A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  In March an Argentine ship tested the waters, or rather the land of South Georgia, a small dependency south of the Falklands, landing scrap-metal dealers there without warning. Then on 1 April the main invasion began, a landing by Argentine troops which had been carefully prepared for by local representatives of the national airline. In three hours it was all over, and the eighty British marines surrendered, having nonetheless killed five Argentine soldiers and injured seventeen with no losses of their own. In London, there was mayhem. Thatcher had had a few hours’ warning of what was happening from the Defence Secretary, John Nott. Calling a hurried meeting in her Commons office, she had to wait while the Chief of the Naval Staff, Sir John Leach, was rescued by a Tory whip after being detained by the Commons police, who had not recognized him in his civilian clothes. But Leach made the difference, giving her clarity and hope when her ministers offered confusion. He was her kind of man. He told her he could assemble a task-force of destroyers, frigates and landing craft, led by Britain’s two remaining aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible. The task-force would be ready to sail within forty-eight hours and the islands could be retaken by force. She told him to go ahead. She would decide later whether to authorize it to actually try to re-invade the islands. Could some kind of deal be done?

  A part of the Falklands story not revealed at the time was the deep involvement, and embarrassment, of the United States. Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had already begun to develop a personal special relationship. But the Argentine junta was important to the US for its anti-communist stance and as a trading partner. The United States began a desperate search for a compromise while Britain began an equally frantic search for allies at the United Nations. In the end, Britain depended on the Americans not just for the Sidewinder missiles underneath her Harrier jets, without which Thatcher herself said the Falklands could not have been retaken, but for intelligence help and – most of the time – diplomatic support too. These were the last years of the Cold War. Britain mattered more in Washington than any South American country. Still, many attempts were made by the US intermediary, the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, to find a compromise. They would continue throughout the fighting. Far more of Thatcher’s time was spent reading, analysing and batting off possible deals than contemplating the military plans. Among those advising a settlement was the new Foreign Secretary, Francis Pym, appointed after the thoroughly decent Lord Carrington had insisted on resigning to atone for his department’s sins. Pym and the Prime Minister were at loggerheads over this and she would punish him in due course. She had furious conversations with Reagan by phone as he tried to persuade her that some outcome short of British sovereignty, probably involving the United States, was acceptable.

  But as with the European budget Thatcher broke down the diplomatic deal-making into undiplomatic irreducibles. Would the islanders be allowed full self-determination? Would the Argentine aggression be rewarded? Under pulverizing pressure she refused to budge. She was confronted too by a moral question she did not duck, which was that many healthy young men were likely to die or be horribly injured, to defend a word, sovereignty. In the end, almost a thousand did die, one for every two islanders, and many others were burned, maimed and psychologically wrecked. But she argued that the whole structure of national identity and law were in play. She wrote to President Reagan, who had described the Falklands as ‘that little ice-cold bunch of land down there’, that if Britain gave way to the various Argentine snares, ‘the fundamental principles for which the free world stands would be shattered’. Reagan kept trying. Pym pressed. The Russians harangued. Michael Foot, who had been bellicose at first, now entreated her to find an answer. Later she insisted that she was vividly aware of the blood-price that was waiting and not all consumed by lust for conflict. As it happened, the Argentine junta, divided and belligerent, ensured that a serious deal was never properly put. Their political position was even weaker than hers. Buenos Aires always insisted that the British task-force be withdrawn from the entire area; that Argentine representatives take part in any interim administration and that if talks failed Britain would lose sovereignty.

  Politically, Thatcher had believed that from the start that to cave in would finish her. The press and the Conservative Party were seething about the original diplomatic blunders. Pressed to the wall, even Labour seemed to be in favour of force to recapture the islands, with Foot harking back to the appeasement of fascism in the thirties. For the SDP David Owen was as belligerent as any Tory. Thatcher established a small war cabinet, keeping her Chancellor, and hence mere money, out of it. Nor were the politicians out of touch with the mood of the country. The polls showed anger with the government for allowing the invasion to happen. So the task-force, now up to more than twenty vessels strong, was steadily reinforced. Eventually it would comprise more than a hundred ships and 25,000 men. The world was transfixed, if also bemused. The headline on a New York paper read ‘The Empire Strikes Back.’

  Well so it did. By the end of the month South Georgia was recaptured and a large number of Argentine prisoners taken: Thatcher urged questioning journalists simply to ‘rejoice, rejoice’. Then came one of the most controversial episodes in this short war. A British submarine, the Conqueror, was following the ageing but heavily armed Argentine cruiser, the Belgrano. The British task-force was exposed and feared a pincer movement, although the Belgrano later turned out to be outside an exclusion zone announced in London, and steaming away from the fleet. With her military commanders at Chequers Thatcher authorized a submarine attack. The Belgrano was sunk, with the loss of 321 sailors. The Sun newspaper cheered: ‘Gotcha!’ The Labour MP Tam Dalyell, a rare early opponent of the war in the Commons, began a lonely campaign to show that the sinking was politically motivated and immoral, possibly connected to an attempt to scotch the latest peace move. Soon afterwards, a British destroyer, HMS Sheffield, was hit by an Argentine Exocet missile. Forty died and she later sank. The war had started for real.

