In the end, it was her courage that counted. It is academic whether it was the heart of a lion or a lioness that produced it. As Willie Whitelaw said on the night of victory, only she could have done it. By succeeding, she changed the mood of the country, the landscape of politics and her legacy to history.
The Falklands War was the turning point in Margaret Thatcher’s story.
________________
* See Chapter 25.
† The phrase was originally coined by Lord Hailsham in an earlier context to describe the power of a government with a large majority. It was often applied to the Thatcher style of leadership in her second and third terms.
22
After the Falklands
THE CHANGING OF THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE
The political rewards for Margaret Thatcher from the Falklands were enormous, but she was too cautious to exploit them quickly. With two years to go before the 1979 Parliament ran its full term, she dismissed the speculation that she might make an early dash to the polls in a ‘khaki election’.1 Instead, she engaged in a more subtle form of political opportunism. She exploited to the full the growing perception of her strong personality.
The Iron Lady and the Lady Not for Turning had been two uncertain stereotypes when they first made their appearances. After the Falklands they were not only accepted; they merged into two sides of the same re-valued coin.
Enoch Powell was the first to articulate this. Using the metaphor of metallurgy he had deployed in the epic parliamentary debate at the start of the war, he rose at Prime Minister’s Questions on 17 June to remind the House how he had predicted that the Falklands crisis should determine what metal the Iron Lady was made of. With theatrical solemnity Professor Powell announced the results of his experiment: ‘It shows that the substance under test consists of ferrous metal of the highest quality, that it is of exceptional tensile strength, is highly resistant to wear and tear and to stress, and may be used with advantage for all national purposes.’* Margaret Thatcher glowed at Powell’s tribute. ‘I am very grateful indeed to the right hon. Gentleman. I agree with every word he said’, she replied.2
It took her no time to develop a link between the resolution she had demonstrated in the South Atlantic and the resolution that would be required to solve the most pressing economic, industrial and political issues at home.
The summer of 1982 was a festival of Falklands jubilation. One by one, the big ships of the task force came home – HMS Illustrious, Hermes, Fearless, Intrepid and the Canberra – amid scenes of high emotion at Portsmouth and Plymouth. One image that I vividly recall from the television news was that of a burly Marine coming ashore from HMS Fearless to embrace his wife with tears streaming down his face as he repeated ‘Best bloody country in the world, this!’3
Margaret Thatcher tapped into these manifestations of national pride. In one of her first speeches after the war, at Cheltenham Racecourse, she alluded to the connection between conflicts to come at home and the war that had just been fought:
We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence – born in the economic battles at home and tested and found true 8,000 miles away … We rejoice that Britain has rekindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.4
Outwardly she seemed hyped up during the weeks of post-Falklands euphoria. Inwardly she was tired, perhaps suffering from a temporary burn-out after some seventy-two days of intense pressure and sleepless nights. She admitted as much to friends and family.
She became tetchy about post-Falklands pinpricks. She was incandescent with the BBC for its ‘unpatriotic’ (they said ‘even-handed’) reporting; insulted by the suggestions from Tam Dalyell MP that she had ordered the sinking of the General Belgrano to thwart the Peruvian peace initiative; and irritated with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, for including prayers for the Argentine dead in the Falklands Memorial Service at St Paul’s Cathedral.
She was also dismayed at having to allow the setting up of a committee of senior Privy Councillors under the Chairmanship of Lord Franks, inquiring into the way the government handled the crisis in the period leading up to the conflict. Six months later, Franks came to the conclusion that the invasion could not have been anticipated or prevented by Britain since the Argentines themselves only decided to seize the Islands at a very late date. This exoneration was diplomatically generous but politically wise, even if a few critics called it a whitewash. For the Franks Committee deliberated against a background of national gratitude for a job well done. Although there clearly had been errors of judgement in political and intelligence areas before the war, none of the blame for them was apportioned to the Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher’s Falklands’ luck held.
Her popularity was at its zenith when Parliament went into recess at the end of July. But she needed a rest so unusually for her she took a proper holiday, staying for ten days at a chateau in the Swiss Alps owned by Lady Glover.† On return, the Prime Minister was admitted to the Fitzroy Nuffield Hospital in Bryanston Square for surgery on her varicose veins. She discharged herself the same day as the operation, wearing trousers for the only time in her years at No. 10. Her general practitioner, Dr John Henderson, told reporters that he was ‘completely overwhelmed … by the way Mrs Thatcher has recovered. She is really behaving as if nothing had happened … she simply won’t allow herself to be ill’.5
What she was allowing herself to do was to rise above the political fray. For the next few months she soared to an extraordinary status somewhere between ‘she who must be obeyed’ and ‘she who should not be criticised’. This was not achieved by wrapping herself in the Union Jack. She was circumspect about her triumph as a war leader, confining the Falklands to no more than a few sentences at the end of her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in October. Instead she entered the artificial world of soft imaging.
