Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography

by Charles Moore

  But by Sunday night Carrington’s mind was pretty much made up, and the leading article in The Times on Monday morning, just as tough as rumoured, finally decided him. ‘How can I stay’, he asked a protesting Michael Palliser, ‘when I cannot defend my policy in the Commons?’91 Luce followed Carrington’s suit, and resigned as soon as he could; so did Humphrey Atkins. John Nott was furious that no one had told him in advance that Carrington was to resign. He felt himself in an impossible position and begged Mrs Thatcher that he be allowed to go too. She refused, saying, by her own account, that she ‘could not possibly accept when the Task Force was on the ocean’.92 The true reason for Mrs Thatcher’s determination to keep him was political: she feared that the departure of the only other Cabinet minister apart from herself who had been involved in the debacle would leave her own position vulnerable. Even without Nott leaving, the departure of Carrington and his colleagues emphasized her isolation in her own mind. ‘I felt totally bereft, I felt deserted, very lonely,’ she told Richard Luce years later.93

  When Carrington saw Mrs Thatcher to tell her his decision, she ‘behaved with the greatest possible kindness’. Then she told him that she proposed to replace him with Francis Pym. By his own account, Carrington said to her, ‘Margaret, you mustn’t do that. You hate him. It’ll all end in tears.’ ‘I know,’ replied Mrs Thatcher, ‘but he’s the only one with the experience.’94 Her stated reason for choosing Pym was a true one. Like Carrington, and Willie Whitelaw, Pym had won the MC in the Second World War. (‘Don’t forget, he was a brave soldier,’ Mrs Thatcher was wont to say, when feeling guilty about criticizing him.)95 He had been Northern Ireland Secretary (very briefly) for Ted Heath, and Defence Secretary for Mrs Thatcher. As leader of the House, until he became Foreign Secretary, and a former chief whip, he could bring to the job a deep knowledge of the Commons from which Carrington had been absolutely disqualified.

  The additional – and most unwelcome – reason why Mrs Thatcher felt she had to promote Pym was that he was now the favourite to succeed her as leader. In retrospect, it seems improbable that this somewhat nervous and hesitant man, whose public performances never excited the general public, could have been seen as Mrs Thatcher’s most likely replacement, but this is to forget the precariousness of her position. Even before the Falklands crisis, she was on probation with the party, and had never been properly accepted by many in its higher echelons. Pym positioned himself in case ‘anything should happen to her’. Brian Fall, who was Carrington’s private secretary, and so became Pym’s on 5 April, felt that ‘Francis didn’t vigorously enough deny the ambitions which others attributed to him.’96 He could not be overlooked for promotion: he was in a strong position, but one of which Mrs Thatcher was bound to be suspicious. Besides, Carrington was right in his estimation of the personal relationship between the two. With his rather hunched, anxious demeanour, Pym was not her sort of man. He had suffered a minor nervous breakdown in the 1970s. Officials considered that he was ‘actually very courageous’,97 but they were frustrated by his manner at meetings, particularly meetings with the Prime Minister: ‘he can seem to be a branch bending in the wind … he gets red in the face and can’t put his case very well.’98 Pym was probably one of those men, quite common in his generation, who hated arguing with a woman, and found Mrs Thatcher intimidating. He quailed when she came at him ‘with her hair glued up and her eyes flashing’.99 According to Antony Acland, their encounters were ‘slightly like the Mad Hatter’s tea party. There she was opposite and Francis was the dormouse, who had snuck into the tea party and was getting smaller and smaller and smaller.’100*

  That afternoon, the leaders of the Tory tribe, including Mrs Thatcher and Carrington, who read the lesson, attended the memorial service of R. A. Butler in St Margaret’s, Westminster. Coming on the same day as Carrington’s resignation, it provided the funeral rites for a certain sort of whiggish Conservatism. Bill Deedes, who attended the service, noted: ‘View of PM – in black, composed … Carrington reads 1st lesson in clear tones, as if nothing had happened. She watches with distant eyes … Only sudden movement by the PM when Archbishop leads prayer for those who govern. She drops her head into her hands.’101 Butler had always spoken of politics as ‘the art of the possible’, using that phrase for the title for his memoirs. Mrs Thatcher had criticized the phrase in the past. Now, both in her economic policies and in the Falklands crisis, she was truly attempting the art of the impossible.*

