‘The rush, predominantly among the middle classes, determined to ensure that they and their children quickly learn this central skill of the future, is unmatched anywhere else in the world,’ the Guardian reported proudly. This was no exaggeration. Britain now had the world’s highest rate of home computer ownership, well ahead of both the United States and Japan, with one machine in every six homes by the spring of 1983. Here was a new Britain indeed. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ one newsagent admitted to the Observer, contemplating the shelves stuffed with computer magazines. ‘Computers are now more popular than porn.’40
The boom seemed unstoppable. ‘We are not placing any limits on the size we can grow to,’ declared Acorn’s Chris Curry, setting out his plans to dominate the education market, secure ‘half the home computer market’ and capture the market for business machines, winning over ‘all the people who are buying Apples’.fn6 As for Sinclair, he seemed the master of all he surveyed. With turnover now £50 million, his personal worth was estimated at a staggering £130 million. ‘Today’, declared the Observer, ‘a Sinclair computer drops off the end of the production line every four seconds.’ The Guardian crowned him the Young Businessman of the Year; the government awarded him a knighthood. ‘Where will it end?’ wondered the Guardian. Perhaps the answer lay in ‘the gleam in Mr Sinclair’s eye’, his plan for a ‘cheap electric car’ that could revolutionize transport forever. ‘If it was anyone but Clive Sinclair,’ said a spokesman for a rival firm, ‘we should be laughing. But what that man does we have to take seriously.’41
In the spring of 1984, Sinclair reached his apotheosis. Invited to Washington to address an American congressional symposium, he told them that in decades ‘we will be able to assemble a machine as complex as the human brain’. Soon ‘machines of silicon will arise first to rival and then surpass their human progenitors’. Computers would become teachers, even doctors. There would be ‘totally automatic personal vehicles’, travelling at more than 200 miles an hour; there would be ‘truly personal telephones … wireless devices [that] would allow us to telephone and be telephoned wherever we choose’. Mankind, Sinclair said grandly, was on the brink of an age of ‘art, music and science … as golden as that of Greece’. And afterwards? It was time to talk seriously about building a ‘vast, man-created world in space, home to thousands or millions of people’. And then ‘we may begin in earnest the search for worlds beyond our solar system and the colonisation of the galaxy’.42
First, though, came his electric car. But that, as it turned out, was a rather less inspiring story.
31
Strangers in the Night
The news was all rubbish apart from a scurry in the Falkland Islands where some impertinent Argentinians are pinching scrap metal or something.
Kenneth Williams’s diary, 29 March 1982
‘We’ve lost the Falklands,’ I told Jane. ‘It’s all over. We’re a Third World Country, no good for anything.’
She is used to my suddenly taking the apocalyptic view. Didn’t say much.
Alan Clark’s diary, 2 April 1982
Saturday 27 March 1982: a sunny afternoon in Oxford, and Simon Winchester had just lit a bonfire in his back garden when the phone rang. It was the Sunday Times. ‘We think you should stand by to go to the Falkland Islands,’ said the voice at the end of the line. Winchester’s first reaction was not enthusiastic. All that way for a story about some scrap-metal dealers! Still, by the following afternoon he was on a flight to Madrid. And by the time he touched down in Spain he was halfway through the file of clippings about the people who lived on these remote islands in the South Atlantic, the ‘sturdy breed of sheep farmers and mullet fishermen who kept the Union Jack flying all those thousands of miles from home’.
