In the spring of 1981, Murdoch made two changes. First, the Sun introduced its own bingo competition; second, and more important, he brought in a new editor, the 34-year-old Kelvin MacKenzie. One colleague called MacKenzie ‘driving, youthful, modern-minded, brash’, while his deputy Roy Greenslade called him a ‘workaholic, manic, abusive, obnoxious, socially gauche bully-cum-comedian with a singular talent for editing a populist tabloid’.fn4 MacKenzie, who had left his direct-grant grammar school with a single O-level, had a clear vision of his ideal reader. ‘He’s the bloke you see in the pub,’ he said, ‘a right old fascist, wants to send the wogs back, buy his poxy council house, he’s afraid of the unions, afraid of the Russians, hates the queers and the weirdos and drug dealers.’ And although more high-minded souls shuddered, MacKenzie’s formula worked. By April 1982, boosted by bingo, the Sun’s sales had risen by more than half a million copies in just twelve months.29
When the Falklands crisis broke, MacKenzie saw an unmissable opportunity to confirm his paper’s hold over working-class Britain. On Tuesday 6th, declaring that the ‘worms are already coming out of the woodwork’, the Sun attacked the ‘ailing Daily Mirror’ for its cowardice in urging a negotiated settlement. On the 7th it laid into another ‘political termite … No.1 left-winger Tony Benn’, as well as the ‘whining namby-pamby ultra-Left, who always run scared at the first sign of a crisis’. And on the 8th it ran a double-page spread (‘LEST WE FORGET’) showing the Marines surrendering during the Argentine invasion. ‘It was a black moment in our history,’ the Sun said sententiously. ‘But now our troops are on their way … to wipe out the memory and free our loyal friends.’30
Every day brought more of the same. As the future bestseller writer Robert Harris explains in his book Gotcha!, this was ‘the first time old-fashioned jingoism had been allied in wartime to a modern, mass-circulation British tabloid’. No joke was too tasteless, no stunt too contrived, no headline too sensational. Later, Private Eye produced a brilliant Sun front page, including the timeless offer ‘KILL AN ARGIE – and Win a Metro’. But it was hard to tell the difference between the parody and the original. MacKenzie and his team airlifted fifty gigantic posters of Page Three girls to the RAF base at Ascension Island, in the middle of the South Atlantic, and had them dropped by helicopter on to the Invincible. They mounted a campaign to persuade housewives ‘NOT to buy corned beef produced in the Argentine’. They promoted a video game that allowed players to torpedo Argentine ships. They ran a daily ‘Argy-Bargie’ joke column, and offered £5 and a tin of ‘non-Argentinian’ corned beef for every successful entry. They even featured Page Three girls, ‘all shipshape and Bristol fashion’, wearing knickers displaying the names of Task Force ships (‘Britain’s secret weapon’).
All the time they searched for ever more outrageous puns, culminating in one of the most famous headlines in the paper’s history, referring to the latest impasse in diplomatic negotiations: ‘STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA.’ MacKenzie enjoyed the joke so much that, a few days later, he offered readers the chance to ‘give those damn Argies a whole lot of bargie’ by buying a ‘Sunsational’ STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA T-shirt. The next day, he ran a version of the headline again, though this time it proved much more controversial:
Appearing in the issue of 21 May 1982, Private Eye’s version of the Sun front page was one of the best things it ever did, not least because it was so hard to tell it apart from the originals. When MacKenzie saw the ‘KILL AN ARGIE – and Win a Metro’ competition, he remarked: ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’
STICK THIS UP YOUR JUNTA!
A Sun Missile for Galtieri’s Gauchos
The first missile to hit Galtieri’s gauchos will come with love from the Sun.
And just in case he doesn’t get the message, the weapon will have painted on the side ‘Up Yours, Galtieri’, and will be signed by Tony Snow – our man aboard HMS Invincible.
The Sun – on behalf of all our millions of patriotic readers – has sponsored the missile by paying towards HMS Invincible’s victory party once the war is over.
