For all his defiance, the Governor and his family were indeed flown out of Stanley later that afternoon. So were the Royal Marines, who, in a moment of bitter humiliation, had been photographed face-down on the ground beneath their armed captors. In a final touch of bravado, Hunt insisted on wearing his full ceremonial uniform, complete with sword, gold braid and gigantic ostrich-feathered hat, and drove to the airport in his red cab, the Union Jack fluttering proudly on the bonnet. It was, he remembered, a sunny afternoon, and the streets were lined with islanders who had come to wave goodbye, many of them in floods of tears. At the airport, his wife Mavis, incongruously clutching a Dick Francis novel, burst into tears, too. ‘I feel as if we are deserting these people,’ she said. ‘We should be staying with them. What is going to become of them all?’ Then they boarded the plane. The last thing Hunt saw, as the Falklands fell away beneath them, was the ‘blue and white flag of Argentina, usurping the Union Jack on the airport flagpole’.43
In London, five hours ahead of Stanley, it was evening. For Mrs Thatcher and her ministers, Thursday had been a day of agonizing inevitability. Early that morning, she had broken the news to the Cabinet at Number 10. Nott reported that the defence chiefs were already assembling a ‘large amphibious task force’, which could sail within days. The Leader of the House, Francis Pym, asked why she had not already issued the order to sail. ‘I don’t wish to close options,’ Mrs Thatcher explained. Sir Geoffrey Howe thought even this was too belligerent, since it would give the public ‘the impression that we are in a position to reverse or reconquer. We ought to convey the opposite impression.’ But Nigel Lawson, more presciently, thought people would demand action: ‘Public opinion won’t regard this as a faraway island.’44
Even as Hunt and his Marines were besieged in Government House, the government remained in total confusion. At 11 a.m. on Friday, the Foreign Office minister Humphrey Atkins made a short statement in the Commons, admitting that there was a ‘real expectation’ of an Argentine attack, but claiming that they had just been in touch with Hunt and that no Argentine troops had yet landed. This was obviously untrue: not only had the government lost control, it had completely lost its bearings. At about lunchtime, the British Antarctic Survey told the Foreign Office that they had intercepted radio reports indicating that Argentine ships had reached Stanley and that armoured troop carriers had been seen on land. Yet even now, as rumours spread of cheering crowds in Buenos Aires, there came no word from the government. Indeed, at 2.30 a visibly unhappy Pym told the Commons that there was still no news from the South Atlantic. If news came, he added, the Commons would be recalled the next day, even though it was a Saturday.45
By this point, Hunt was already preparing to surrender, yet still the government hesitated. ‘From the BBC in London’, John Smith noted sardonically, ‘we hear they think the Falkland Islands may have been invaded. Words fail us – this is the age of the train, rockets to the moon, computers and microchips and they only think that the Falklands may have been invaded. God help us all.’ At last, at six that evening in London, the BBC announced that the islands had fallen. A few moments later, their faces ashen, Carrington and Nott appeared in front of the cameras at the Foreign Office and admitted that the Falklands had been lost. When one reporter asked if they had offered their resignations, Nott paused, and then said it was ‘ridiculous and quite untrue’. But Carrington merely shook his head, and said nothing.46
Two hours later, the Cabinet reassembled in Number 10, joined by Sir Henry Leach. The Foreign Office had now sent across a preliminary assessment, which suggested that Britain would not win international backing for using force. Even the United States, it predicted, would remain neutral, and as for the British public, it would be ‘hard to persuade people that the game was worth the candle’. Mrs Thatcher could scarcely believe her eyes. Here, in black and white, was proof that the Foreign Office would always appease foreign dictators, just as she had feared. ‘When you are at war’, she recalled, ‘you cannot allow the difficulties to dominate your thinking: you have to set out with an iron will to overcome them. And anyway what was the alternative? That a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen’s subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was Prime Minister.’47
In the Cabinet Room, the consensus was that the Task Force must sail as soon as possible. Leach said that while victory was never guaranteed, with the ‘anti-air capability we could provide, I would feel confident of success’. Almost everybody thought they should go for it: as Carrington remarked, nobody would believe a word they said unless the fleet was sailing. ‘We should lose a vote of confidence if we don’t sail,’ agreed Michael Heseltine, although ‘we don’t know where we are going’. Only one minister, the independent-minded John Biffen, was against sending the Task Force. Leach thought he was a ‘little runt of a man’.48
Saturday was a gloriously bright spring day. From breakfast, MPs were pouring into Westminster for the emergency debate, the first time they had met on a Saturday since Suez. The queue for the public gallery was the longest many journalists had ever seen, and even by parliamentary standards the atmosphere was electric, the anger almost tangible. The morning headlines left no room for doubt about the mood. Argentina’s action, declared The Times, ‘threatens the right to self-determination of all island peoples throughout the world … We no longer “rule the waves”. But … we can inflict severe damage on the Argentine navy if we have to reply to force with force. It should be clear that we are prepared to do that if the invaders are not withdrawn.’ The Express carried the same message in a single front-page image: a large photo, taken in happier times, of all 1,813 Falkland Islanders gathered outside Government House, laughing and waving Union Jacks. ‘Our Loyal Subjects,’ read the headline: ‘We MUST Defend Them.’
