Who Dares Wins

by Dominic Sandbrook

  To the newspapers, the Falklands invasion set the seal on Britain’s decline into impotence and insignificance. This is Stanley Franklin in the Sun, 5 April 1982.

  While Fleet Street rejoiced, Mrs Thatcher mourned the loss of a man whose loyalty and gallantry she had much valued. (‘Your old Cabinet colleagues continue to miss you very much,’ she told Carrington a few weeks later, ‘and me most of all.’) His replacement as Foreign Secretary, however, was rather less to her taste. Cautious, serious, always looking for compromise, the Eton-educated Francis Pym embodied what she saw as the very worst qualities of the old guard. What was more, he was widely regarded as the most likely successor if the Tories got rid of her, which meant she was promoting her most dangerous rival. But not only did Pym know how to handle the Commons, he had served as her first Defence Secretary and was a decorated veteran of the campaigns in North Africa and Italy. ‘Margaret, you mustn’t do that,’ Carrington said when she told him. ‘You hate him. It’ll all end in tears.’ ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but he’s the only one with the experience.’59

  There was, of course, one more guilty man. When, before lunch on Monday, John Nott heard that Carrington was going to resign, he was furious that nobody had warned him. If the Foreign Secretary was going, he told Mrs Thatcher, he would go too. Otherwise he would look like a dishonourable creep, clinging to office after Carrington had graciously fallen on his sword. But Mrs Thatcher turned him down flat. Nott could not possibly go ‘when the Task Force was on the ocean’. In fact, she probably kept him on because, if he went, the pressure on her would become even more intense; what was more, she needed a loyalist at the Ministry of Defence. ‘Thank goodness I didn’t accept it,’ she wrote a year later, in a private memoir of the war. ‘John was splendid throughout the campaign.’

  Even so, Nott insisted that Number 10 tell the press his resignation had been refused, and even asked them to publish his resignation letter. But he never forgave Mrs Thatcher for making him look dishonourable, and with good reason. Despite the publication of his letter, many people were convinced, quite unfairly, that he had clung on like a limpet. The Wets, wrote Alan Clark, were furious at Carrington’s resignation and were ‘taking it out on poor old Notters, saying he should be sacked, that it was intolerable that he should have survived, etc.’ Even some of the public agreed. The difference between Carrington and Nott, Peter Hibbitt told Mass Observation, was ‘the difference between an honourable man and a power-seeking careerist’.60

  That afternoon, as the first ships in the Task Force sailed for war, Mrs Thatcher went to Westminster Abbey for the memorial service for the former Tory grandee R. A. Butler, who had died a month earlier. With blackly ironic timing, Carrington had promised to read the first lesson: the order of service still billed him as Foreign Secretary. ‘To his credit, he read the text with great aplomb,’ admitted Alan Clark. But the ironies were unavoidable. As a central figure in the Conservative governments of the 1950s, Butler had been the incarnation of the liberal, patrician values that Mrs Thatcher blamed for Britain’s decline. But he had also belonged to a vanished age, the heyday of economic optimism and full employment, as well as the twilight of Empire, when the map had still been splashed with pink. In his address, the Reverend Harry Williams reminded the congregation of Butler’s unhappiness during the Suez crisis, when he had never made the mistake of ‘letting his heart rule his head’. Butler, he said, had never forgotten that the ‘hot-headed ringing of bells’ was ‘often followed by the wringing of hands’. Few of his listeners missed the implication.61

  A few hours later, Mrs Thatcher went on television, where she presented an image of implacable self-possession. ‘We have to recover those islands, we have to recover them for the people on them are British,’ she told ITN. What about the risks? ‘When you stop a dictator there are always risks,’ she said, ‘but there are great risks in not stopping a dictator. My generation learned that a long time ago.’ What about if she failed? Would she resign?

  I am not talking about failure, I am talking about my supreme confidence in the British fleet … superlative ships, excellent equipment, the most highly trained professional group of men, the most honourable and brave members of Her Majesty’s service.

  Failure? Do you remember what Queen Victoria once said? ‘Failure – the possibilities do not exist.’