Even many of the men in the Task Force were appalled. ‘There was a general feeling’, said another reporter on the Invincible, ‘that it was a sick thing to do.’ Some complained to the Ministry of Defence’s press office. But since there was nothing they could do, the ‘Paper That Supports Our Boys’ roared on regardless.31
The irony of all this is that, far from boosting sales, the Sun’s rhetoric probably put some readers off. Across Fleet Street, newspaper sales barely rose during the war, but the Sun’s circulation actually dropped by 40,000 copies. Yet even though the Sun’s own reporters were mortified by some of its coverage, it was MacKenzie’s paper that set the tone. The Daily Star eagerly followed its example, urging Mrs Thatcher to ‘throw the invading Argentines into the sea’, and devoting one front page to an attack on Tony Benn and nine other Labour traitors, ‘no friends of their country, of freedom or of their own party’. At one point the Star warned Benn not to ‘abuse’ the privilege of free speech ‘by continuing with your dangerous attacks on the Task Force’, and commissioned a lawyer to examine his speeches. The lawyer duly reported that Benn ‘might be considered as preaching something very like treason’.32
For people who were already minded to look down on the tabloids, all this merely confirmed their unforgivable vulgarity. Jonathan Raban considered the Sun’s headlines ‘infantile’ and ‘grisly’, while almost every day the Guardian’s diarist, Alan Rusbridger, had something to say about ‘Rupert’s boys at the Sun’, who lacked even a ‘soupçon of sensitivity’. In early May the Guardian ran a long essay by the veteran journalist Tom Baistow, attacking the tabloids’ ‘nastiness and bathos’, their ‘vicious, undemocratic tripe’ and ‘Yobspeak headlines’. (That word ‘Yobspeak’ is, of course, very revealing.) Some observers thought this absurdly precious. The Sun’s approach might have upset ‘the intelligentsia in London’, wrote a scornful David Owen, ‘but in the provinces it was taken in good heart’. Plenty of people, though, thought MacKenzie had crossed a line. On his return from the South Atlantic, Admiral Woodward deplored the ‘lunatic nationalist pride’ of the tabloids, singling out the Sun in particular. No doubt he was just another a whining namby-pamby.33
In the newsroom of the Sun, victory was never in doubt. But at Northwood Headquarters, where Mrs Thatcher’s military chiefs pored over their options, things seemed less clear-cut. Every element of the campaign was fraught with danger: the towering waves, the freezing cold, the howling winds – and that was just the weather. And precisely because of the weather, the margins were painfully tight. Even in late April the seas were likely to be stormy, and by late May winter, bringing rain and gales, would have arrived on the Falkland Islands. Even for elite units like the Marines and the Paras, the conditions would be awful. And given how long it took to get to the islands, Northwood’s planners calculated that they had a ten-day window to move the troops off the ships and on to dry land, from 14 to 23 May. If anything went wrong, the operation would be in real trouble.34
That was not all. As the Task Force approached the Falklands, it would be acutely vulnerable to attack, especially by Argentina’s warplanes, with their Exocet anti-ship missiles. Even if the fleet arrived without disaster, an amphibious assault on Stanley was far too dangerous because the Argentines had concentrated at least 9,000 troops around the town and had mined the nearby beaches. So British troops would have to land elsewhere and establish a bridgehead before moving over rough terrain towards the capital. The landing alone would be dauntingly risky, and early estimates suggested they might lose one in five men, about 900 in all. Even if they made it on to the islands, wet, cold and exhausted, they would be facing about 13,000 Argentines, who would have had weeks to bring in supplies and prepare their defensive positions. The naval commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse, told Mrs Thatcher that they might incur 3,000 casualties, but nobody knew for sure. In his own words, ‘this is the most difficult thing we have
attempted since the Second World War’. And not even Britain’s closest allies were convinced they could do it. Given the ‘logistical problems’ facing the British, the CIA told President Reagan, they would ‘be hard pressed to oust a force of the size anticipated’.35
At Westminster, many of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers had strong doubts about the wisdom of such a complicated operation. Later, Willie Whitelaw admitted that he was ‘haunted by Suez’, when another Conservative government had gambled and lost. Like some of his colleagues, Whitelaw had seen war at first hand, and knew that things always went wrong. Indeed, among the seasoned Tory patricians, there was a strong feeling that a woman who knew nothing of war had rushed into a decision that could have terrible consequences. ‘She wouldn’t have done it if she’d been a man and if she’d been in the armed forces during the war,’ reflected Philip Goodhart, a former junior defence minister who had served in the Paras. ‘Then she’d have been aware how dreadfully wrong everything was likely to go.’36
In this instance, the fact that Mrs Thatcher was not a man proved an enormous asset. Since she could not be expected to know anything about war, she had no problem deferring to people who did. On 7 April she called the first meeting of her War Cabinet, which consisted of Whitelaw, Francis Pym, John Nott and Cecil Parkinson. The first three picked themselves. If nothing else, Whitelaw had won the Military Cross in Normandy, Pym had won it in Italy and Nott had been an officer in the Gurkhas in Malaya. But Parkinson, the party chairman, was a more controversial choice. To Mrs Thatcher’s critics, this revealed her obsession with presentation, as well as her determination to politicize the conflict. In reality, she needed Parkinson to give her a majority against Pym and Whitelaw, whom she suspected of being instinctive appeasers. As she told him when she offered him the job, there was ‘no room for fainthearts’.