This was a strategic move suggested by Tim Bell to counter-balance her reputation as a Warrior Queen. Suddenly the women’s magazines and the women’s pages of the tabloids were full of prime ministerial interviews accentuating her feminine side – her hair, her favourite recipes, her clothes, her feelings as a mother, her taste in novels and her enjoyment of TV serials. The readers of Vogue, Woman, Woman’s Own, the Sun, the Sunday People and the News of the World may have lapped this up. Those who knew the real Margaret Thatcher had a double take or two when she professed to watch television drama series, read many novels, and to like nothing more than to just potter in the kitchen or the garden.
This charm offensive extended to the broadcast media. She appeared on both ITV and BBC children’s programmes, achieving one of the highest-ever viewing audiences for her starring role on Jim’ll Fix It with Jimmy Savile. Her memories of the Falklands campaign often featured in these broadcasts, particularly on the Remembrance Sunday edition of Songs of Praise, when she talked about the lives lost at Goose Green, and chose as her favourite memorial hymn:
O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame6
She also relived the Falklands War in front of the television cameras when she made her first visit to the Islands in January 1983. It was an emotional tour of battlefields and war graves combined with meeting servicemen and enjoying parties hosted by grateful Falklanders. There were touches of comedy too, such as her insistence at rising at 5 a.m. on the morning of her departure with the demand, ‘I haven’t seen a penguin. I must see a penguin before I leave.’7 Her energy levels exhausted everyone, not least Denis, who at one point had to restrain her from inspecting some discarded boxes of ammunition. ‘For God’s sake, woman, don’t get out and count them.’8
If her non-political image needed any further polishing, it got it from a BBC documentary, The Woman at No. 10, shown in March 1983. This was soft journalism extended to soft furnishings. It drew comparisons with Jackie Kennedy’s televised presentation of the Whit
e House a generation earlier. The complaisant interviewer on this prime ministerial guided tour of No. 10 was one of her favourite spiritual gurus, the anthropologist Sir Laurens van der Post, who had been a Chelsea neighbour in her Flood Street days. He gave her carte blanche to talk about her favourite paintings, porcelain and predecessors.
She seized her opportunities. ‘I thought of Wellington very much because I was very upset at the people who lost their lives in the Falklands’, she said, pointing to one portrait of the victor of Waterloo. ‘The great Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister for thirteen years’, was her comment on another picture on the walls of No. 10. Sitting in a chair in the Cabinet Room, she gestured towards a painting of Sir Robert Walpole: ‘It is a great comfort to many of us that he stayed here for twenty-one years.’9
The not so subliminal message was that Margaret Thatcher had woven herself into the tapestry of Britain’s military and political history. Like Walpole, Wellington, Salisbury and Churchill, she would be around for a long time.
The electorate had already taken this message on board. Before the Falklands she was rated as the country’s most unpopular prime minister since polling was invented. With both Labour and the SDP well ahead of her, winning by-elections in Tory strongholds up to March 1982, her chances of remaining at No. 10 looked slender. One year later she bestrode the political landscape like a colossus. The polls proclaimed it and the public knew it. This success was not all down to the Falklands factor. She appeared to be winning on two other battlefields that the voters cared about – the economy and the trade unions.
THE ECONOMY AND THE UNIONS
The economy was on the move before the Falklands War started. Sir Geoffrey Howe’s bold budget of 1981 had begun to produce its medicinal results. The most worrying symptom of the British disease, rising inflation, was being cured. By the end of 1982, the headline rate of inflation had fallen to below 5 per cent. After the price rise panics of the 1970s, when the Retail Price Index had fluctuated between 8 and 24 per cent, this stability was reassuring. With interest rates also coming down and living standards on the rise for those in work, Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy was beginning to be credited with delivering at least some of what she had promised.
What was not being delivered was a reduction in unemployment. In August 1982 it soared to 3.3 million. Such a figure would have previously been a harbinger of electoral disaster for any government. Old hands still worried on this score. In the middle of the post-Falklands festivities, when the earliest voices began predicting a second term for Margaret Thatcher, her loyal deputy Willie Whitelaw was heard to warn: ‘Nobody has ever won an election before with three million on the dole.’10 But Norman Tebbit, who had joined the cabinet as Employment Secretary in September 1981, took a more sanguine view, persuading the Prime Minister that the jobless figure had reached a plateau, and that in any case the public were coming round to a different view of the causes of unemployment. Tebbit was right on both counts.
The sea change in the public’s perception of unemployment was one of the most remarkable consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s style of leadership. In the politics of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, governments had always been blamed for putting people out of work. In her didactic way of telling home truths, the Prime Minister had been sending out the message that jobs were lost by lack of international competitiveness, by over-manning, by the follies of mismanagement and, above all, by trade-union militancy. Gradually it became clear that the public was starting to believe her. From their own experiences of daily life, the majority of the electorate grudgingly accepted that she was correct. Unemployment became the dog that did not bark in the night.
The domestic arena where Margaret Thatcher scored her most convincing victories was in confronting the power of the unions. The unions helped her by inflicting some of the worse damage on themselves. She accelerated the twilight of their authority by changing the law.