  In the course of the day, and of the next, with bands playing and families weeping, the initial Task Force set sail from Portsmouth, led by the aircraft carriers Invincible and Hermes, accompanied by the assault ship Fearless and eleven frigates and destroyers. Among those on board Invincible was the Queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, a helicopter pilot. In her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher says that the Queen had made clear that ‘there could be no question of a member of the royal family being treated differently from other servicemen.’102 What she does not add is that she herself opposed the sending of Prince Andrew, because she was frightened of hostage-taking and of political problems, but ‘the Palace dug their toes in in a big way’.103 It was to an earlier queen that Mrs Thatcher turned for inspiration as the fleet sailed. Interviewed on television, she was asked whether she would resign if the enterprise failed. ‘Failure?’ she replied. ‘Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? “Failure – the possibilities do not exist.” ’104 In her manuscript memoir of the war, written a year later (see below), Mrs Thatcher summed up the day, including a comic slip of the pen: the Task Force, she wrote, left ‘with a speed and inefficiency [sic] which astounded the world and made us feel very proud and very British.’105† In his diary, François Mitterrand’s adviser Jacques Attali recorded: ‘A large part of the British fleet begins its 14,000 km journey to South America. About Margaret Thatcher, François Mitterrand wonders: “Do I admire her … or envy her?” ’106

  That evening, Michael Palliser cancelled what would have been his farewell party in the Foreign Office and it became instead the wake for Carrington. But although the Foreign Office had probably never been at such a low ebb in modern times, one of its number had already secured the most lasting diplomatic success of the war. As soon as the Argentine invasion of the Falklands had become imminent, Anthony Parsons,* Britain’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations, had seen that the faster Britain acted at the UN, the greater the likelihood of success. He knew there was no prospect of getting UN support for the British claim to the Falkland Islands – existing General Assembly resolutions made clear that this was regarded with disfavour as colonial – but he believed that a straightforward condemnation of the Argentine use of force was obtainable. He called an emergency meeting of the Security Council, on which Britain has a permanent place, for the evening of Saturday 3 April, the day of the debate in Parliament. He sought to pass a resolution condemning Argentina, even though it seemed unlikely that Britain could muster the nine votes required. At the Foreign Office, Luce overruled cautious officials and authorized Parsons’s action.

  Early in the evening of that fraught Saturday, Mrs Thatcher had already had a most encouraging telephone call from President Mitterrand of France, who told her: ‘I quite realise that Britain is quite big enough to find its own solutions to this problem. But it’s important you should realise that others share your opposition to this kind of aggression.’107† His message was an important one. It showed the solidarity of one nation with far-flung possessions for another, and gave her reason to hope that there might be strong support for Britain from the EEC. It also showed that Mitterrand shared Mrs Thatcher’s view, born, in both cases, from the experience of the 1930s, that ‘you must never accept the modification of frontiers by force.’108 It gave her a personal bond with the socialist French President that transcended their considerable ideological divide‡ and, at that precise moment, it added to her confidence about the Security Council resolution, in which France offered support and helped swing countries within its sphe
re of influence Britain’s way. A message from Parsons quickly made clear, however, that Britain was still a vote short, and begged that Mrs Thatcher intervene personally with King Hussein of Jordan. Luce rang her in her flat at No. 10 and passed on the message, explaining that there were only twenty-five minutes left.109 Mrs Thatcher rang the King. He promised to order Jordan to vote for the resolution, saying, ‘I hope I will be in time.’ ‘You’re a very kind and wonderful ally,’ Mrs Thatcher replied.110 Security Council Resolution 502 was duly carried, with the Soviet Union, despite Argentina pleading with it to use its veto, abstaining. It called for the ‘immediate withdrawal’ of Argentine forces and instructed the governments to seek ‘a diplomatic solution to their differences and to respect fully the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations’. These purposes and principles included Article 51, the right of self-defence, on which Britain could now rest to justify armed response. It was a triumph which, Parsons knew from the first, could not be improved upon, and Mrs Thatcher brandished it from then onwards, to the greatest effect. Parsons was, in a sense, the Henry Leach of diplomacy, hurrying forward with a clear solution while others dithered. As in the case of Leach, Mrs Thatcher loved him for it.

