Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality

by Aitken, Jonathan

  Finally President Reagan came off the fence. Although privately he never quite lost his air of bemused detachment about what he called ‘that little ice-cold bunch of land down there’,57 he did change his position. After a private discussion with Caspar Weinberger, Reagan told him, ‘Give Maggie everything she needs to get on with it’.58

  After chairing a meeting of his National Security Council on 29 April, when it was formally decided to take ‘an explicit pro-UK tilt’, the President wrote to the Prime Minister to inform her of this new policy direction. He agreed not to publish the full text of ‘Haig Two’, ‘because of the difficulty that might cause you’, and ended his message with these helpful words: ‘We will leave no doubt that Her Majesty’s Government worked with us in good faith, and was left with no choice but to proceed with military action based on the right of self defence.’59 As he wrote in his private diary, ‘I don’t think Margaret Thatcher should be asked to concede any more.’60

  Making concessions to Argentina had never been on the Prime Minister’s agenda since that rumbustious morning in the House of Commons, when Parliament had given its full backing to the sending of the task force. She had always been certain that the Argentines would refuse to compromise over their illegal occupation of the Islands. She was no less uncompromising herself in her determination to remove them by military force. But she had to avoid sounding obdurate. As she later recalled, ‘We … had to stand firm against the pressure to make unacceptable compromises, while avoiding the appearance of intransigence.’61

  This posture of outwardly pretending to be flexible while inwardly remaining resolute was Margaret Thatcher’s hardest challenge of the diplomatic phase of the conflict. If any other British politician of the twentieth century, with the exception of Churchill, had been Prime Minister when the doves of Washington were putting on the pressure for concessions, it is likely that they would have given ground. Margaret Thatcher gave none. ‘That’s one hell of a tough lady’, said Haig as he returned to his hotel after his first meeting with her on the Falklands crisis.62 She would need to get tougher still, but she had won the first round. The task force sailed on.

  REFLECTION

  Margaret Thatcher’s personality was the driving force throughout all her preliminary moves and responses to the Falklands crisis.

  Once the Islands had been invaded the instinctive reactions of her leadership were courageous. The strengths of her character and her determination were an inspiration to the military preparations for war and to the avoidance of an unprincipled diplomatic settlement.

  Yet the uncomfortable truth has to be faced that the stubbornness of Margaret Thatcher’s earlier attitude and her inexperience in foreign affairs killed off all the opportunities between May 1979 and March 1982 for the conflict to be avoided.

  During this phase of the drama Lord Carrington was in the right and the Prime Minister was in the wrong. The leaseback solution was a workable and sensible option. If she had backed it at an early stage, she could have achieved an honourable settlement of the dispute. This would have meant encouraging Lord Carrington and Nicholas Ridley in their negotiations; persuading the majority of her back-benchers to accept them; and selling the deal to the Falkland Islanders. Only the last hurdle would have presented a serious difficulty. But most Falklanders would surely have seen the merit of a ninety-nine-year or even a 999-year lease (both were discussed in Ridley’s talks) granting full British administration to the Islands while ceding British sovereignty. What had worked well in over-populated Hong Kong could have worked even better in Britain’s under-populated South Atlantic dependencies.

  The might have beens of history are eternally debatable. But this one is easier than most on which to reach a judgement. Margaret Thatcher deserves the highest praise for winning the Falklands War. She has been fortunate to escape censure for bungling her opportunity to make an earlier peace.

  Throughout 1979–1980 she either thwarted or undermined every effort to reach a Hong Kong-type settlement with the elected government of Argentina.

  The ‘thermonuclear lunch’ at Chequers in May 1979 was worse than Denis Thatcher’s phrase ‘a little extravagant’ in its incandescent rejection of the leaseback option. Hanging Nicholas Ridley out to dry, let alone undermining him in December 1980 with the help of her Parliamentary Private Secretary Ian Gow, were extraordinary acts of prime ministerial sabotage.

