What Turkey did have, however, was refugees. About 3 million people fleeing the Syrian civil war had ended up inside the country’s borders, and the news was full of pictures of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Turkey (and too often dying in their attempt). The EU had opened talks about a resettlement scheme that might help to ease the pressure, but it would not involve the UK taking in anyone. While the European Commission made noises about speeding up the glacial pace of accession talks – or rather, about ‘preparations… now underway to progress towards the opening’ of talks, which was not quite the same thing – they had specifically ruled out anyone new joining within five years.68 What’s more, every single country that was already in the EU had a veto over new members, and more than one of them had indicated a willingness to use that veto in the case of Turkey. And this was a real veto, not a Cameronesque one: since each country had to approve new members as part of the council of heads of government, and also sign a treaty with every national member government, legal experts branded it a ‘double veto’.
The Leave campaign dealt with this contradictory evidence by pretending it away. ‘We’re not going to be consulted or asked to vote: they are going to join, it’s a matter of when,’ declared government minister Penny Mordaunt on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. Challenged twice about Britain having a right to veto, she said: ‘It doesn’t. The British people are not going to be able to have a say.’69 Cameron was so infuriated that he called a special press conference to denounce this ‘complete untruth’. ‘It’s irresponsible and it’s wrong,’ he declared, ‘and it’s time that the Leave campaign was called out on the nonsense that they’re peddling.’ It would, he said, be ‘literally decades’ before Turkey would even be in a position to become a member – ‘at the current rate of progress they will probably get round to joining in about the year 3000.’70
Did it work? Nope. Just as they had done with the £350 million for the NHS, the Leave campaign doubled down. Although Boris Johnson, who has Turkish ancestry, apparently felt this particular claim was beyond the pale, his colleague Michael Gove was happy to lead the charge: ‘With the terrorism threat that we face only growing, it is hard to see how it could possibly be in our security interests to open visa-free travel to 77 million Turkish citizens’ – the population seemed to have exploded in no time at all – ‘and to create a border-free zone from Iraq, Iran and Syria to the English Channel.’71 Vote Leave released a map on which the ongoing war zones of Syria and Iraq, neither of which could apply for EU membership, were highlighted. ‘You are telling lies and you are scaring people,’ the mayor of London and Remain campaigner Sadiq Khan told Johnson at a televised debate as he brandished a copy of the map. ‘This map shows in red, Turkey, but the only countries named in this map are Syria and Iraq. That’s scaremongering, Boris, and you should be ashamed.’72
The lies about Turkey even managed the impressive feat of giving Nigel Farage the moral high ground in the very week he unveiled a poster depicting a line of Syrian refugees with the caption ‘Breaking Point’; the image was quickly denounced as reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. Gove claimed he had taken one look at it and ‘shuddered. I thought it was the wrong thing to do.’73 Farage replied: ‘Have you seen their posters? They have been doing very strong posters, not only about Turkey but the number of terrorists and criminals that have come into Britain under free movement rules.’74
None of it discouraged Dominic Cummings, Gove’s former protégé who had made a name for himself as chief headbanger of the Vote Leave campaign. Insiders reported that, following the initial row, he delightedly told staff that ‘Every week is Turkey week’ and instructed them, whenever possible, to get to work ‘Turkifying’ stories before releasing them to the public.75 Police figures would later show that racist attacks and other hate crimes rose as much as 58 per cent in the weeks immediately following the Brexit vote.76
7
WHERE POWER LIES
These are the big lies, the ones that were truly matters of life and death.
They are the lies uttered by those in charge, told because they felt it was their duty to lie: that by doing so, they were serving what is often called the ‘greater good’ and that the end justified the means. They are the lies told because the people in power convinced themselves that they knew best. That they had a superior ability to see ‘the bigger picture’ and discern the ‘moral truth’ of a situation (as opposed to the boring, black-and-white details bogging down the folks closer to ground level). The lies told because it was the ‘right’ thing to do.
In some cases, the lie was the result of disinterested decisions taken in the cold, blinding light of committee rooms – the ones connected by those infamous corridors of power. Officials charged with looking after the best interests of the country were unquestioningly allowed to calculate what those best interests must be: subsequently events beyond the scope of any bureaucratic war-gaming spun out of their control. In other cases, the lie came from the passionate intensity of a true believer, the elected official whose fervent self-belief had taken him or her all the way to the very top of the political hierarchy and, in the process, provided a sheaf of insulation from the doubts and questioning voices which beset the rest of us at every turn.
When truth is not spoken to power, the powerful do not always speak the truth.
* * * * *
‘It was not sailing away from the Falklands. It was in an area which was a danger to our ships and to our people on them.’
Margaret Thatcher, BBC Nationwide, 24 May 1983
It was exactly one month after the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands that Margaret Thatcher agreed to the sinking of the Belgrano. She took the decision on the morning of 2 May 1982 at Chequers, her weekend retreat, in the absence of the full war cabinet, who were due to gather later that afternoon. But she was careful to consult with the government’s chief law officer, Attorney General Sir Michael Havers, because she knew full well that she was drifting into difficult legal waters.