In January 1982, Norman Tebbit produced the government’s second instalment of trade-union reform. He only just managed to have his Employment Bill accepted by the cabinet after Margaret Thatcher had crushed the doubting voices by summing up vigorously in support of her abrasive new Employment Secretary. In fact the ‘Chingford skin-head’, as his detractors called him, produced a more subtle package than the Tory right were hoping for. The bill removed the immunity of trade-union funds from actions for damages resulting from secondary or sympathetic strike actions. It also tightened the restrictions on closed shops and made it easier for employers to dismiss persistent trouble-makers. Norman Tebbit wanted to make union ballots compulsory before strike action could be called. But Margaret Thatcher’s political caution caused her to take a gradualist approach. She postponed such radical changes until 1984. Her moderation ensured a comparatively easy passage for the bill through Parliament.
Her first test of strength with the unions came over the 1980 steel strike. The British Steel Corporation (BSC) was faced with a demand for a 20 per cent wage increase, which could not possibly be paid on any economic basis. The steel unions, who called a strike in support of their pay claim, came to No. 10 to ask the government to help BSC settle the dispute with ‘new money’.11 Margaret Thatcher firmly pointed out that there was no such thing.
In the first three months of the strike, steel stocks diminished and officials at the Department of Industry pressed their Secretary of State, Sir Keith Joseph, to settle the dispute by finding extra pockets of pubic money. For all his strict monetarist principles, Sir Keith was inclined to see all sides of the question too easily, so he returned at least three times to No. 10 to try and get the Prime Minister’s agreement to a strike settling formula. She would have none of it. ‘Don’t wobble, Keith’,12 she instructed. Her determination won the day.
In the thirteenth week of the strike, steel stocks mysteriously began to rise because private companies discovered how to import steel in containers using non-union ports. By April the unions settled their pay claim for a disappointing increase – 3 per cent below the rate of inflation. The strike was broken – the first time this had happened to a major union for over twenty years. It was a seminal moment in the power struggle between Margaret Thatcher and the unions, reinforced soon after the Falklands victory when in 1982 she saw off the strikers in two other fiefdoms – the railways and the National Health Service.
In spite of such successes, Margaret Thatcher did not have everything her own way. She continued to look for deeper cuts in public spending. In the summer of 1982, her Downing Street think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS), produced a paper packed with radical ideas. It called for funding the NHS with a new system of private health insurance; charging for visits to the doctor; ending state funding for all institutions of higher education, and slashing the social security budget by stopping all welfare benefits from rising with inflation. When this wish list was circulated around Whitehall, according to Nigel Lawson, ‘it caused the nearest thing to a cabinet riot in the history of the Thatcher administration’.13 The wets and the traditionalists were united in denouncing the CPRS proposals, which were largely backed by an accompanying paper from the Treasury.
Ministers attacked these ideas from all points on the political compass. The usually supportive Lord Hailsham called them ‘the worst mistake the Government has made since it came to power’.14 The resident contrarian, Peter Walker, went ballistic in his criticisms and organised the cabinet opposition. He leaked the CPRS paper and the details of the ministerial rebellion against it to The Economist,15 whose story caused an explosion.
Margaret Thatcher’s handling of this foreseeable furore revealed aspects of her personality which were unedifying. They included poor judgement and deceit. Not only should it have been obvious to her that the CPRS agenda could not possibly have been acceptable politically, but she was warned of this by the most neutral and favourable source of advice, her own private office at No. 10.
The Treasury civil servant who had been appointed as her Private Secr
etary for Economic Affairs was Michael Scholar. He immediately saw the dangers of the paper, and tried to persuade the head of the CPRS, John Sparrow, to tone down the right-wing radicalism. But the Prime Minister had the bit between her teeth, and rejected all recommendations to dilute the proposals or to restrict their dissemination. ‘Does anyone imagine she would have dared to circulate the paper if it hadn’t been for Falklands euphoria?’16 Jim Prior privately asked his colleagues. This correctly identified hubris was followed by the inevitable nemesis. The cabinet was never going to agree to the onslaught on educational, welfare and NHS spending that the Prime Minister was implicitly advocating. She had to retreat under heavy fire. Some of it became personal. ‘Why on earth did you allow this paper to be circulated?’ she was asked, towards the end of the angry cabinet meeting of 9 September. ‘I didn’t’, she replied defensively, pointing her finger at her Private Secretary, who was sitting at the end of the room. ‘Michael circulated it.’17
This was untrue. Michael Scholar had done his best to persuade the Prime Minister to avoid the confrontation that was now taking place. He kept silent, and bore the opprobrium as all eyes turned reproachfully towards him. Although he was far too good a Private Secretary to deny his Prime Minister, he privately felt that Margaret Thatcher had let herself down.
In the face of the near riot by most of her cabinet ministers, the Prime Minister had to give up. She yielded with another display of bad grace, saying in a petulant tone, ‘All right then, shelve it’.18
It was not quite her last attempt to investigate ways of radically reforming the NHS. Soon after this reversal in cabinet, she returned to the subject at a time when the Health Secretary, Norman Fowler, was out of the country studying the worldwide AIDS crisis. In his absence, the Prime Minister reached out to the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health and Social Security, Sir Kenneth Stowe, commissioning him to produce a brief on the question of whether there were more sustainable ways of running Britain’s health-care system with the users of the service contributing more towards its cost.
Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality Page 48