they rejected ‘Haig Two’ out of hand. The Secretary of State’s 32,000-mile peace shuttle had ended in failure. Despite further fruitless overtures to the Argentine Foreign Minister, Nicanor Costa Mendez, the die was now cast for war.54
One other development contributed to the inevitability of a fight for the Falklands. While Haig had been pursuing his frustrating negotiations, American public opinion had been shifting towards Britain. On Capitol Hill and on the television talk shows, the UK’s two ambassadors, Anthony Parsons at the United Nations and Nicholas Henderson in Washington, had been highly effective in converting influential voices to Margaret Thatcher’s cause. On 29 April the US Senate by seventy-nine to one votes passed a resolution stating that the US ‘cannot stand neutral’ and must help Britain achieve ‘full withdrawal’ of Argentine forces.55 The US Defense Secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger, on his own initiative ordered that maximum military assistance should be given to the British. His help included full access to US intelligence; the code-breaking of Argentine military signals; unlimited use of fuel and spares from the US base on Ascension Island; and accelerated purchase of American Sidewinder missiles which were to prove one of the most effective weapons in the conflict.56 The Anglophile Secretary of the US Navy, John Lehman, was also extremely helpful to Britain’s Royal Navy at a working level of co-operation.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 43