But every paper also agreed that this was a dreadful, almost unprecedented disgrace, for which Mrs Thatcher’s government had been unforgivably culpable. The Guardian thought Friday had been a ‘day of spectacular military and diplomatic humiliation’, while the Sun urged Mrs Thatcher to ‘Sack the Guilty Men’. Even the Express, always so loyal, was in no doubt. ‘Mrs Thatcher’s government’, it said, ‘was reeling last night amid the wreckage of Britain’s biggest disaster since Suez.’ Now she was ‘on the spot, her whole defence policy under fire and two of her most senior Ministers facing the sack’. This, it predicted, would be ‘the most humiliating day of her life’.49
By mid-morning the Commons was packed: as Tory MPs gathered, many were muttering that Nott and Carrington would have to go, and perhaps even Mrs Thatcher herself. In a gloomily bathetic note, Humphrey Atkins kicked off with a short statement apologizing for misleading the House the day before, which strengthened what Alan Clark called ‘the general impression of almost total Government incompetence’. Then came Mrs Thatcher. ‘Mr Speaker,’ she began quietly, ‘the House meets this Saturday to respond to a situation of great gravity. We are here because, for the first time for many years, British sovereign territory has been invaded by a foreign power.’
At first, wrote Clark, she spoke ‘very slowly and didactically’. Then, while describing the invasion, she said: ‘We sent a telegram’ – and the Labour benches ‘started laughing and sneering’. That threw her: ‘she changed gear and gabbled’. David Owen, too, thought she was ‘clearly shaken’, with ‘none of the self-confident hectoring that we were used to’. Yet what she actually said left little room for compromise. The Argentine occupation could not be tolerated. The Task Force would sail. ‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race. Their way of life is British; their allegiance is to the Crown. They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their own allegiance.’50
Then Michael Foot rose to speak, and the Tories braced themselves. But although the Labour leader had nothing but scorn for the government’s handling of the crisis, what most struck his listeners was his passio
nate commitment to the islanders’ cause. The Argentine junta, he said, was a regime in which ‘thousands of innocent people … have been tortured and debased. We cannot forget that fact when our friends and fellow citizens in the Falkland Islands are suffering as they are at this moment.’ The islanders had been faced with an ‘act of naked, unqualified aggression, carried out in the most shameful and disreputable circumstances’. They had the ‘absolute right to look to us at this moment of their desperate plight, just as they have looked to us over the past 150 years’. It was Britain’s duty to ensure that such ‘foul and brutal aggression’ did not succeed.