Argentina had invaded the remote islands off the tip of South America – a Crown colony since 1841 – on 2 April. Britain had declared a ‘total exclusion zone’ around the Falklands – within which they declared any Argentine ships or aircraft would be attacked – on 26 April. It had taken that long for the ships of the British task force to get close enough to enforce the zone. When the head of the navy had informed Thatcher of the timeline for reaching the islands, she had burst out in shock: ‘Three weeks? Surely you mean three days?’1
By May, however, she was fully up to speed, and had agreed to vary the official rules of engagement for what she insisted on calling a ‘conflict’ rather than a war so that the Argentine aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo could be attacked outside the total exclusion zone. Capable of covering five hundred miles a day and stocked with fighter aircraft that could roam five hundred more, the aircraft carrier was too much of a threat to British troops; an attack could be justified under the self-defence rules of the UN Charter, since the ship was steaming towards them. The problem was that the British couldn’t find it: it was out there somewhere in the South Atlantic, but no one knew precisely where.
They did, however, know the position of another Argentine boat, the cruiser General Belgrano. Intercepted messages had revealed that it was ‘deploying to a position 54.00S 060.00W to attack targets’.2 A British submarine, HMS Conqueror, was shadowing it through the ocean; naval commanders suspected it was part of a pincer movement, along with the 25 de Mayo, which was closing in on the British task force in preparation for ‘a major Argentine attack’.3 But with the rules of engagement as they stood, and the Belgrano still outside the total exclusion zone, they could do nothing about it. Rear Admiral John Woodward, the task force commander, came up with a cunning plan to push the problem in front of the prime minister: he issued orders for the submarine to sink the Belgrano in the knowledge that these orders would be countermanded by military HQ back in Britain.4 As a result of Woodward’s fe
int, the chiefs of staff immediately went to Thatcher, seeking her permission to vary the rules of engagement in order to permit the attack.
It didn’t take long – about twenty minutes – for her to agree. ‘You don’t wait for them to get to your ships,’ she said later.5 That night the Conqueror torpedoed the Belgrano twice; around two hundred men were killed in the explosions, and the ship began to sink immediately. Its captain gave the order to abandon ship after twenty minutes and 850 crew took to the life rafts. Confusion on board nearby ships, bad weather and damage to the Belgrano’s radio systems (making it unable to put out a distress signal) led to only 770 of the crew being rescued.6 The Sun, then in its most frothily jingoistic phase, celebrated the attack with the headline ‘GOTCHA!’ They thought better of it when they realized the possible scale of losses, and changed the headline in later editions to ‘DID 1200 ARGIES DROWN?’7
The scale of the losses was not the only problem. In between Woodward’s countermanded orders and Thatcher’s rubber-stamped ones, the Belgrano had changed course. At the time of the attack, it was heading west towards the South American mainland, not north towards the Falklands. But when Defence Secretary John Nott gave his account of the incident to the Commons the following day, he did not mention this, telling MPs that the ship had been ‘close to the total exclusion zone and was closing on elements of our task force, which was only hours away’. He concluded: ‘It must be a matter of deep concern to the House at the loss of life from these engagements including the sinking of the General Belgrano. But our first duty must be the protection of our own ships and men. There may be further attacks on our forces – and they must be allowed to act in self-defence. We cannot deny them that right.’8
On 29 November, five months after Britain had successfully retaken the Falklands, a junior defence minister, Peter Blaker, finally confirmed the Belgrano’s direction of travel: ‘Throughout 2 May, the cruiser and her escorts had made many changes of course. At the moment she was torpedoed, about 8 p.m. London time, General Belgrano was on a course of 280 deg.’9 That could have meant, as the government were subsequently at pains to stress, that the ship was travelling parallel to the perimeter of the total exclusion zone, ready to turn and head into it to launch an attack as soon as an order was given. But it could also mean, as observed by the MP who had managed to winkle the information out of the Ministry of Defence, that the ship was ‘on course for the Straits of Magellan and her home port of Uschaia in the southern Argentine’.10
The questioner was Labour MP Tam Dalyell. He was a veteran conspiracy theorist, in many cases not without good cause, and in this particular case he and many others were convinced that the Belgrano had been sunk in order to scupper a peace plan which the US and Argentina’s neighbour Peru had been attempting to broker, so that Mrs Thatcher could pursue a war she had decided she had to win at all costs. In a 1987 polemic against the prime minister, Dalyell thundered: ‘I say she is guilty of gross deception. I say… she is guilty of calculated murder, not for the national interests of our country, not for the protection of our servicemen, but for her own political ends.’11 The timings did indeed look suspicious – the statement directly before Nott’s on the day after the attack had been an update from Foreign Secretary Francis Pym on the progress of his talks in America, and he said that ‘we are working actively on various ideas, including those put forward by the President of Peru.’12 But Pym had not made it back from Washington in time for the meeting at which the attack on the Belgrano was authorized; he only updated the war cabinet on the fresh proposals from the government in Lima on the Sunday afternoon.13