  She also invented the doctrine that the views of the 1,800 Falkland Islanders should be ‘paramount’ in exercising a veto over leaseback. In fact the residents of the colony were never fully or formally asked to consider a Hong Kong option. She also failed to understand the political symbolism of HMS Endurance.

  The debate over Margaret Thatcher’s initial handling of the Falklands problem will continue for centuries to come. My judgement is that she got the pre- invasion stage of the story badly wrong, and then got the post-invasion chapter gloriously right. Both sides of the coin are explicable by the vehemence of her personality.

  In between part one and part two there were grey areas of intelligence failures and Whitehall inertia during the first three months of 1982. If there were mistakes in this period they were not made by the Prime Minister. The Franks Committee of Inquiry into the war concluded in the final sentence of its report, ‘we would not be justified in attaching any criticism or blame to the present Government for the Argentine Junta’s decision to commit its act of unprovoked aggression in the invasion of the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982’.63

  This may have been a generous exoneration of some of the intelligence failings in the weeks leading up to the invasion, but as the Prime Minister was never alerted by the Joint Intelligence Committee to the dangerous situation evolving inside the junta, she cannot be faulted for not responding to it.

  The strangest omission by the British government in the days leading up to the invasion was its failure to send an ultimatum to the junta in Buenos Aires. In their book The Falklands War, Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins highlight this error describing it as ‘one of the mysteries of the pre-invasion week … known still to exercise a number of those present at Thatcher’s various crisis meetings’.64 The authors ascribe it and other weaknesses to the Prime Minister’s inexperience in defence and foreign affairs. This is fair comment.

  Having from the outset rejected the only workable proposal for the Falklands – leaseback – Margaret Thatcher had no policy for dealing with either the run-up to the invasion or the invasion itself. She only stumbled upon a policy after Admiral Sir Henry Leach had made his dramatic entry into her meeting in the House of Commons on 28 March, and told her that Britain could and should despatch a task force. Once the sending of the task force became a reality, Margaret Thatcher’s resolution and tenacity were the strengths that delivered clarity in diplomacy and victory in war.

  On the diplomatic front, she was right to deal brutally with the mish-mash of muddled proposals for a negotiated settlement that were initially served up to her by the US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. His task was made infinitely harder by the confused and contradictory responses made to him by the junta.

  One of Margaret Thatcher’s assets throughout the crisis was that she read the minds of her enemies in Buenos Aires with remarkable accuracy. She grasped, apparently by intuition, that General Galtieri and his military colleagues could never accept any sort of diplomatic compromise that involved Argentine troops withdrawing from the Islands they had invaded. So, whatever she said during the various moves and counter-moves by Alexander Haig and other international intermediaries, Britain’s Prime Minister was filled with an inner certainty that the Islands would have to be recaptured by Britain’s armed forces. She somehow communicated this certainty down the chain of command to the officers and men of the task force. Even when the risks they faced looked daunting, they knew they could rely on clear and committed leadership from No. 10 Downing Street. As the task force sailed on, Margaret Thatcher’s courage was to prove a major factor in its ultimate succ
ess.

  ________________

  * There is a conflict of evidence on the attire worn by Sir Henry Leach. Most accounts, including the one given to me by Ian Gow, say he was in full dress uniform. Margaret Thatcher describes him in her memoirs as wearing ‘civilian dress’. Her official biographer, Charles Moore, says he was in ‘his admiral’s day uniform’.

  † Carrington had tried to ‘carry the can’ at an earlier stage of his career. In 1954 he offered his resignation as a junior minister over the Crichel Down affair. His boss, the Agriculture Minister Sir Thomas Dugdale, resigned for this episode which is often cited as the classic case of ministerial responsibility being honourably accepted. Carrington’s friends, notably Selwyn Lloyd and Alec Douglas-Home, said to me in later years that they thought he always had pangs of guilt for not having resigned with Dugdale. Perhaps the memory of Crichel influenced his Falklands resignation.