  Yet everybody knew that the stakes were higher than ever. In a matter of weeks, either she would be a national hero, or she would be finished.

  Watching her in the Commons the next day, Frank Johnson wrote that ‘she had about her an almost visible aura of being alone … between triumph and tragedy’. And two days later, her factotum Ian Gow scribbled her a private letter. He had been talking to Sir Geoffrey Howe, and they both felt she was confronting ‘the worst and most daunting situation faced by any Prime Minister since Suez, 26 years ago’. But, Gow went on:

  We also said that there is no one in the Kingdom better qualified than you to lead Party and Nation.

  I think I understand a little of the loneliness of your task and of the enormity of the responsibility which you carry.

  The purpose of this note is just to remind you that there are many of us who, whatever the future holds in store, will be forever thankful for having had the privilege of trying to help the finest chief, the most resolute and far sighted leader and the kindest and most considerate friend that any man could hope to serve.

  He was, of course, trying to reassure her. But it was obvious that even he feared the end was coming.62

  32

  We’ll Show ’Em We’re British

  We have faith in Margaret Thatcher. She has the nation behind her.

  Sun, 6 April 1982

  One 17 year old girl who had passed O level Geography had never even heard of the Falkland Islands and now it seems we are heading for war over something ordinary people hardly knew existed.

  Mary Richards to Mass Observation, 20 April 1982

  On the morning of Monday 5 April the aircraft carrier Invincible slipped its moorings and eased into Portsmouth Harbour, bound for the South Atlantic. It was barely ten o’clock, yet the shoreline was packed with tens of thousands of flag-waving onlookers, roaring and cheering for all they were worth, many of them in tears. From every building in sight flew the Union Jack, while well-wishers brandished dozens of homemade placards and banners: ‘God Bless, Britannia Rules’, ‘Don’t Cry for Us, Argentina.’ In the harbour, a flotilla of little boats, crammed with spectators, bobbed with patriotic enthusiasm. And as the band played and the ship’s horn sounded, red flares burst into the sky.

  Half an hour later, a second carrier, Hermes, followed the Invincible into the Channel. Watching on a battered black-and-white television, the sceptical Jonathan Raban thought it seemed a spectacle from history: ‘pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs’, thousands of little Union Jacks fluttering as Nelson’s heirs headed for the Falkland Islands. The cameras tracked across the faces left behind. ‘Girls, their shoulders quaking, searched for their powder compacts; the grandfathers frowned at a memory; the infants shook their happy flags like rattles.’ And suddenly, as the picture blurred, Raban realized that he was in tears. It was ‘absurd’, he thought, ‘like crying over a bad movie in an empty cinema’. But he could not help it. ‘The families on the shore, the receding ships, the bands and streamers had me blubbering with silly pride in Queen and Country.’1

  The departure of the Task Force, carried on a tide of pomp and patriotism, was one of the great public spectacles of the age. For the last few days, all roads leading to Portsmouth’s naval dockyards had been clogged with traffic. The pubs had stayed open on Sunday night, packed with sailors and Marines, but every few minutes lorries thundered towards the docks, carrying artillery, ammunition and explosives. The Mirror thought it a ‘scene every Briton prayed we would never see again’. Yet the Task Force was terrific theatre: the cranes on the quaysides, the columns of trucks, the colours and crowds. And despite all
the tears, it carried an extraordinarily patriotic charge. The Daily Mail interviewed a veteran of the First World War, Tommy Mallen, for whom it had been a day of catharsis. ‘I thought England was done for, spineless, a doormat for the world,’ he said. ‘I’d pass the war memorials or see Nelson’s Victory and wonder what it had all been for. But I was wrong, thank God. We are still a proud country, and we’ll still protect our own.’2