After the war, everybody agreed that Mrs Thatcher’s handling of the War Cabinet had been a model of political management. They met every weekday at Number 10 and at Chequers at weekends, joined by their military chiefs and senior officials. For perhaps the only time in her premiership, wrote Hugo Young, Mrs Thatcher ‘listened more than she spoke’, always deferring to her commanders on the details, but remaining totally clear-sighted about the wider objectives. Whenever the military asked her for a decision, she swiftly obliged. But she always recognized that they knew far more about it than she did, and listened to the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Terence Lewin, with immense respect. Many insiders thought she regarded the armed forces with a kind of nostalgic awe. Yet at the same time she saw her soldiers and sailors as paragons of her ideal forward-looking Britain, professional, classless, gallant and decisive, in stark contrast to the spineless fops at the Foreign Office. As Alan Walters laconically recorded at the end of April: ‘PM loves the forces.’37
But while the Falklands brought the best out of Mrs Thatcher, the political effort was far from a one-woman show. Later, she recognized a particular debt to her ambassador to the United Nations, the urbane Sir Anthony Parsons. As early as the evening of Saturday 3 April, Parsons had called a meeting of the Security Council and introduced Resolution 502, which called for talks to resolve the crisis and, crucially, the withdrawal of all Argentine forces. Twenty-five minutes before the vote, though, Parsons was still not certain of getting the necessary two-thirds majority. So Mrs Thatcher rang King Hussein of Jordan, and begged him to back it. He agreed. ‘You’re very kind and a wonderful ally,’ she said breathlessly. The resolution passed, with ten countries voting for it, the Soviet Union, China, Spain and Poland abstaining and only Panama voting against. From now on Mrs Thatcher could point to the support of the United Nations, including its Charter’s endorsement of the right of self-defence. The crisis was only a day old, and already she had seized the moral high ground. After the vote, the Soviet ambassador murmured to Parsons: ‘You should get the Garter.’
In Buenos Aires, Resolution 502 came as a terrible shock. Almost incredibly, the Argentine generals had given little thought to what would happen next, simply assuming that the British would roll over. They had no plans for fighting a long campaign, while their nationalist rhetoric had made it impossible for them to compromise without appearing fatally weak. After the explosion of joy that had followed the initial conquest, to pull back now would be an utter fiasco. Above all, they had completely failed to line up international support. A few Western countries, notably Ireland, Spain and Italy, sympathized with the Argentines for historical or cultural reasons. But most were shocked by the invasion and felt sorry for the Falkland Islanders, while Commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand were firmly pro-British. As for the Soviet Union, it had no dog in the fight: as far as it was concerned, it was a shame both sides could not lose.38
From Mrs Thatcher’s perspective, three countries were particularly vital. One was Argentina’s neighbour Chile, ruled by another authoritarian right-wing regime under General Augusto Pinochet. Despite their ideological affinity, the Chileans absolutely despised the Argentines. Only four years earlier they had come close to war, and it was an open secret that Argentina’s military was itching to move against Chile. Almost immediately, therefore, Pinochet agreed that the RAF could use an air base in southern Chile, while his intelligence agencies promised to hand over details of Argentine naval movements and to help the British break the enemy’s signals. Neither side was keen to advertise these arrangements: the Chileans were flouting the code of Latin American solidarity, while Pinochet’s record of violent repression made him an uncomfortable ally. But Mrs Thatcher did not forget it. When Pinochet was detained on human rights charges in London in 1999, she made a point of visiting him to say thank you.39