On Monday morning, Winchester arrived in Buenos Aires. That evening, he had a quick chat with the British ambassador, Anthony Williams, who admitted that the imbroglio on South Georgia – a bizarre row about a group of scrap-metal dealers who had landed illegally and were refusing to leave – was ‘damned exasperating, no doubt about it’. The following day Winchester and a couple of other reporters set off to the Falkland Islands’ tiny capital, Stanley. It was very cloudy, he remembered, and he saw nothing until the last few moments of the flight – ‘and then, suddenly, beneath the wheels, came the landscape we had been expecting. Rain-sodden, windswept, bleak – all green and black and grey, scrubby grassland dotted with sheep, curling clouds of gulls wheeling over the low cliffs.’ When he disembarked it was raining, and there was a faded portrait of the Queen over the immigration desk in the aerodrome. A Land Rover took him to the island’s only hotel, the Upland Goose on Ross Road. There he ‘sat down to tea and cakes, and looked out at the rain’. ‘Everything was so Scottish!’ he thought. And then two Royal Marines from the island’s garrison went past, and he remembered that he was not in Scotland after all.fn11
The Falkland Islands have not always enjoyed a very good press. Samuel Johnson, who never visited them, wrote scornfully of their ‘bleak and gloomy solitude’. Charles Darwin, who did, was struck by their ‘desolate and wretched aspect’, their ‘peaty soil and wiry grass, of one monotonous brown colour’. Another great British thinker, Denis Thatcher, remarked simply that they were ‘miles and miles of bugger all’.fn2 ‘When you first set foot in the Falklands’, the BBC’s Latin America correspondent told Radio Four listeners in March 1982, ‘you feel a sense of isolation, like you’re at the end of the earth, which is where you nearly are … There’s no television, and no roads to speak of outside the capital … But there is a lot of drunkenness, a high divorce rate and a shortage of women.’ No doubt Dr Johnson, too, would have thought the islands very Scottish.2
The history of the islands is immensely complicated. First visited by the English but first settled by the French, they changed hands several times in the eighteenth century, ending up with Spain. During the Napoleonic Wars the Spanish abandoned them, but left a plaque insisting that they still belonged to the Spanish crown. When Argentina declared independence in 1816, it claimed sovereignty over the Malvinas, as they were known in Spanish, and eventually established a small colony. However, the British had not abandoned their own previous claim and in 1833 moved in and re-established control. For the next 150 years the Falklands were British, though the legal situation remained very ambiguous. For the Argentines, the case was simple: the Malvinas were part of their inheritance and had been stolen by ‘pirates’. But the British insisted that the islands had been up for grabs after the disintegration of the Spanish Empire. What was more, Britain had now owned them for longer than most modern nation-states had existed. And the islanders had lived there for generations, longer than most Argentine families had been in South America, and overwhelmingly wanted to remain British.3
The real question is why anybody cared. The Falklands had no Argentine cultural connections and few natural resources, and were hundreds of miles from the South American mainland. But the issue had become inextricably entwined with Argentina’s sense of national self-worth, especially after the Second World War, when Juan Perón stoked nationalist feeling to fever pitch. Like most authoritarian populists, Perón thrived on enemies, none more diabolical than the British, whose economic buccaneers had supposedly been robbing the Argentine people for decades. For Perón, as for his successors, regaining the Malvinas from the Anglo-Saxon pirates carried immense symbolic resonance. The islands became a totem of national independence; they had been stolen, and without them Argentina would never be whole. ‘Englishmen,’ read the banners in Buenos Aires during Perón’s years in power, ‘give us back the Malvinas!’4
The irony of all this is that, deep down, most British politicians would have been delighted to return them. Although the Falklands had taken their place in British naval legend as the site of victory over the Germans in 1914, they had little strategic or economic value. From a peak of 2,392 in 1931 the population had slowly declined, dipping to 1,813 fifty years later. By the late 1960s the
islands’ days seemed numbered. The problem, though, was that while the Foreign Office was very happy to transfer sovereignty to Buenos Aires, the islanders were dead against it. They might rely on Argentina for their flights, their post, their medical services and even their petrol, but they were damned if they would become Argentines. Quite apart from their anxieties about Argentina’s economic and political instability, they saw themselves as British, so attached to their mother country that they had donated £50,000 from their own funds to buy Spitfires during the Second World War.