  20

  The Falklands War II

  Into the fighting

  MILITARY AND POLITICAL PREPARATIONS

  ‘How do you actually run a war?’ Margaret Thatcher asked Sir Frank Cooper, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence, over a gin and tonic in the flat above 10 Downing Street just twenty-four hours after the parliamentary debate, which had backed her decision to send the task force.1 She put a similar question to Harold Macmillan when he came to offer his ex-Prime Minister’s support and counsel, two days later. The result of their advice was that she set up the smallest possible war cabinet – so small that it excluded the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Geoffrey Howe. His feelings were hurt by his omission. It was partly due to Macmillan’s argument that there was no role for the Treasury in a cause where national honour transcended all financial concerns. A second reason was that the Prime Minister’s antennae had deduced that Howe might be more eager to find a compromise than to support her war aims.

  Four out of the five ministerial members of the war cabinet picked themselves. They were the Prime Minister; her de facto deputy, Willie Whitelaw; the Defence Secretary, John Nott; the new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym; and Cecil Parkinson. The last name caused some surprise. Parkinson had been an effective junior minister for Trade, but he was a new arrival at the top table of politics, having just joined the cabinet as Chairman of the Conservative Party and Paymaster General. In the previous few months he had become something of a Thatcher court favourite. Westminster gossip said he owed his promotion to his maintee idol good looks. A more substantive reason was that he had made an impressive contribution as a member of the top-secret cabinet sub-committee, which took the decision to acquire the Trident nuclear missile system. Also, John Nott strongly recommended Parkinson for membership of the war cabinet. Margaret Thatcher agreed, later saying that she had picked him because he was ‘brilliantly effective in dealing with pubic relations’.2

  The war cabinet, known to Whitehall by the initials ODSA,* met every weekday at 9.30 in the morning, and at weekends at Chequers. It was observed by insiders that ODSA was notable for being the one and only important Whitehall committee throughout her premiership where Margaret Thatcher listened much more than she talked. This was because she grasped that her role as a war leader was to give political direction to the overall strategy of the campaign, and then to let the military get on with it. She was guided on all the naval and military aspects of the campaign by the representative of the Armed Services in the war cabinet, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin. With his quiet charm and authoritative expertise he built a close rapport with the Prime Minister. Lewin and all the service chiefs were pleasantly surprised by her committed backing for their tactics. She in turn developed an almost emotional reverence for their professional judgement. It was political and military teamwork at its best. Lloyd George in the First World War and Churchill in the Second World War did not have anything like as harmonious a relationship with the top brass as Margaret Thatcher enjoyed with Admiral Lewin and his senior colleagues.

  The excellence of the Prime Minister’s rapport with her naval and military commanders was not matched by her confidence in the two most important political colleagues in the war cabinet.

  After John Nott’s disastrous speech in the Falklands debate, she was edgy about him for the first weeks of the campaign. He was a mercurial politician at the best of times, sometimes capable of surprising mood swings. She thought of him as ‘a mixture of gold, dross and mercury’,3 which was not the ideal metallurgical alloy for the war test envisaged by Enoch Powell. Yet the accord between the Prime Minister and her Defence Secretary improved as the Falklands campaign progressed. Despite one or two disagreements, John Nott became a strong member of her team. He was a far steadier and more supportive colleague, in her eyes, than the Foreign Secretary.

  Perhaps because he had seen the horrors of battle at first hand in the Second World War, Francis Pym was zealous, even over-zealous, to find a diplomatic solution to the Falklands problem. He thought he was doing his duty in going the extra mile for peace. She thought he was willing to sell out for peace at any price. These tensions simmered unhappily between them for the duration of the crisis.

  There were, however, both visible and invisible bulwarks of support for the Prime Minister on the verge of war. Denis was a rock whose military experience combined with a husband’s love provided unseen dimensions of strength in the lonely hours of night in the flat. Many of those hours were spent glued to the BBC World Service news bulletins, adding prime ministerial sleeplessness to restlessness.