  On 18 May 1982 the war cabinet agreed that landings on the Falklands should go ahead, despite lack of full air cover and worsening weather. By landing at the unexpected bay of San Carlos in low cloud, British troops got ashore in large numbers. Heavy Argentine air attacks, however, took a serious toll. Two frigates were badly damaged, another was sunk, then another, then a destroyer, then a container ship with vital supplies. In London the success of the landing seemed on the edge. The requisitioned liner Queen Elizabeth 2 was nearby, vulnerable and carrying 3,000 troops. Thatcher called it the worst night. And indeed, had the Argentine air force bombs been properly fused for the attacks, far more would have exploded; had their navy had more Exocets, far more would have been launched. Had British Harrier jets not been equipped with the latest US missiles and helped by the secret provision of American AWACS radar cover, the situation would have been desperate. As it was, 3,000 British troops had a secure beach-head and began to fight their way inland. Over the next few weeks they captured the settlements of Goose Green and Darwin, killing 250 Argentine soldiers and capturing 1,400 for the loss of twenty British lives. Colonel ‘H’ Jones became the first celebrated hero of the conflict when he died leading 2 Para against heavy Argentine fire along with Sergeant Ian McKay of 3 Para.

  The battle then moved to the tiny capital, Port Stanley, or rather to the circling hills above it where the Argentine army was dug in on Mount Tumbledown, Wireless Ridge, Sapper Hill and Mount William. Before the final assault two British landing ships, the Sir Tristram and the Sir Galahad, were hit by missiles and the Welsh Guards suffered dreadful losses, many of the survivors being badly burned. Ministers talked of losing a ship a day, while at a summit in Versailles Thatcher was again swatting off attempts to halt the fighting by diplomatic means. By now she was determined that nothing short of Argentine surrender would do. The United States, on the other hand, was still desperately hoping to preserve the junta and avoid its humiliation. The scenes at the United Nations were close to farce. They ended after the final attac
k on the demoralized and badly led Argentine troops forced their leader, General Menendez, to surrender. The British commander arrived at the door of the West Store in Stanley, where many islanders were taking refuge, with the immortal words, ‘Hullo, I’m Jeremy Moore. Sorry it’s taken rather a long time to get here.’

  Many people thought the war mere butchery for a meaningless prize. The most famous comment came from that mordant South American writer Jorge Luis Borges who said it reminded him of two bald men fighting over a comb. Tam Dalyell hounded the Prime Minister with parliamentary questions as he sought to prove the sailors on the Belgrano had been killed to keep the war going, not for reasons of military necessity. He was not alone in his outrage. One of the few genuinely dramatic moments in the 1983 election campaign came when Mrs Thatcher was challenged on television about the Belgrano by a woman who seemed a match for her, as few men were. Among the Labour leadership, Denis Healey accused her of glorying in slaughter and the next leader, Neil Kinnock, got into trouble when, responding to a heckler who said that at least Margaret Thatcher had guts, he replied that it was a pity other people had had to leave theirs on Goose Green to prove it.

  The Falklands War was both throwback and throw-forward. For millions it seemed utterly out of time, a Victorian gunboat war in a nuclear age. Yet for more millions still (it was a popular war) it was a wholly unexpected and almost mythic symbol of rebirth. Margaret Thatcher herself lost no time in telling the country what she thought the war had meant. Speaking at Cheltenham racecourse in early July, she said: ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence, born in the economic battles at home and found true 8,000 miles away…Printing money is no more. Rightly this government has abjured it. Increasingly this nation won’t have it…That too is part of the Falklands factor.’ The old country had rekindled her old spirit, she concluded: ‘Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won.’ The Toxteth riots may not have had anything to do with sterling M3 but apparently the activities of 2 Para did.

  The Falklands War changed Margaret Thatcher’s personal story and the country’s politics. But it merged into a wider sense that confrontation was required in public life. There was a raw and bloody edge to the spirit of the age. In Northern Ireland, from the spring of 1981, a hideous IRA hunger-strike was going on, which would lead to the death of Bobby Sands and nine others. ‘A convicted criminal,’ Margaret of Lincolnshire briskly called him. ‘He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organisation did not allow to many of its victims.’ As with civil service strikers or the United Nations peace party, Thatcher was utterly determined not to flinch, as rock-hard as her ruthless Irish republican enemies. They had assassinated Lord Mountbatten in 1979 and the mainland bombing campaign went on, with attacks on the Chelsea barracks, then the Hyde Park bombings, when eight people were killed and fifty-three injured. And, indeed, none of them were offered any choice.