  At Easter 1983, roughly a year after the crisis began, Mrs Thatcher composed her own private account, writing with the ‘War Cabinet’ minutes beside her, of the Falklands War. She kept this so secret that it seems that no one, not even her private secretaries, knew about it at the time. Her motive, she said many years later, was the thought ‘I’ll damn well write some of this down for posterity,’111 and it was probably prompted in her mind by the first anniversary of the war.* Mrs Thatcher gave her private record the dry title ‘Notes on the Emergency Cabinet Committee’. Rather than starting ‘at the beginning’, she began with the question of how to fight the war in Whitehall. Following legal advice, which showed that a declaration of war would make other countries neutral and thus forbidden to assist Britain, it was decided early on that no war should formally be declared. The word ‘conflict’ was preferred. There was no doubt, however, that, in practical terms, this was war. The Cabinet, therefore, was much too large and cumbersome a body to make any but the most important decisions of principle, and even these would, in effect, be pre-cooked elsewhere. Mrs Thatcher was advised by Frank Cooper, who saw her about it at lunch on Sunday 4 April,112 that the trick was to avoid a situation in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer could pull the plug on proceedings – as Harold Macmillan, then the Chancellor, had done to Eden over Suez, getting himself made prime minister in the process – by cutting off the money or warning of a loss of confidence in the currency. She should replicate the successful arrangements instituted by Winston Churchill during the Second World War. On Tuesday 6 April, Harold Macmillan himself came to see Mrs Thatcher in her room in the Commons. His first question was ‘Have they got the [atomic] bomb?’ (They hadn’t.) His second contribution was: ‘You will need a Pug Ismay.’113 General Sir Hastings Ismay had been Churchill’s chief of staff and deputy secretary to the War Cabinet. His job was to make sure that everything was smooth in the conduct of war between generals and politicians. He was known as ‘the man with the oil can’. Some attempts were made to find such a person. Lord Carver, the former CDS, was considered, but rejected as being too maverick and left wing.114 But in the event no such appointment was made, partly because it turned out that the job could be best done by the Chief of the Defence Staff himself, Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, and partly because Mrs Thatcher, unlike Churchill, had no inclination to try to tell the generals how to run a war.*

  Knowing whereof he spoke, Macmillan told her that it would be ‘fatal’ to mix any ‘economic committee’ for the conduct of the war with the ‘campaign committee’.115 This was not displeasing news to Mrs Thatcher, who had already noticed at Cabinet and OD that Geoffrey Howe was inclined to harp more than she liked on the need for peace. She duly excluded him from the War Cabinet. He always maintained that he accepted this decision happily, but according to his private secretary, John Kerr, ‘he was upset.’116 Howe ‘sulked’, said John Coles.117

  The bureaucratic solution to the problem was Robert Armstrong’s creation of a South Atlantic sub-committee to OD. So OD(SA) (pronounced Odza) became the official name of the War Cabinet. It met daily, usually at 9.30 each morning, sometimes twice in a day, and held a total of sixty-seven meetings before being disbanded on 12 August 1982. It was chaired by the Prime Minister and its members were Whitelaw, Pym, Nott and Cecil Parkinson, who was brought in partly to handle press relations, but also to balance what was feared might prove to be a defeatist axis of Whitelaw and Pym.118 When she summoned Parkinson to ask him to serve in the War Cabinet, Mrs Thatcher told him that there would be ‘no room for fainthearts’ in it.119 The words echoed one of her father’s sermons, ‘God wants no fainthearts for His ambassadors.’ The War Cabinet was serviced by Armstrong and Wade-Gery, and also attended by Lewin, the Chief of the Defence Staff, and by the Attorney-General, Sir Michael Havers. Others frequently present were Antony Acland, Frank Cooper and Michael Palliser, and the Foreign Office legal adviser, Sir Ian Sinclair. From time to time, the other service chiefs, in addition to Lewin, and also Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, the Commander-in-Chief Fleet, would attend. Of the twenty or so most important people involved in the Falklands War politically, officially or militarily, about three-quarters had served in the armed forces (almost all of them, including all the service chiefs, in the Second World War). The exceptions were Acland, who was too young, Armstrong and Henderson, who had not served for medical reasons, and, most notably, the Prime Minister herself.