  Four days later, in Southampton, came the sequel. This time all eyes were on the hastily requisitioned Canberra, home to the vanguard of the land force charged with recapturing the Falklands: Brigadier Julian Thompson’s 3 Commando Brigade, consisting of three Royal Marine battalions and two Parachute Regiment battalions, some 3,500 men in all. Once again cheering crowds packed the quayside; once again the bands played, the flags waved and the tears flowed. As the Canberra steamed away, sailors on nearby ships lined the decks, shouting three cheers. The Evening Standard’s Max Hastings, who had grabbed one of the few places on board for journalists, stood by the rail, listening as ‘Rule Britannia’ drifted up from the quay. ‘Now I know this is serious,’ a Marine officer muttered. ‘You can’t let the nation see us go off to war with bands playing and then bring us back without doing anything.’3

  Yet to many of the young men settling into their berths on the Canberra that night, the expedition still seemed ‘unreal, almost a joke’. One young paratrooper, Ken Lukowiak, had cheered when 2 Para’s commanding officer, Colonel Herbert (‘H’) Jones, told them they were going to the Falklands. But as they pulled away, Lukowiak recalled, the fear was that ‘nothing was ever going to come of it. We were going to get there, do a bit of sabre rattling, the Argies would piss off back to Argentina and we’d all sail home disappointed.’ Even some of their families thought so. When 3 Para’s Vincent Bramley told his parents he was heading for the Falklands, they ‘seemed more concerned about the weather’. A few hours before the Canberra was due to leave, Bramley rang to ask if they were coming to see him off. ‘Vince,’ they said, ‘you’ll be home shortly’ – and, in any case, they had visitors.

  Yet as the lights of the South Coast receded into the dusk, the mood changed. ‘I watched from the deck’, Bramley recalled, ‘and an almost eerie silence took over as we moved away from the dock. The only noise now was the rushing of water as the great liner cut a path through the Channel. Gone was the sound of cheering families and friends. Almost gone, too, was the sight of England.’ Then, as the coastline disappeared, he heard men singing below. Leaning over the rail beside him, a Marine said: ‘Looks like something from a film, don’t it, mate?’4

  Few expeditions had ever left British shores amid such passionate enthusiasm. According to the first polls, some eight out of ten people agreed that Mrs Thatcher’s government had been caught badly off guard, but eight out of ten also thought Britain must get the islands back. On 5 April, the day the Task Force sailed, a poll for News at Ten found that 88 per cent thought Britain had an obligation to support the Falkland Islanders, 70 per cent would sink Argentine ships if necessary and 41 per cent wanted the government to use force right away. The next day, a poll for the Daily Mail found that 69 per cent thought it was ‘very important’ to regain the islands, while 53 per cent wanted to fight immediately. And two days later, a poll for Weekend World found that even if the islanders themselves were happy to accept Argentine rule, almost one in five people thought Britain should go ahead and fight anyway.

  Far from abating as the days went by, public attitudes almost visibly hardened. A survey published in The Economist on 17 April found that 51 per cent of people claimed to ‘care very much’ about the fate of the islands, with 32 per cent caring ‘a little’. Almost nine out of ten thought the government should ban Argentine imports, eight out of ten backed sending the Task Force and seven out of ten wanted to break off relations with Argentina. Perhaps most strikingly, almost a third wanted to bomb Argentine military bases. And two out of ten people thought Britain should invade Argentina itself – a prospect that was never remotely likely.5

  To the expedition’s critics, the public fervour seemed utterly bewildering. Outside the hard left, few people in 1982 thought of Britain as an especially warlike nation. With the end of National Service twenty years earlier, only a tiny minority had direct contact with the military. And with the exception of their involvement in Northern Ireland, the armed forces had been relegated to the fringes of the national imagination. When young men joined the army, they tended either to come from military families or to be escaping deprived, abusive or unhappy backgrounds. Many of those who sailed to the Falklands had been in trouble as teenagers; they had joined the army as a way of finding a purpose and seeking adventure, not because they seriously expected to fight on a foreign field. Indeed, to most children of the 1960s the prospect of Britain ever fighting another war on its own, especially so far from home, seemed utterly fantastical.6