  Overhanging the violence at home and part of the backdrop of the Falklands War, was the residual fear of global nuclear war. With hindsight the grey old Soviet Union of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko may seem a rusted giant, clanking helplessly towards its collapse. This was not how it seemed in the early eighties. The various phases of strategic arms reduction treaties were under way but to well-informed and intelligent analysts the Soviet empire still seemed mighty, belligerent and unpredictable. New SS20 missiles were being deployed by the Russians, targeted on cities and military bases across Western Europe. In response, Nato was planning a new generation of American Pershing and Cruise missiles to be sited in Europe, including in Britain. In the late winter of 1979 Russian troops had begun arriving in Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev was an obscure candidate member of the Politburo, twenty-eighth in the pecking order, working on agricultural planning, and glasnost was a word no one in the West had heard of. Poland’s free trade union movement Solidarity was being crushed by a military dictator.

  Western politics echoed with arguments over weapons systems, disarmament strategies and the need to stand up to the Soviet threat. Moscow had early and rightly identified Thatcher as one of its most implacable enemies in the West and when, eighteen months after her election victory, she was joined by a new US President, Ronald Reagan, she had a soul-mate in Washington. Reagan may have been many things Thatcher was not – sunny, lazy, uninterested in detail and happy to run huge deficits. But like her he saw the world in black and white terms, a great stage where good and evil, God and Satan, were pitched in endless conflict. Their shared detestation of socialism in general and the Soviet Union in particular underpinned a remarkably close personal relationship; she was his first overseas visitor after his election; for her he was always ‘Ronnie’. To young politicians watching from the wings – people such as Tony Blair – lessons about the effect of a popular war and the importance of keeping close to the White House were being quietly absorbed.

  To the public who had barely focused on Thatcher a few years earlier, she was now becoming a vividly divisive figure. On one side were those who felt they at last had a warrior queen for hard times, a fighter whose convictions were clear and who would never quit, someone who had cut through the endless dispiriting fudging of earlier decades. On the other were those who saw her as a dangerous and bloodthirsty figure, driven by an inhumanly stark world view. To the cartoonists of the Sun, Daily Mail and other right-wing papers she was a Joan of Arc, a glorious Boudicca, surrounded by cringeing wets, apelike trade unionists and spitting Irish terrorists. To the cartoonists of the Guardian, Daily Mirror and Spitting Image she was simply mad, with sharply curved vulture’s beak nose, staring eyes and rivets in her hair. Sexual confusion was rife. She was the only real man in her cabinet, or the ultimate housewife who had seized control of the country; or she was the eerie repudiation of femininity, cold, barren and vengeful. France’s President Mitterand, who in fact had quite a good relationship with her, summed up the paradox better than any British observer when, after an early meeting he told his Europe minister, ‘She has the eyes of Caligula but she has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.’

  The Falklands War confirmed and underlined these opposing views of Thatcher. In a flush of over-confidence she seized her moment so hard she nearly throttled it. She encouraged the government’s internal think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff, to come up with a paper about the future of public spending. They came up with a manifesto which can be summed up as Margaret Thatcher unplugged, what she would have liked to do, unconstrained. They suggested ending state funding of higher education; student loans to replace grants; no increases in welfare payments in line with inflation and the entire replacement of the National Health Service with a system of private health insurance, including charges for doctors’ visits and medicines – in effect, the end of the Attlee Welfare State. Though some of these ideas would become widely discussed much later and student loans would be brought in by a Labour government, at the time the prospectus was regarded as bonkers by most of those around her. The Prime Minister battled for it but ministers who regarded it as her worst mistake since coming to power leaked the CPRS report to the press in order to kill it off. In this they were successful. The episode was an early indication, long before the poll tax, that Thatcher’s charge-ahead politics could produce mistakes as well as triumphs.

  The electoral consequences of the Falklands War have been argued about ever since. The government had got inflation down and the economy was at last improving but the overall Conservative record in 1983 was not impressive. The most dramatic de-industrialization of modern times, with hundreds of recently profitable businesses disappearing for ever, had been caused in part by a very high pound, boosted by Britain’s new status as an oil producer. This, with the Howe squeeze, was deadly. Later Joseph admitted that ‘we hadn’t appreciated, any of us’ that this ‘would lead to such rapid and large de-manning’. Unemployment ‘had not been considered a huge problem’. Given the shrinking of the country�
��s industrial base and unemployment at 3 million this was a mistake and a half. Further, this pro-tax-cutting government had seen the total tax burden rise from 34 per cent of GDP to nearly 40 per cent. Public spending, intended to be 40 per cent of GDP, was 44 per cent. The apparently crucial measurement of the money supply showed that it had grown at about double the target.