  Another rock was Ian Gow, who recognised from the outset ‘the loneliness of your task’, as he described it in a hand-written note to his boss on 8 April. He told her that he was one of many ‘who, whatever the future holds in store, will be forever thankful for having had the privilege of trying to help the finest chief, the most resolute and far-sighted leader, and the kindest friend that any man could hope to serve’.4

  The tenor of suppressed emotion in this and many other communications to and about Margaret Thatcher at this time reflected the rising tension of a nation going to war. One concern, often expressed but never directly to her face, was the question: how would she cope with the experience of taking responsibility for heavy casualties?

  SOUTH GEORGIA, THE BELGRANO AND THE SHEFFIELD

  In the month of April, most of the war cabinet’s time had to be devoted to diplomacy, while the military tackled the huge logistical challenges of preparing to fight a war 8,000 miles from home. Against the advice of the Royal Navy, the politicians at the war cabinet wanted to start the campaign with what looked like an easy victory. As the first strike in the conflict, they decided to recapture South Georgia before moving on to the Falklands, because this would please domestic public opinion and send a signal of resolve to the Argentines. In spite of strong reservations expressed by Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, the Commander in Chief of the Fleet, Margaret Thatcher authorised what had been seen as a low-risk operation to evict the occupying Argentines on South Georgia. She was horrified to be given a situation report that suggested that the plan had gone wrong.

  On the afternoon of 22 April, John Nott and Admiral Lewin told the Prime Minister that the British SAS and SBS units who had landed on the island were in serious difficulty. In appalling weather, two of their helicopters had crashed, leaving some of the toughest men in Britain’s Special Forces stranded in an Antarctic blizzard, too weak to continue. On being told that there was a possibility that seventeen lives might be lost, the Prime Minister wept. She then had to go out to speak at a dinner given by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House. As she was leaving Downing Street in a miserable mood, her private secretary rushed out with the good news that a third helicopter had managed to land in the treacherous conditions, and had rescued the SAS and SBS units without loss. ‘As I carried on out of No 10 and left for the dinner I walked on air’, she recalled.5

  The Prime Minister’s first brush with the risks of war in a hostile climate moved from near-disaster to total triumph. In the next few hours,
fresh contingents of Special Forces and Royal Marines landed on South Georgia. After heavy exchanges of fire, they disabled an Argentine submarine, accepted the surrender of the garrison and hauled up the Union Jack. The war cabinet’s first military move had been a high-risk gamble, but it paid off. John Nott announced the news late at night on 25 April outside No. 10.

  After he had read the MoD communiqué, journalists began questioning him for further details. Margaret Thatcher interrupted her Defence Secretary to give the media a piece of her mind. ‘Rejoice! Just rejoice!’ she declared in a tone that might have been sounding the Reveille, as she rolled the Rs of the imperative verbs. ‘Just rejoice at the news, and congratulate our forces and the marines … Rejoice!’6

  In the context this was a rebuke to the reporters rather than an exultation of war. Margaret Thatcher, who well knew that the recapture of South Georgia had been a perilously close drama, was more relieved than triumphant.

  Four days later, the war cabinet took what turned out to be the most controversial decision of the entire conflict. Britain had declared a Maritime Exclusion Zone (MEZ) of 200 nautical miles around the Falklands, warning that any Argentine warship inside it was liable to be sunk. This MEZ had been superseded by a further British warning that any ship operating in the area of the task force would be attacked. This created the Total Exclusion Zone (TEZ), which came into force on 30 April 1982.

  On 2 May, the British naval commander in the South Atlantic, Admiral ‘Sandy’ Woodward, reported that the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano with two destroyer escorts was operating on the edge of the TEZ, engaged in ‘a classic pincer movement’ against the task force.7 He requested permission to order a nearby British submarine, HMS Conqueror, to attack the General Belgrano. The request, brought to a meeting at Chequers of the war cabinet by Admiral Lewin, was one of the quickest decisions of the conflict.