Whatever the precise sequence of diplomatic events, Dalyell managed to expose what looked like a serious cover-up of the circumstances of the Belgrano’s sinking. ‘Again by parliamentary question I established that there were no elements of the Task Force west of where the Belgrano had been sunk, so use of the word “converging” was downright wrong,’ he said.14 But the government seemed determined to apply the old World War II motto ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ retrospectively. When on 14 December Dalyell asked a follow-up question about the precise details of the ship’s course, Blaker bluntly told him: ‘It would not be in the public interest to go into details.’15 Two days later the prime minister herself snapped back at him: ‘The precise courses being steered at any particular moment were incidental to the indications we possessed of the threat to the Task Force.’16
Thatcher did not appreciate queries about her tactics, as she had made very plain to the journalists who attempted to ask followup questions about the retaking of South Georgia early in the Falklands campaign. She had shot down their enquiries with ‘just rejoice at that news and congratulate our forces and the marines’.17 Her government had erupted into fury when, on BBC2’s Newsnight, Peter Snow had introduced information from military briefings with the phrase ‘if we believe the British’.18 And a general attitude of ‘keep quiet and trust in us’ presided across government: it was still – rather unbelievably – official policy to not even admit the existence of the secret services, even as James Bond celebrated his twelfth cinematic outing, in For Your Eyes Only, with a congratulatory cameo from impressionists of Maggie and Denis.
A full year after the attack on the Belgrano, Mrs Thatcher appeared on the BBC’s early evening current affairs show Nationwide as part of the 1983 General Election campaign. ‘We’ll be inviting viewers around the country to put Mrs. Thatcher “on the spot”, as we call it,’ announced a chirpy Sue Lawley.19 If the prime minister was expecting friendly, soft-lobbed questions, she was in for a surprise. From the very first question – in which one Janet Blair from Exeter grilled her on why she talked about ‘Victorian values’ when those had involved ‘child labour, unemancipated women, rigid class barriers, almost impossible poverty traps, and a variety of frigid morality which rejected fun and generally helped to maintain the status quo’ – the tone was unremittingly hostile.20 A university lecturer haranguing Thatcher about unemployment levels and a vicar complaining about tax breaks for the rich followed. Then Lawley threw to the BBC’s Bristol studio, where a Mrs Diana Gould was waiting:
GOULD: Mrs Thatcher, why when the Belgrano, the Argentinian battleship, was outside the exclusion zone and actually sailing away from the Falklands, why did you give the orders to sink it?
THATCHER: But it was not sailing away from the Falklands.
This was simply an outright lie, and the prime minister knew it. Her interrogator was not the sort of woman who was going to let Thatcher get away with it. Gould had a double first in physical geography from Cambridge, specializing in the region around the Falklands, and she had served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service – the Wrens. What’s more, she had made sure to swot up very carefully on all the facts ahead of her TV appearance.
GOULD: Mrs Thatcher, you started your answer by saying it was not sailing away from the Falklands. It was on a bearing of 280 and it was already west of the Falklands, so I’m sorry but I cannot see how you can say it was not sailing away from the Falklands when it was sunk.
THATCHER: When it was sunk it was a danger to our ships.
GOULD: No, but you have just said at the beginning of your answer that it was not sailing away from the Falklands, and I’m asking you to correct that statement.
THATCHER: Yes, but it was in an area outside the exclusion zone, which I think is what you are saying is ‘sailing away.’
LAWLEY: We’re arguing about which way it was facing at the time.
THATCHER: It was a danger to our ships.
GOULD: Mrs Thatcher, I am saying that it was on a bearing 280, which is a bearing just north of west. It was already west of the Falklands and therefore nobody with any imagination can put it sailing other than away from the Falklands.
THATCHER: Mrs – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.
LAWLEY: Mrs Gould.
THATCHER: Mrs Gould, when orders were given to sink it and when it was sunk it was a danger to our ships. Now, you accept t
hat, do you?
GOULD: No, I don’t.
THATCHER: Well I’m sorry, it was.21
The next question was about nuclear holocaust. It probably came as light relief.
‘Q: Can it be transmitted to humans?
A: There is no evidence that it
is transmissible to humans.’
Briefing for press officers on BSE in cattle, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 15 October 1987
The first case of BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was identified by the Central Veterinary Laboratory in a cow from a herd in West Sussex in November 1986. The official inquiry into the disease concluded that officials at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) had ‘appreciated from the outset the possibility that BSE might have implications for human health’.22 But it would be a full decade before Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell admitted to the House of Commons that ‘the most likely explanation’ for a spate of young people suffering from the horrific brain disease Creutzfeldt–Jakob was ‘that those cases are linked to exposure to BSE’ from eating beef as children.23 For much of the intervening decade, officials and ministers did their damnedest to reassure the public that there was no danger to humans from doing just that.
The Lies of the Land Page 18