  It was an important compensation to Mrs Thatcher for her own ignorance that Denis had served in the Second World War. He had loved his time in the army, and he followed military affairs closely ever afterwards, reading widely in the subject. She was to turn to him in the most difficult moments and he, for the course of the Falklands War, sometimes broke his self-imposed general rule and ‘offered advice without being asked’.120 His wife was obviously at a disadvantage in knowing nothing about war. On the few occasions when she made military suggestions to colleagues, they were usually wide of the mark. ‘Couldn’t we put up a smokescreen?’ she suggested one day to the War Cabinet as a remedy for Argentine air attack. ‘There were titters round the Cabinet Room,’ John Coles recalled.121 There were also a few ‘Churchill moments’ when she would suddenly propose something dramatic and impractical like the occupation of Tierra del Fuego.122 But there was a less obvious sense in which her lack of knowledge helped. It gave her the humility which she was often, in other matters, accused of lacking, and encouraged her to listen to colleagues such as Whitelaw, who had military experience.* It also kept her mind clear for the political task and made her uncomplicatedly anxious to do everything possible for the Task Force. Ministry of Defence officials felt that ‘It was clear from Day One that the military would get what they wanted.’123 Her inexperience may also have given her the optimism necessary to carry through the task without compromise. According to Philip Goodhart, a defence minister just before the Falklands crisis and himself a veteran of the Second World War, ‘She wouldn’t have done it if she’d been a man and if she’d been in the armed forces during the war. Then she’d have been aware how dreadfully wrong everything was likely to go.’124

  The War Cabinet met for the first time on Wednesday 7 April 1982, once in the morning and once at seven in the evening. It was working with the timetable that the first submarine could be on station near the Falklands by 11 April and the first surface ships by 24 April. There was pressure for it to decide on a Maritime Exclusion Zone (MEZ) round the Falkland Islands within which Britain would have authorized itself to attack all Argentine shipping. This was resisted by Francis Pym lest it prejudice the imminent visit of the US Secretary of State, Al Haig, who had announced his intention of coming to London to see, as an ally, what could be done to secure peace. By Mrs Thatcher’s private account, there was a �
�long argument’ and ‘eventually through patient persistence the rest of us managed to overcome Francis’ objections. It was a pattern to be repeated many times.’125 Haig had asked to come that day, but Mrs Thatcher had put him off for twenty-four hours because of a debate in the House of Commons that afternoon, the first setpiece since the drama of the previous Saturday.

  The debate was notable for a skilful attack on Mrs Thatcher by her predecessor, Jim Callaghan, who wished to make clear how well he had handled the previous Falklands crisis, contrasting this with her performance. Bitingly, he said: ‘we are sending an aircraft carrier that has already been sold to meet cash limits, from a port that is to be closed, and with 500 sailors holding redundancy notices in their pockets,’126 and he held the Prime Minister personally responsible. When preparing her memoirs, Mrs Thatcher remembered the uncomfortableness of this, describing Callaghan as ‘a very nasty, spiteful person’.127 The debate was Francis Pym’s first outing as Foreign Secretary and Mrs Thatcher did not speak in it, to let him make his mark and to allow Nott, who also spoke, the chance to recover ground. In his speech, Nott announced the 200-nautical-mile MEZ, to be imposed from midnight on 11 April, this being the first time that the first submarine would be ready. ‘It was worth noting’, wrote Mrs Thatcher the following year, ‘that at no time during the Falklands operation did we say we would take action until we were in a position to do it … I was determined that we should never put ourselves in a position where “bluff could be called”. And we never did.’128 For the first time, the House noticed possible differences between Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. It was Eric Ogden, a Labour backbencher with close family links to the Falklands, who said, ‘I smell a sell-out.’ Tony Benn, who positioned himself as the most extreme and prominent opponent of the war, declared: ‘The Prime Minister must have an astonishing view of her power if she thinks that she can bring 1,800 hostages out of the Falkland Islands with the British Fleet, operating 8,000 miles from home, when Carter had the humiliation of seeing the inauguration of his successor before the Ayatollah Khomeini would release the hostages.’ For his part, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Denis Healey, started to qualify Labour support for the use of force, warning of the dangers of an opposed landing. It was becoming easier to see how the Opposition would undermine the government as soon as things started to go wrong. In Prime Minister’s Questions the following day, David Owen called for an official inquiry into the causes of the Falklands disaster. Mrs Thatcher immediately conceded that such an inquiry should take place.