As another visiting reporter, the ubiquitous Ian Jack, told his readers in 1978, this was not some weird self-delusion. The Falkland Islanders, or ‘Kelpers’, looked British, sounded British and even ate British. They drove Land Rovers and drank Tennent’s. At the quayside, fish fingers arrived every three months on a boat from Tilbury. At the Upland Goose, Mrs King served onion soup, mutton stew and crème caramel made in a British factory. At the Philomel Store, Mr Peck sold cans of beer, tubes of Smarties and stickers reading ‘Keep the Falkland Islands British’. The islanders had their grievances, of course: the stagnant economy, the falling population, the depressing tendency of local girls to marry Royal Marines and move to England. But most insisted that they would never surrender their birthright. ‘I’d go,’ one said flatly when Jack asked about the prospect of Argentine sovereignty. ‘I’d quite definitely – what, stay here under some lousy Latin American dictator? Not likely.’5
By this point, though, the Argentines were running out of patience. The mid-1970s had been horrendously violent and turbulent years for Argentina, and the ruling military junta craved a grand gesture of patriotic self-assertion. In December 1976 their air force landed a little party on the uninhabited British dependency of Southern Thule, some 1,200 miles south of Stanley, and refused to budge. The Labour government lodged a formal protest, but otherwise did nothing. A year later, Jim Callaghan was so concerned about Argentina’s aggressive rhetoric that he sent a submarine and two frigates to patrol the South Atlantic. Years afterwards, Callaghan claimed that if only Mrs Thatcher had done the same she could have deterred Argentina from invading the Falklands. In reality, the junta never knew about his little flotilla because the British government kept it secret. And at least one of Callaghan’s ministers feared that if the worst happened Britain would never have the guts to fight back. This ‘ghastly fascist military dictatorship’, wrote Tony Benn, was ‘determined to get hold of the islands’. And when it did, the ‘total spinelessness of the Foreign Office and the general decay of Britain will have combined to put us in a position where we will be unable to do anything to defend the 1950 people who live there’. Needless to say, he took a rather different view five years later.6
For Mrs Thatcher, the Falklands were never a priority. Compared with her enormous domestic difficulties, they were barely even a sideshow. But they would not go away. As early as October 1979, Lord Carrington warned his colleagues that unless they found a solution there was a ‘serious threat of Argentine invasion which would require the long-term commitment of substantial British forces’. If the Argentines did invade, recovering the islands would be ‘extremely difficult’, because they were so far away that it would be impossible to resupply any expedition. But Mrs Thatcher did not seem wholly convinced. Underlining a passage about the islands’ importance to Argentine national honour, she wrote crossly: ‘Acc. to the Foreign Office our national honour doesn’t seem to matter!’ And beside Carrington’s warnings of an invasion, she scribbled: ‘These conclusions are debatable … What evidence?’7
In June 1980 Carrington returned to the subject. They really ought to settle the issue, he said, not least because the ‘uncertainty’ was damaging the islands’ economy. The obvious solution was to hand over sovereignty to Argentina in return for a ‘leaseback’ deal, whereby Britain would continue to administer the Falklands for an agreed period. That way, the Argentines could claim they had regained ownership of the islands, while the islanders would be reassured by living under British rule for the foreseeable future. And at first his scheme looked very promising. In November he reported that preliminary discussions with Argentina had gone well, with talk of a lease lasting ninety-nine years. Mrs Thatcher was still very wary. ‘We can’t afford to defend them,’ she told her ministers, but ‘surrender of sovereignty’ would be ‘very difficult’ to sell. ‘We should do nothing,’ she added, ‘without [the] consent of the islanders.’ Fortunately, the Foreign Office had a plan. It proposed to send Carrington’s junior minister, Nicholas Ridley, to win them over.8
Ridley’s visit to the Falklands, which took place at the end of November, was an unmitigated disaster. The son of a viscount and the grandson of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, Ridley was an enthusiast for fishing, painting and smoking, with an arrogant manner and an aristocratic relish for saying what people did not want to hear. When he was invited to address a public meeting at Stanley Town Hall, things did not go well at all. ‘I don’t think we should give them sovereignty. We’re giving up our birthright,’ one man said. ‘Well then,’ said Ridley, ‘you take the consequences, not me.’ The man, evidently astonished, said: ‘That’s a pretty bald statement.’ But Ridley was unrepentant. ‘If you can’t get the communications, if you can’t get the medical services and the educational services, if you can’t get the oil,’ he said, ‘then it’s you who suffer, not us.’ ‘We know that,’ the man said angrily, ‘we realise that, we’re not nits.’