Foot sat down to roars of approval. ‘He got a tremendous cheer from the Tories,’ noted a shocked Tony Benn. Alan Clark thought he was ‘excellent’, while the next speaker, the Conservative Edward du Cann, declared that ‘the Leader of the Opposition spoke for us all’. By contrast, many of Foot’s friends were shocked that he had taken such an uncompromisingly patriotic line. But, as he saw it, the issue was simple. The islanders were British, and had never harmed anybody. The Argentines were fascists, with a hideous record of torture and repression. As a young man Foot had made his name as a critic of appeasement; he was damned if he was going to become an appeaser now. Later, when the Eton-educated Labour maverick Tam Dalyell accused him of indulging his inner jingoist, Foot had a simple answer: ‘I know a fascist when I see one.’51
Foot’s speech set the tone for the next ten weeks. This was not just a spat in the South Atlantic. It was the Second World War all over again, a titanic moral clash between the defenders of liberty and the forces of fascism, between a beleaguered island people and a blood-soaked military dictatorship. And now, one by one, speakers rose to pledge support for the fleet. ‘Let us hear no more about logistics – how difficult it is to travel long distances,’ insisted du Cann. ‘I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour.’ Only victory, agreed Julian Amery, could ‘wipe the stain from Britain’s honour’. As for the Argentine leadership – a ‘Fascist, cruel and corrupt regime’, a ‘jumped-up junta of barbarous men’, led by a ‘man who wears upon his chest the medals that he won in repressing his own people’ – most speakers had nothing but contempt. ‘The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals’, thundered Sir Bernard Braine, ‘is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood – and the blood of Scotsmen and Welshmen – boil.’
Yet while the Commons worked itself into a frenzy of patriotic outrage, at least some people were horrified. For Tony Benn, who could not even bring himself to speak, the atmosphere was ‘awful’, the Commons ‘in the grip of jingoism’. ‘I came away full of gloom’, he wrote afterwards, ‘because it is obvious that a huge fleet of forty or so warships will set sail for the Falklands … and then there will be a major battle.’ The Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, too, could ‘scarcely believe my ears … Listening to the debate in the country, from a portable radio on the kitchen table, it seemed to me that the place had taken leave of its senses.’ He expected this sort of thing from the Tories, ‘but it was the bipartisanship of the patriotic passion which dinned the ears that morning’. And the writer Jonathan Raban was so shocked he had to turn off his set. ‘It wasn’t a debate,’ he thought, ‘it was a verbal bloodletting … Listening to it, I felt that I’d been eavesdropping on the nastier workings of the national subconscious; I’d heard Britain talking in a dream, and what it was saying scared me stiff.’52
Under the circumstances, Mrs Thatcher got off lightly. She was lucky that the House preferred to vent its fury at the hapless Nott, whose closing speech, stuttering, peevish and unduly partisan, was such a disaster that he sat down with cries of ‘Go!’ ringing in his ears. For Mrs Thatcher, though, the most painful moment had come earlier, thanks to the man some saw as her John the Baptist. As Enoch Powell got to his feet, recalled Alan Clark, she bowed her head, her entire being ‘knotted with pain and apprehension’. The Prime Minister, Powell reminded them, had been nicknamed the Iron Lady, and ‘there was no reason to suppose that the right hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description’. But this, he said, was the test. ‘In the next week or two, this House, the nation and the right hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.’53
That weekend the Task Force mobilized for war. On Friday morning, even before the Cabinet had given the go-ahead, Leach had sent a signal to Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, on exercise in the mid-Atlantic, ordering him to prepare to head south. By Saturday a small team were heading for Gibraltar, preparing to requisition the vast P&O cruise liner Canberra for use as a troopship, while columns of supply trucks were streaming towards the South Coast. At the Royal Marine barracks in Plymouth, senior officers were poring over maps of the Falklands, while in scenes that reminded older people of the Second World War, posters had gone up in major railway stations, urging members of the Parachute Regiment’s 3rd Battalion to report immediately. And at Portsmouth, where Harrier jump jets and Sea King helicopters were already being loaded aboard the carriers Hermes and Invincible, journalists found a ‘heady whiff of war in the air’. For sailors and soldiers alike, this was the kind of adventure they had been dreaming of since boyhood. ‘We are all keen to get to the Falklands,’ one naval lieutenant told the Express. ‘Just let us at ’em,’ agreed a young Royal Marine. ‘We’re raring to go.’54