  Only a few days earlier, many people had never heard of the Falkland Islands. When Adrian Mole bursts in to tell his father about the invasion, the latter leaps ‘out of bed because he thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland’. He was not alone. Having heard other boys discussing the crisis at school, I was astonished when my parents told me that the Falklands were not, in fact, somewhere near the Shetland Islands, but were off the South American mainland. ‘Like many people I know,’ Mary Richards told Mass Observation, ‘we thought they were off Scotland.’ ‘What’s all this crap about the Spicks invading Scotland?’ one young Para asked Vincent Bramley. And even Ken Lukowiak had ‘never heard of them and so, for some reason, assumed that they must lie off the coast of Scotland’.7

  It is all the more striking, then, how quickly the Falklands assumed a near-sacred place in the national imagination. Back in Britain after being kicked out by the Argentines, Rex Hunt was astounded to find ‘ordinary people from all walks of life, young and old’, writing him letters of support or coming up to him in the street. On one occasion, he was even accosted by a tramp under Charing Cross Bridge, who insisted on shaking his hand with the words, ‘Well done, Guv!’ And when, during the first weekend of the crisis, Jonathan Raban went for a drink at Plymouth’s Royal Western Yacht Club, he found the regulars suffused with patriotic excitement. ‘It’s exactly as if Russia had come over and occupied the Isle of Wight without a by-your-leave,’ one man said. ‘Exactly the same. No difference at all. It’s British soil.’ ‘Well, is it, quite?’ Raban asked. ‘Of course it is,’ the man said. ‘Sovereign territory. British soil. The Falklanders are as English as I am. To a man.’8

  Later, Mrs Thatcher’s critics claimed that this was the last colonial war, driven by her atavistic desire to rebuild the British Empire. On 10 April the cover of the American magazine Newsweek depicted HMS Hermes sailing south beside the blazing headline ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. And when intellectuals condemned the war, the word ‘imperialism’ came up again and again. But this is not convincing at all. The Falklands campaign was very different from most colonial wars. It was not a war of conquest, nor a defence of white imperialists against a nationalist uprising, but the defence of a tiny island population against an unprovoked invasion. The sheep farmers of the Falklands were hardly a colonial elite; in any case, they had been there since 1833, when the islands had been largely uninhabited. And the Argentines were hardly downtrodden natives: indeed, as the heirs to the Spanish Empire, they had actually exterminated most of their own native population centuries earlier.

  Even the argument that Mrs Thatcher wanted to restore the British Empire does not stand up. Both in public and in private she often talked about the Second World War, but she almost never talked about the Empire. She adored Kipling, but she loved him for his patriotism, not his imperialism. Like many Conservatives, she enjoyed making misty-eyed tributes to Britain’s brethren in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but there was rarely any sense of personal investment. Her family had no colonial connections, and she never evoked the glory of the Raj, the veldt of southern Africa
or the jungles of Malaya. In that respect, she was absolutely typical. As surveys consistently found, people were not nostalgic for Empire. Most knew very little about it and cared even less. They did not even care about the Commonwealth.9

  So why did they care about the Falklands? The answer is obvious. The islanders, wrote Jonathan Raban, were ‘visibly, audibly, our kith and kin’. As the Sunday Telegraph’s Peregrine Worsthorne wrote with brutal frankness, it would have been a different story if they had ‘black or brown skins, spoke with strange accents or worshipped different gods’. But when a Falklands family, trapped in Britain during the invasion, appeared on television, Raban thought they sounded like people from the 1950s, their voices evoking ‘gin and tonic, cavalry twill, the next monthly mortgage repayment, brussels sprouts, tea cosies, Journey’s End at the amateur dramatic society, the Magimix in the kitchen and the Queen’s head on the stamp’. To the public, ‘the Falklanders were us’, in nostalgic miniature.

  As Mrs Thatcher had told the Commons, the people of the Falklands were an ‘island race’. They were little people: farmers and shopkeepers, parochial, unassuming and old-fashioned, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s hobbits. And at a time when the very idea of Britain seemed besieged by economic decline and cultural upheaval, that made the islands the perfect cause. The Falklands, wrote Raban, reflected ‘all our injured belittlement, our sense of being beleaguered, neglected and misunderstood … They meant Tradition, Honour, Loyalty, Community, Principle – they meant the whole web and texture of being British.’10