At one point somebody asked: ‘If the Argentines invaded, what is Britain going to do?’ ‘Kick them out!’ Ridley said, at which there was a burst of mocking laughter. ‘Of course we will!’ he exclaimed, raising his voice above the din:
Goodness me – that’s not the problem. The problem is, do you want the Argentinians invading you and us kicking them out in a state of perpetual war? That’s what you’ve got to think about. I mean, it’s all very well sitting here saying someone else must come and kick the Argentinians out. Of course we will, but is that good for sheep-farming, for fishing, for looking for oil, for all your futures, for your children, and your grand-children and your great-grand-children? Is that the way you want to live? – That’s what you’ve got to think about.
Ridley was never going to win any prizes for tact, but everything he said was true. The problem was twofold: the islanders did not want to hear it, and he was entirely the wrong person to persuade them. When he left to fly home, they saw him off with a loudspeaker playing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, ‘This Land Is Our Land’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’.9
What really killed off the leaseback idea, though, was the reaction in the Commons. By the time Ridley reported back on 2 December, the small pro-Falklands lobby had got to work, and the result was a terrible thrashing. For true-blue Conservatives, the issue was an opportunity to flaunt their patriotism; for Labour, it was simply a chance to have a go at the government. One by one, MPs leapt up to denounce this shameful sell-out. The islanders’ wishes must be ‘paramount’, said Labour’s Peter Shore. The plan was an ‘insult’ to people ‘wholly British in blood and sentiment’, thundered the Conservative backbencher Sir Bernard Braine. ‘Whatever the Government’, declared Labour’s Tom McNally, ‘there will never be a majority in this House to give this historically separate people and these separate islands to the Argentine.’ Eighteen MPs spoke; none had anything but contempt for the Foreign Office’s plan. So that was that. And with leaseback dead, the government reverted to what the Falklands War’s official historian, Sir Lawrence Freedman, calls ‘Micawberism’: waiting for something to turn up.10
When Mrs Thatcher remarked that Britain could no longer afford to defend the Falklands, she had not been joking. For a quarter of a century, governments of both parties had been whittling away at the defence budget, endeavouring to reconcile the demands of the Cold War with the reality of Britain’s overstretched finances. In the autumn of 1980, Sir Geoffrey Howe had tried to cut defence spending even further, but her first Defence Secreta
ry, Francis Pym, had fought a dogged rearguard action to protect his budget. So in January 1981 Mrs Thatcher brought in a new Defence Secretary, the saturnine, prickly and impeccably dry John Nott.
A man who always looked as though he had missed his calling as a Bond villain’s accountant, Nott duly sharpened his axe. Given Britain’s commitments in West Germany, the obvious target, he told Mrs Thatcher, was the Royal Navy. By the summer, he had decided on ‘radical adjustment’, scrapping much of Britain’s surface fleet, closing the dockyards in Chatham and Gibraltar, shutting down much of the Portsmouth dockyard and slashing naval manpower by at least a third. Not only was Nott eager to get rid of two of Britain’s three aircraft carriers, HMS Hermes and HMS Invincible, he was also keen to sell the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, as well as at least twenty destroyers and frigates. The navy, not surprisingly, were aghast. The First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, visited Mrs Thatcher in Number 10 and told her she was making a ‘serious miscalculation’. Such cuts, he said, would ‘unbalance our entire defence capability, and once the ships were gone, we should probably not be able to recover this century’. But he was wasting his breath. Nott thought Leach was a romantic fantasist. What Leach thought of Nott was barely printable.11
Who Dares Wins Page 104