In the South Atlantic, General Galtieri’s troops were strengthening their grip. By Saturday morning, transport planes were already landing vast quantities of equipment, including radar technology and heavy machine guns, while more armoured cars were thundering along the roads into Stanley. The islanders themselves were in total despair. Watching the Argentines ‘rushing and roaring about all over the place, knocking down fences, breaking up the roads’, John Smith thought it was ‘like a living nightmare’. Worse was to follow. By mid-morning, the rebranded Radio Nacional Islas Malvinas had announced that all schools, shops and pubs would be closed indefinitely. Any citizens who ignored these instructions could expect ‘personal misfortunes’. Then came a blizzard of announcements. Stanley was now Puerto Argentino. British currency was no longer valid, the islands’ official language was now Spanish and all transactions must use metric measurements. Flicking V-signs at Argentine soldiers carried a penalty of thirty days’ imprisonment, while disrespect for the Argentine flag meant sixty days. And all cars had to drive on the right, much to the islanders’ fury. ‘Which would you prefer,’ said an Argentine officer, ‘that our eighteen-year-old conscripts, with their big lorries, should try to drive on the left, or that you, with your little vehicles, change to the right?’55
As it turned out, the occupiers were less bloodthirsty than their new subjects had feared. Some islanders were threatened, and some even forcibly detained. But none was tortured, raped or murdered, which by the standards of the Argentine military represented extraordinary self-restraint. Yet none of this came as much consolation to the islanders, many of whom openly wept as the armoured cars rumbled past their front doors. Nor did it cut much ice with the British press. Without exception, the papers agreed that the Argentines had revealed themselves to be strutting, sadistic bullies. And by Monday morning, all but the Guardian and the Mirror were in the mood for battle.56
That morning, The Times cleared the decks for a colossal 68-column-inch leader, written by its editor Charles Douglas-Home and entitled ‘We Are All Falklanders Now.’ The central issue, the paper said, was simple: ‘The Falkland Islands are British territory, inhabited by British citizens. They have been invaded by enemy forces. These forces must be removed.’ The obvious parallel was with Hitler’s invasion of Poland. As in 1939, Britain had a duty to ‘prevent the expansionist policies of a dictatorship affecting our interests’. But there was another issue. ‘The Poles were Poles; the Falklanders are our people … When British territory is invaded, it is not just an invasion of our land, but of our whole spirit
. We are all Falklanders now.’
So this was a test not just of Mrs Thatcher’s government, but of every man and woman in Britain; a test of ‘the national will to defend itself … in a dangerous and unpredictable world’. And in its conclusion, The Times became positively lyrical:
We are an island race, and the focus of attack is one of our islands, inhabited by our islanders. At this point of decision the words of John Donne could not be more appropriate for every Briton, for every islander, for every man and woman anywhere in a world menaced by the forces of tyranny:
‘No man is an island, entire of itself. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’
It tolls for us; it tolls for them.
Here, echoing Michael Foot’s rhetoric in the Commons on Saturday, were all the themes of the next ten weeks: the island race, the crusade for democracy, the test of the nation’s will, even the parallel with the Second World War. Later that summer, in a fervent polemic, the writer Anthony Barnett claimed that Britain had succumbed to ‘Churchillism’, its themes being ‘the cruel seas, a British defeat, Anglo-Saxon democracy challenged by a dictator, and finally the quintessentially Churchillian posture – we were down but we were not out’. There was a lot of truth in this. On the same day that Times editorial appeared, the Sun mockingly depicted Lord Carrington, a mouse, alongside Winston Churchill, a lion. In the Sun newsroom, executives had already put up Churchill’s portrait.57
For Carrington, the papers made agonizing reading. He had spent the weekend wrestling with his conscience, and Monday morning’s editorials were even worse than he had feared. The Times thought he should ‘honourably resign’; the Mail urged Mrs Thatcher to ‘sack him and his whole rotten gang’; the Express claimed that he and Nott, ‘Thatcher’s guilty men’, had ‘misled themselves, the Cabinet, Parliament and the country’. The Foreign Office itself came in for scathing treatment. ‘Rotten to the core, rotten with appeasement’, said the Mail, while the Sun urged Mrs Thatcher to clean out the ‘appeasers’ and surround herself with ‘men of iron’. Carrington had drafted a resignation letter the night before. When he got to his Whitehall office, he sent it. Mrs Thatcher knew there was no point in arguing. At midday, the government announced that Carrington, Luce and Atkins had resigned.58
Who Dares Wins Page 107