The second key ally was France. On the evening of Saturday 3rd, while Mrs Thatcher was awaiting the vote at the United Nations, President Mitterrand rang to offer his support. ‘I wouldn’t wish you to think’, he said, ‘that France, as a very close friend and neighbour, was not absolutely with you in thought and freedom … If there’s anything we can do to help, we should like to.’ He was as good as his word. In the past, France had made a lot of money selling Super Étendard fighters and Exocet anti-ship missiles to Argentina. Now Mitterrand told his staff to hand over all the necessary specifications to the British, and blocked the sale of more missiles to Peru, which was likely to pass them on to Buenos Aires. He was ‘the staunchest of our friends’, recalled Mrs Thatcher, who ‘never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support’. It did not mean she gave him an easier ride at European summits, though.40
The most important country of all was Britain’s closest military ally, the United States. With British forces operating in the Western hemisphere, access to American intelligence, satellite reports and communications technology would be vital, while the Task Force would need to refuel halfway across the Atlantic at Ascension Island, a British colony which the Americans were using as a military base. President Reagan’s natural sympathies lay with Mrs Thatcher, while his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, saw the Washington–London axis as the ‘bedrock’ of the Western alliance. Almost from the first, therefore, Weinberger ordered his officials to give the British whatever they wanted, including the latest Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. As Reagan privately remarked a few days later, they should ‘give Maggie everything she needs to get on with it’.41
But not all of Reagan’s officials shared his views. Most worryingly for Mrs Thatcher, his ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, was a great fan of General Galtieri’s regime, which she regarded as a bulwark against Communism. To avoid alienating their allies in Latin America, she told Reagan on 7 April, it was vital ‘not to be seen to be favouring the British’. That went down very badly with some of her colleagues. But Reagan, despite his personal inclinations, appreciated the dilemma. ‘The main thing we have to do’, he told his staff, ‘is to get these two brawlers out of the bar room.’ To do it, he turned to his Secretary of State, the immensely self-confident Alexander Hai
g. Formerly NATO’s Supreme Commander in Europe, Haig leapt at the chance to promote himself as a world statesman. It would take him two weeks, he told Reagan, to broker a deal. ‘There will not’, he promised, ‘be a war in the South Atlantic.’42
On 8 April, Haig and his team arrived in London. At the airport, an embassy official warned him that Mrs Thatcher would never bend: ‘If you think you can sway her you’re dead wrong.’ But Haig was not deterred, and late that afternoon he went in to see the Prime Minister, Pym and Nott. Mrs Thatcher kicked off with a gesture that came close to self-parody, ostentatiously showing her guests a pair of portraits that she thought ‘very appropriate’. One was Nelson, the other Wellington. Then she got down to what Haig’s aide Jim Rentschler called the ‘nut-cutter nitty-gritty’.
Haig suggested that a possible deal might see the Argentine forces withdraw and an interim ‘multilateral entity’ take charge of the islands until the two sides sorted out the question of sovereignty. But Mrs Thatcher, the colour rushing to her face, did not like that at all:
I am pledged before the House of Commons, the Defense Minister [sic] is pledged, the Foreign Secretary is pledged to restore British administration. I did not dispatch a fleet to install some nebulous arrangement which would have no authority whatsoever. Interim authority! – to do what? I beg you, I beg you to remember that in 1938 Neville Chamberlain sat at this same table discussing an arrangement which sounds very much like the one you are asking me to accept; and were I to do so, I would be censured in the House of Commons – and properly so! We in Britain simply refuse to reward aggression – that is the lesson we have learned from 1938.
‘Tough lady,’ Rentschler thought, while Haig sat chain-smoking and ‘nervously tapping his leg’. But Mrs Thatcher knew exactly what she was doing. As the meeting broke up, she said she hoped the Americans realized that this kind of candour was only possible ‘among the closest of friends’. ‘With everyone else’, she said sweetly, ‘we’re merely nice.’43
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